hamlet essay sparknotes

by William Shakespeare

Hamlet study guide.

The story of the play originates in the legend of Hamlet (Amleth) as recounted in the twelfth-century Danish History, a Latin text by Saxo the Grammarian. This version was later adapted into French by Francois de Belleforest in 1570. In it, the unscrupulous Feng kills his brother Horwendil and marries his brother's wife Gerutha. Horwendil's and Gerutha's son Amleth, although still young, decides to avenge his father's murder. He acts the fool in order to avoid suspicion, a strategy which succeeds in making the others think him harmless. With his mother's active support, Amleth succeeds in killing Feng. He is then proclaimed King of Denmark. This story is on the whole more straightforward than Shakespeare’s adaptation. Shakespeare was likely aware of Saxo's version, along with another play performed in 1589 in which a ghost apparently calls out, "Hamlet, revenge!" The 1589 play is lost, leading to much scholarly speculation as to who might have authored it. Most scholars attribute it to Thomas Kyd, author of The Spanish Tragedy of 1587. The Spanish Tragedy shares many elements with Hamlet , such as a ghost seeking revenge, a secret crime, a play-within-a-play, a tortured hero who feigns madness, and a heroine who goes mad and commits suicide.

The Spanish Tragedy was one of the first and most popular Elizabethan "revenge tragedies," a genre that Hamlet both epitomizes and complicates. Revenge tragedies typically share a few plot points. In all of them, some grievous insult or wrong requires vengeance. Often in these plays the conventional means of retribution (the courts of law, generally speaking) are unavailable because of the power of the guilty person or persons, who is often noble if not royal. Revenge tragedies also emphasize the subjective struggle of the avenger, who often fights (or feigns) madness and generally wallows in the moral difficulties of his situation. Finally, revenge tragedies end up with a dramatic bloodbath in which the guilty party is horribly and often ritualistically killed. Hamlet is not Shakespeare's first revenge tragedy - that distinction belongs to Titus Andronicus , a Marlovian horror-show containing all of the elements just mentioned. But Hamlet is generally considered the greatest revenge tragedy, if not the greatest tragedy, if not the greatest play, ever written.

The central reason for the play's eminence is the character of Hamlet. His brooding, erratic nature has been analyzed by many of the most famous thinkers and artists of the past four centuries. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe described him as a poet - a sensitive man who is too weak to deal with the political pressures of Denmark. Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud viewed Hamlet in terms of an “Oedipus complex,” an overwhelming sexual desire for his mother. This complex is usually associated with the wish to kill one’s father and sleep with one’s mother. Freud points out that Hamlet's uncle has usurped his father's rightful place, and therefore has replaced his father as the man who must die. However, Freud is careful to note that Hamlet represents modern man precisely because he does not kill Claudius in order to sleep with his mother, but rather kills him to revenge his father’s death. Political interpretations of Hamlet also abound, in which Hamlet stands for the spirit of political resistance, or represents a challenge to a corrupt regime. Stephen Greenblatt, the editor of the Norton Edition of Shakespeare, views these interpretive attempts of Hamlet as mirrors for the interpretation within the play itself - many of the characters who have to deal with Hamlet, including Polonius , Claudius, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern , also develop theories to explain his behavior, none of which really succeeds in doing so. Indeed, nothing sure can be said about Hamlet except that it has been a perennial occasion for brilliant minds to explore some of the unanswerable questions of human existence.

Hamlet Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Hamlet is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Closely examine Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy on page 137 (lines 57-91). Summarize the arguments he is contemplating in this speech.

What act and scene are you referring to?

Describe Fortinbras based on what Horatio says.

Do you mean in Act 1? Based upon Horatio's description, young Fortinbras is bold, inexperienced, and willing to do anything to regain his father's lost lands.

Why is a clock mentioned in Hamlet. There weren’t any clock’s in Hanlet’s time.

Yes I've heard this question before. This is called an anachronism. It is an inconsistency in some chronological arrangement. In this case, there were clocks in Shakespeare’s time but not in Hamlet's. Shakespeare wrote it in because he thought it...

