In Act 3, sc. 2 of Hamlet, the young Hamlet offers acting lessons to the Player of  the “Mousetrap” performance that shed light  on much more than the theater prowess of the prince.  These directions reflect the different acting that goes on in the play, whether it is Hamlet “acting” crazy, the Queen “acting” like a good wife or Ophelia “acting” on her father’s behalf. These varieties of acting fall into the repeating idea that truth can be bated with lies and doing kindness with pain.  The duplicity of acting is reflected in such plans as Hamlet’s concocted play and his utter blunt reveal to his mother of the wrong committed against her  first husband, his father.

The lines

” Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor…For anything so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing whose end, both at the first and now, was an is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her (own) feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and nature” (3.2  17- 26)

shed light on the purpose and pattern that Hamlet himself applies to his performance of lunacy. In his acting, he reveals not only the crime of his uncle, but the nature of his two friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,  the acting of Ophelia upon her father’s wishes, and the performance of his mother as the widowed Queen. It is to his madness that each of these relationships and actings respond and almost seem to bring an extreme that would not have been otherwise unearthed if it was not for Hamlet.

It is especially significant when considering that ideas like truth/lies and pain/kindness are opposites. Yet they are necessary to bring out the other within the play.  These opposites are necessary for the other to exist and can actually bring out each other, like the opposite characters of the play and the different forms of acting that thread the play.