Maynard Mack says that in the last act of the play "Hamlet accepts his world and we discover a different man." He has existed outside of the corrupt system, and yet, he has been unable to resist being drawn in. The Ghost sealed Hamlet's fate when he challenged him to "remember me." In this final scene, the maelstrom finally catches Hamlet stripped of his words, and at the mercy of his "bare bodkin." He maneuvered around the world of "seems" and "acts" and "plays" as long as he could, and tried to beat this world by using its own tactics. He feigned madness and betrayed the woman he ostensibly loves, her father, and his school chums. He committed three cold-blooded murders and sent Ophelia to her death. He had thought he towered above such dirty fighting, but found himself swept into it. He must now face the inevitable. As Mack says, Hamlet has finally "learned, and accepted, the boundaries in which human action, human judgment, are enclosed."
We recognize Hamlet's change in the first part of the scene when he explains to Horatio with complete dismissal how he sent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths. The calculating premeditation of his actions is a complete reversal of the Hamlet we have come to know. Horatio's next comment indicates that he is horrified. He says, "So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to't," meaning that they go to their deaths, to which Hamlet counters
Why man, they did make love to this employment.
They are not near my conscience. Their defeat
Does by their own insinuation grow.
Hamlet has transformed himself from a man who wallows in self-recrimination into one who can blithely justify cold-blooded betrayal and murder. More significantly, Hamlet has become a man who assumes he can take responsibility for righting all the wrongs created by his corrupt uncle's usurpation of the old order by killing Claudius and reclaiming the throne.