Study Guide for Hamlet

Hamlet study guide contains a biography of William Shakespeare, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Hamlet
• Hamlet Summary
• Hamlet Video
• Character List

Essays for Hamlet

Hamlet essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Hamlet by William Shakespeare.

• Through Rose Colored Glasses: How the Victorian Age Shifted the Focus of Hamlet
• Q to F7: Mate; Hamlet's Emotions, Actions, and Importance in the Nunnery Scene
• Before the Storm
• Haunted: Hamlet's Relationship With His Dead Father
• Heliocentric Hamlet: The Astronomy of Hamlet

Lesson Plan for Hamlet

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Hamlet
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Hamlet Bibliography

E-Text of Hamlet

The Hamlet e-text contains the full text of the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare.

• List of Characters

Wikipedia Entries for Hamlet

• Introduction

Introduction to Hamlet

Hamlet is one of the best plays of all time written by William Shakespeare . According to literary scholars, there has never been such a play by his predecessors and successors alike. It is known as The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The play was published roughly between 1599 and 1602 and staged during the same period. Hamlet has proved a Mona Lisa of literature, evoking multiple interpretations and mesmerizing generations across the globe. It was also the time when ghosts were often part of the plays and literature. He depicted a simple, tragic saga of the Prince Hamlet and his struggle to avenge his father, King Hamlet. He tries to trap his uncle, Claudius, into a confession without any success. It leads to the deaths of not only the hero but also of the villain , along with various other characters.

Summary of Hamlet

The play opens with three soldiers standing on the guard of the castle of Elsinore. Along with Prince Hamlet’s best friend, Horatio, the soldiers encounter a ghost. Horatio and soldiers believe it is King Hamlet’s ghost. When Hamlet listens to Horatio’s encounter, he joins him to confirm the truth. After the proof and visitation from the ghost, Hamlet is convinced that his uncle, Claudius murdered his father. He realizes that Claudius hastily married his mother and occupied the throne. The ghost request Hamlet to avenge his death. Hamlet has a thoughtful and over-philosophical nature. Hence, he decides not to take immediate revenge.

Hamlet pretends to be insane and suffers from acute depression at the same time. Here, his melancholiness is termed as depression in modern terms. Horatio and the guards are aware that Hamlet has “put an antic disposition on”.

Queen Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, also worries about him. She checks on him with the help of Claudius and Polonius, the court attendant. Meanwhile, his university friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, arrive at the palace. Claudius and Gertrude ask their help to get the truth out of him. However, they find him very quizzical and mentally challenging. Also, Hamlet realizes that his mother and step-father sent them as a spy as well.

Ophelia, daughter of Polonius, and Hamlet shared an intimate relationship. Polonius is Claudius’ court advisor. Both Claudius and Polonius use Ophelia to spy on Hamlet. However, she fails to understand him and tells her father about Hamlet’s behavior. Hamlet also realizes that she has been trying to spy on him. He later insults her for returning love letters, and rejects her advances, leaving Ophelia in a state of distress. Polonius assumes that Hamlet’s lost his mind after breaking up with Ophelia. It is in this scene the famous ‘to be or not to be’ is spoken.

One day, a group of theatre actors visits Elsinore. Hamlet gets an idea of exposing his father’s murderer during the play. He asks the troupe to perform ‘The Murder of Gonzago’. The play is similar to King Hamlet’s murder. Hamlet wasn’t sure if he should believe in his father’s ghost. Hence. Hamlet believes that the play will reveal if Claudius was the murderer.

When the play starts and the moment of assassination arrives. In the play, the king dies as the poison is poured in the ear by the enemy. Panicked Claudius leaves the stage immediately. This incident helps Hamlet to conclude that Claudius was the murderer. Hamlet also listens while Claudius confesses to killing his own brother. Even though Hamlet has an opportunity to kill Claudius, he hesitates. Hamlet wonders if Claudius will go to heaven if he receives forgiveness at the last minute.

