What is Hamlet hoping to accomplish with the speech of the Player Queen to the Player King?

In Act III of Hamlet, Shakespeare presents a play within a play. In the previous act, the ghost of King Hamlet spoke with his son and told him that his death was at the hands of his brother, Hamlet's uncle, Claudius. This revelation leaves Hamlet with even more questions. Was his mother a part of the plan? Did she know Claudius's plan? Hamlet writes extra lines for the players to present in their play "The Mousetrap."
The play within the play begins with the Player King and Player Queen acting out their scene without talking. In this scene, the Player King is killed by a man who pours poison into the king's ear and then steals the crown. The second part of the play has the Player King and Queen discussing their love and what would happen if one of them were to die. The Player King tells his wife to be happy if he dies, but the Player Queen refuses by claiming that if her beloved husband were to die, she could never remarry. She goes so far as to say that marrying another man would be the same as treason and that if she were to go to bed with another man, it would be like killing her first husband over and over.



Oh, confound the rest!

Such love must needs be treason in my breast.

In second husband let me be accursed!

None wed the second but who killed the first.


The instances that second marriage move

Are base respects of thrift, but none of love.
A second time I kill my husband dead

When second husband kisses me in bed.

Hamlet creates the Player Queen's dialogue to lay it on quite thick. Even Queen Gertrude believes that her player counterpart is overacting: "The lady protests too much, methinks." However, Hamlet purposefully uses the dialogue as a test. He wants to gauge the king and queen's reactions to the play. Then he will know if they truly had anything to do with his father's death, and he will learn just how much of a role his mother played in it.