Polonius is eavesdropping the conversation between Gertrude and Hamlet. While Hamlet is insulting Gertrude as she asks him the reason for his madness, Polonius, who is hidden behind the curtain, moves believing that Hamlet will attack his mother. Hamlet thinks it’s Claudius and stabs him through the curtain. Sadly, Polonius dies on the spot. The ghost of Hamlet’s father reappears to him one more time, chastising Hamlet to avenge his death quickly and not to be cruel to his mother. After Polonius’ death, Claudius plans to send Hamlet to England and have him killed.

Laertes, Polonius’ son, arrives from France. He blames Claudius for his father’s death and takes a mob to attack him at the palace. However, Claudius cunningly turns Laertes against Hamlet. Saddened by her father’s death Ophelia, goes mad commits suicide by drowning in the river. After Ophelia’s suicide, Laertes’s determination to kill Hamlet to avenge father’s and sister’s death gets stronger.

Hamlet survives the pirate attack and returns home to Denmark. Upon his return, Claudius and Laertes devise to murder Hamlet. After Ophelia’s funeral, Claudius wagers a duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Laertes poisons the tip of his blade and Claudius poisons the wine. Unfortunately, Gertrude drinks that glass of wine and dies. During the duel, Laertes and Hamlet are fatally wounded. Laertes confesses that the idea of poisoning his to death. Hamlet kills Claudius and exchanges forgiveness with Laertes before taking his last breath.

As Hamlet lies dying, the Norwegian prince, Fortinbras, comes with his army. He’s the son of King Hamlet’s rival. In the end, Fortinbras orders a worthy burial for Hamlet and assumes the throne.

Major Themes in Hamlet

Hamlet has been the most discussed play written by Shakespeare. It has a few heightened controversies and interpretations as well. The play is also a mystery for a few literary critics. Hamlet’s themes offer theoretical perspectives and a variety of meanings. Some of the major themes from the play are discussed below .  

• Political Conspiracies: If you read the play carefully, Hamlet is a political drama . Prince Hamlet is a victim of conspiracies by his uncle, Claudius. Claudius kills King Hamlet, Hamlet’s father to win the throne and marries Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother. Knowing that Hamlet will eventually avenge his father’s death, Claudius conspires with Lord Polonius to spy on Hamlet. Polonius’ daughter, Ophelia, is used by her father to report Hamlet’s behavior. Hamlet and Ophelia were in love with each other until Hamlet banishes her from his life. The play ends when conspiracies reach their pinnacles, with the deaths of Hamlet, Laertes, Gertrude, and the main antagonist , King Claudius.
• Religious Theme : Hamlet is also a religious drama. There are a couple of essential incidents that show theological interpretations. The first one is the marriage of Claudius with Gertrude. According to Christian theology, it is forbidden to marry a brother’s wife. The second is the case of suicide. Hamlet is depressed and suicidal since his father’s death. However, he controls his impulses because of his faith in Christianity. Also, after the play, The Murder of Gonzago, Hamlet hears Claudius’ confession in his prayers. The confession stops Hamlet from murdering Claudius at that moment because, as a praying man, Claudius will go to heaven.
• Familial Relationships: Familial relationships is another theme of the play, Hamlet, which runs parallel to political and religious themes. Hamlet is the son of King Hamlet, nephew of Claudius and son of Gertrude, the Queen. Though Claudius is Hamlet’s uncle, after murdering his brother, he marries Gertrude to take over the throne. Ophelia’s brother, Laertes, also the son of Polonius, grieves the loss of his family. He decides to avenge their deaths by killing Hamlet.
• Revenge Play: Hamlet is also a revenge play. The entire plot of Hamlet is about exacting revenge from Claudius for killing his father. Polonius’ son, Laertes is also motivated to avenge his father’s and sister’s Ophelia’s death. The arrival of Fortinbras is also part of revenge. It is revealed that Claudius once attacked his country during his father’s rule.
• Madness: Hamlet either was mad, or he was not. While Hamlet puts on a charade the has lost his mind, after watching his father’s ghost, Hamlet’s personality is changed. He remains mad throughout the play to take revenge on his uncle, Claudius for killing his father. Ophelia also displays the characteristics of madness. Her low esteem, heartbreak, and hopeless drive her to commit suicide.
• Procrastination or Inaction: Hamlet’s delay in taking action makes another thematic strand of the play. While procrastination gives some benefit to the rest of the characters in the play, the delay causes unnecessary deaths of Polonius, Ophelia, Gertrude, and Laertes. However, it is important to note that Hamlet delayed justice to his dead father because he was seeking for the truth. He didn’t want to kill Claudius without proof. Procrastination also points to Hamlet’s positive traits – intelligence, self-discipline, and control.

Major Characters in Hamlet

• Hamlet: Hamlet is the protagonist of the play. He is also remembered as a tragic hero . The entire storyline revolves around him. He goes through unsurmountable suffering due to the assassination of his father. He loses his right to be the only heir. Hamlet is an educated and contemplative young man. He wants to take revenge, but he controls his anger and delays the ghost requests. Hamlet decides not to kill Claudius without proof. Hamlet arranges an elaborate play that reveals the real murderer. Once he gets the evidence , he hesitates when he sees Claudius pray and confess. Hamlet feigns madness drives Ophelia to despair and suicide. Hamlet accidentally kills Polonius, while he was spying on Hamlet’s conversation with Gertrude. Later, Hamlet and Laertes fall into Claudius’ trap and agree for the duel match. However, during their last moments of life, Hamlet kills Claudius and meets his tragic end. Most importantly, before Hamlet dies, he saves his friend, Horatio, from killing himself and entrusts the kingdom to Fortinbras, Prince of Norway. Despite suffering from depression and driven to take revenge by the ghost, Hamlet displays bravery. He is a tragic hero who remains chivalrous and noble until his death.
• Claudius: Claudius is the main antagonist of Hamlet. He murders his own brother, King Hamlet, and marries Gertrude – a marriage not allowed in Christian theology. Therefore, his image as a king does not fit in the predominant ethical framework. Since the death of King Hamlet, Claudius plots to kill Hamlet to remove him as an heir. After the elaborate play arranged by Hamlet, Claudius is found praying and confessing. He uses Polonius, Ophelia, Hamlet’s friends to spy on him. He unsuccessfully plots Hamlet’s execution. In the end, Claudius succeeds in arranging a duel between Laertes and Hamlet. After the fencing duel, when Laertest reveals the plot of poisoning, Hamlet kills him. Claudius is a perfect example of a corrupt individual, with little remorse for the crimes he commits.
• Gertrude: She is Hamlet’s mother and the wife of King Hamlet. After King Hamlet’s murder, she marries Claudius, King Hamlet’s brother. She tries her best to cheer up Hamlet, worries about his well-being. She genuinely loves Ophelia and is heartbroken when she commits suicide. Sadly, she becomes a tool in the hands of Claudius as she tries to spy on Hamlet. As a mother and also a spy, she tries her best to figure out Hamlet’s problems. Though she is insulted by Hamlet, her son, she remains kind and benevolent. King Hamlet’s ghost describes her as a virtuous woman. She accidentally drinks poison-laced wine during the duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Though Hamlet’s death was inevitable, it’s worth mentioning that she took the drink intended for him and dies in place of her son. Having lost of her husband, King Hamlet, her death saves her the agony of watching Hamlet and Claudius die.
• Polonius: He is the Lord Chamberlain and confidant of King Claudius. Polonius is the co-conspirator in King Hamlet’s death and plotting young Hamlet’s demise. He appears as one of the talking characters in the play. His daughter, Ophelia, loves Hamlet. He uses her to spy on Hamlet to know the exact cause of Hamlet’s madness. He eavesdrops Hamlet’s and Gertrude’s arguments while hiding behind the tapestry. He is killed by Hamlet as he is mistaken for Claudius. His son Laertes, later, fights a duel with Hamlet at the provocation of Claudius to avenge his death.
• Ophelia: Ophelia is romantically attracted to Hamlet. She always yearns for attention. Sadly, as Hamlet mourns his father’s heart, he doesn’t accept her love. Secretly, Hamlet does love Ophelia, but he is consumed with the anger of his father’s death. Ophelia also becomes a tool in her father’s and Claudius’ hands. She spies on Hamlet and tells them about his behavior. Hamlet suspects her for spying. He rejects her advances and breaks her heart with insults, which includes asking her to join a brothel (nunnery was slang for brothel). After her father is accidentally killed by Hamlet, she commits suicide and is mourned by Hamlet though she does not receive proper Christian burial.
• Horatio: Horatio is Hamlet’s close confidant and his best friend. He is also the main counselor whenever Hamlet is in some confusion. Before Hamlet’s Horatio witnesses the ghost’s haunting along with the guards. He is stopped by Hamlet from killing himself. Horatio, who is mostly an observer of the events, becomes an orator telling the tales of Hamlet to the public after the tragedy.
• Laertes: Laertes, son of Polonius and brother of Ophelia, is a headstrong but analytical character . He warns his sister Ophelia to stay away from Hamlet. He returns to Denmark after hearing about his father’s death. After first, he falls into Claudius trap and decides to avenge his father’s death by killing Hamlet. However, during the duel, he instantly sees a plot and reveals everything to Hamlet. Sadly, Laertes and Hamlet are mortally wounded and it was too late to save themselves. Laertes is presented as a naïve character in the beginning. Before his death, he exchanges forgiveness with Hamlet and dies an honorable death.
• Guildenstern and Rosencrantz: These two young fellows are Hamlet’s classmates. They bring the theatre group and also become tools in Claudius’ hands and spy on Hamlet. They are perhaps killed in England while taking the letter to the king about Hamlet. The letter was given by Claudius to get Hamlet killed when he returns to England. However, Hamlet intercepts the message and exchanges with his own letter about their instant death.

Writing Style of Hamlet

Hamlet starts with in medias res (into the middle of a narrative ) with guards watching the appearance of the ghost. They express their feelings of terror and horror . This is style is in contrast to the standard methods to tell a story and write plays. The play is written in mostly blank verse . Hence, Hamlet’s style shows the excellence of taking the argument to the pinnacles. Shakespeare brings the argument back to demonstrate the use of climax and anticlimax at the same time. Hamlet is a mixture of comic as well as tragic phrases. There has never been any play in the history of literature that has taken so much length and presented such a golden combination of literary devices . Here, each device seconds the other, presenting the text with multiple meanings and interpretations.

Analysis of Literary Devices in Hamlet

• Alliteration : A play written in blank verse , Hamlet has many examples of the use of alliterations. A few examples are given below:
• What we have two nights seen. (Act-I, Scene II, Line 32)
• To wash it white as snow ? Whereto serves mercy (Act-III, Scene-III, Line, 47)
• Look you lay home to him. (Act-III, Scene-IV, Line, 1)

The above-given lines taken from different acts show the use of alliteration that means the use of consonant sounds in quick succession in a line. For example, /w/, /l/ and /h/ sounds are used in the above lines.

2. Allegory : Hamlet is an allegory that shows the universal problems a man faces on this earth. These are the problems of good and evil in every era and generation. Hamlet faces both of these issues and reflects on himself whether he is doing good or bad. His final words to Horatio that he should justify his cause to the world show this allegorical nature of the play.

3. Assonance : The play, Hamlet, shows good use of assonance as well. For example,

• For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come (Act-III, Scene-I, Line, 64)
• A mote it is to trouble the mind’s eye. (Act-I, Scene-I, Line, 112)
• Why, then, ’tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison. (Act-II, Scene-II, Lines 245-247)

In the above examples, vowel sounds appear after some pauses creating a sort of melodious impact in the verses. The sounds of long /e/, /i/ and /oo/ are used in the above examples.

4. Antagonist : Claudius is an antagonist in the play, as he weaves a plan to kill the protagonist, Hamlet, who is the representative of good, as compared to Claudius, the representative of evil in the play.

5. Allusion : The below lines show good use of allusion.

Oh, my offence is rank. It smells to heaven. It hath the primal eldest curse upon ‘t, A brother’s murder. (Act-III, Scene-III, Lines, 37-39)

These lines show a reference to the earliest murder in human history. It shows the murder of Abel by his brother, Cain, which has been used here as an allusion.

6. Chiasmus : The below example is one of the dialogues that has used this device to emphasize the connection between action and words.

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action—with this special observance, that you o’ erstep not the modesty of nature. (Act-III, Scene-II, Lines 16-18)

These lines mean the use of the phrase in reverse order in the same sentence such as “the action the word, the word to the action.”

7. Conflict : There are two types of conflicts in Hamlet. The first one is the physical conflict that is shown at two places; first, when Hamlet kills Polonius and second when Hamlet fights a duel with Laertes. The second is the mental conflict, which is seen throughout the play in Hamlet’s mind as well as his opponent, King Claudius.

8. Consonance : The play shows the use of consonance at various places. For example,

• I prithee, when thou seest that act afoot, Even with the very comment of thy soul Observe mine uncle. (Act-III, Scene-II, Lines, 74-76)
• You do surely bar the door upon your own liberty, if you deny your griefs to your friend. (Act-III, Scene-II, Lines 321-322)

In both examples, different consonant sounds such as /th/, /t/, and /r/ have been repeated in quick succession that they create melodious impacts.

9. Dramatic Irony : Dramatic Irony occurs at several places in the play. For example, when Claudius is shown praying, he is actually not feeling sorry for killing his brother. This is a dramatic irony that though he is confession doesn’t show any guilt or remorse.

10. Deus Ex Machina : The appearance of a ghost is a good use of deus ex machina in the play. In fact, when the ghost appears, Marcellus, one of the guards, is right in saying that “ Something is rotten in the state of Denmark .”

11. Foreshadowing : When Marcellus sees the ghost, he talks to Horatio and says that “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”. This line shows the use of foreshadowing that something terrible is going to happen. When Hamlet meets his father’s ghost, he learns that his uncle has killed him, and he utters, “O my prophet soul!” (Line 40) which is another use of foreshadowing. Here, Hamlet might have understood that either he or his uncle Claudius or both will kill each other.

12. Imagery : Imagery means to use visually descriptive statements. For example,

• O Hamlet, what a falling-off was there. (Act-I, Scene-V, Line, 47)
• That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain. At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark. (Act-I, Scene V, Lines, 108-109)
• Mad as the sea and wind, when both contend Which is the mightier. (Act-IV, Scene-I, Line, 7-8)

These lines show the sensory images that Shakespeare has used sparingly in the entire play. There are countless examples of excellent use of imagery that the readers have to use five senses to understand the underlying meanings.

13. Metaphor : Hamlet shows good use of various metaphors throughout the play. For example,

• “ To die: to sleep; / No more; and by a sleep to say we end / The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to.” (Act-III, Scene-I, Lines, 60-64)
• But that the dread of something after death , The undiscovered country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? (Act-III, Scene-I, Lines, 77-83)
• The fair Ophelia! – Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remembered. (Act, III, Scene-I, Lines, 89-90)

The first and the second metaphors compare sleep with death and the world hereafter with the country that is undiscovered. In the third example, Hamlet compares Ophelia with a Nymph, a Grecian divine creature.

14. Mood : The entire play shows different moods according to the situation. When the play opens, the viewers and readers experience horrible and fearful in the foggy atmosphere of Elsinore. As the play progresses, the horror and terror encompass the whole atmosphere until the players arrive and bring some atmosphere of entertainment. A movement of tension and conflict reaches its point when the gravedigger provides comic relief . However, the light atmosphere is short-lived as the events turn grim, increasing more tension followed by duel.

15. Protagonist : Hamlet is the main protagonist of the play as he directs Horatio by the end of the play. Hamlet makes sure Horatio stays alive and becomes an orator to tell the public and justify his cause. Hamlet, indeed, stands for good in the play as compared to Claudius, who stands for evil.

16. Pun :  Hamlet is also full of puns. For example,

• Not so, my lord, I am too much in the sun. (Act-I, Scene-II, Line, 67)
• I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me. (Act-I, Scene-II, Line, 85).
• You are the Queen, your husband’s brother’s wife. (Act-III, Scene-IV, Line, 15)

In both of these examples, Hamlet plays upon the word “sun” in the first line that means “son” and “ghost” in the second line that means that he would kill that person who stops him.

17. Paradox : The play also shows good use of paradoxes.

• “Thrift, thrift, Horatio! the funeral baked meats Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.” (Act-I, Scene-II, Lines, 180-181).
• A little more than kin and less than kind.” (Act-I, Scene-II, Line, 65).

These lines show paradoxes that mean to use contradictory ideas in the same statement. For example, in the first statement shows that the meat baked for the funeral was served in the marriage ceremony. The second statement indicates that Claudius is more than kin, but less kind toward him. Here, Hamlet means that Claudius is family; he is nothing like him or his father.

18. Rhetorical Questions : The play shows good use of rhetorical questions at several places. For example,

• “What then? What rests? Try what repentance can. What can it not?” (Act-III, Scene-III, Lines, 54-66)
• How now ! A rat? (Act-III, Scene-IV, Line, 24)

These examples show the use of rhetorical questions and mostly by Hamlet. They also show Shakespeare’s expertise in using rhetorical devices and couple them with literary devices to serve his purpose of multiple interpretations.

19. Simile : The play also contains plenty of similes. For example,

• In the same figure like the king that’s dead. (Act-I, Scene-I, Line, 41)
• And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark. (Act-I, Scene-II, Line, 69)
• Wretched state! O bosom black as death! (Act-III, Scene-III, Line, 68)
• Be soft as sinews of the newborn babe. (Act-III, Scene-III, Line, 69)

Here are four similes used in Hamlet. In the first one, the figure is compared to the king. In the second example, the eyes are compared to the friend. In the third example, the black is compared to death. In the fourth example, the heart is compared to an innocent child.

20. Soliloquy : The play shows some memorable soliloquies. For example,

• O, that this too too solid flesh would melt (Act-I, Scene-II, Line, 129)
• O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I (Act-II, Scene-II, Line, 532)
• To be, or not to be (Act-III, Scene-I, Line, 56)
• Oh my offence is rank, it smells to heaven (Act-III, Scene-III, Line, 36)

Hamlet has delivered the first three examples. Claudius speaks the fourth one. These soliloquies shed some light on the mentality or conflict of the character. They also set the mood of the play.

21. Verbal Irony : The play shows verbal irony as;

• Not so, my lord. I am too much i’the sun. (Act-I, Scene-II, Line 66)
• Second is situational irony in that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern try to meet Hamlet to tell him that they have come to meet him to know what he is mad but his replies are very ironic.
• It is also ironic that play is being stated to entertain Hamlet, while Hamlet is using it to know Claudius’s crime.

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A Summary and Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

To attempt an analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in a single blog post: surely a foolhardy objective if ever there was one. So here we’ll try to focus on some of the key points of Hamlet and analyse their significance, homing in on some of the most interesting as well as some of the most notable aspects of Shakespeare’s play.

Hamlet is a long play, but it’s also a fascinating one, with a ghost, murder, mistaken identity, family drama, poison, pirates, duels, skulls, and even a fight in an open grave. What more could one ask for?

Hamlet is a long play – at just over 30,000 words, the longest Shakespeare wrote – so condensing the plot of this play into a shortish plot summary is going to prove tricky. Still, we’ll do our best. Here, then, is a very brief summary of the plot of Hamlet , perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy.

The play begins on the battlements at Elsinore Castle in Denmark one night. The ghost of the former king, Hamlet, is seen, but refuses to speak to any of the soldiers on guard duty. At the royal court, Prince Hamlet (the dead king’s son) shows disgust at his uncle, Claudius, who is king, having taken the throne after Hamlet’s father, Claudius’ brother, died.

Hamlet also resents his mother, Gertrude – who, not long after Hamlet Senior’s death, remarried … to Claudius. Claudius gives the young man Laertes, the son of the influential courtier Polonius, leave to return to France to study there. At the same time, Claudius and Gertrude entreat Hamlet not to return to his studies in Germany, at the University of Wittenberg. Hamlet agrees to remain at court.

Laertes leaves Denmark for France, bidding his sister Ophelia farewell. He tells her not to take Hamlet’s expressions of affection too seriously, because – even if Hamlet is keen on her – he is not free to marry whom he wishes, being a prince. Polonius turns up and gives his son some advice before Laertes leaves; Polonius then reiterates Laertes’ advice to Ophelia about Hamlet, commanding his daughter to stay away from Hamlet.

Hamlet’s friend Horatio tells Hamlet about the Ghost, and Hamlet visits the battlements with his friend. The Ghost reappears – and this time, he speaks to Hamlet in private, telling him that he is the prince’s dead father and that he was murdered (with poison in the ear, while he lay asleep in his orchard) by none other than Claudius, his own brother.

He tells his son to avenge his murder by killing Claudius, the man who murdered the king and seized his throne for himself. However, he tells Hamlet not to kill Gertrude but to ‘leave her to heaven’ (i.e. God’s judgment). Hamlet swears Horatio and the guards to secrecy about the Ghost.

Hamlet has vowed to avenge his father’s murder, but he has doubts over the truth of what he’s seen. Was the ghost really his father? Might it not have been some demon, sent to trick him into committing murder? Claudius may disgust Hamlet already, but murdering his uncle just because he married Hamlet’s mum seems a little extreme.

But if Claudius did murder Hamlet’s father, then Hamlet will gladly avenge him. But how can Hamlet ascertain whether the Ghost really was his father, and that the murder story is true? To buy himself some time, Hamlet tells Horatio that he has decided to ‘put an antic disposition on’: i.e., to pretend to be mad, so Claudius won’t question his scheming behaviour because he’ll simply believe the prince is just being eccentric in general.

Polonius sends Reynaldo off to spy on his son, Laertes, in France. His daughter Ophelia approaches him, distressed, to report Hamlet’s strange behaviour in her presence. Polonius is certain that Hamlet’s odd behaviour springs from his love for Ophelia, so he rushes off to tell the King and Queen, Claudius and Gertrude, about it.

Claudius and Gertrude welcome Hamlet’s childhood friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to court and charge them with talking to Hamlet to try to find out what’s the matter with him. Polonius arrives and tells the King and Queen that Hamlet is mad with love for Ophelia, and produces a love letter Hamlet wrote to her as proof.

As Hamlet approaches, Polonius hatches a plan: he will talk to Hamlet while the King and Queen listen in secret from behind an arras (tapestry). Sure enough, Hamlet talks in riddles to Polonius, who then leaves, convinced he is right about the cause of Hamlet’s madness. Hamlet talks to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who tell him that the actors are on their way to court.

Hamlet is suspicious that his friends were sent for by Claudius and Gertrude to spy on him (as indeed they were); he confides to his old friends that he is not necessarily really mad; he implies he’s putting it on and still has his wits about him. The actors arrive, and Polonius returns, prompting Hamlet to start answering him with cryptic responses again, to keep up the act of being mad.

To determine Claudius’ guilt, Hamlet turns detective and devises a plan to try to get Claudius to reveal his crime, inadvertently. Hamlet persuades the actors to perform a play, The Murder of Gonzago , including some specially inserted lines he has written – in which a brother murders the king and marries the king’s widow.

Hamlet’s thinking is that, when Claudius witnesses his own crime enacted before him on the stage, he will be so shocked and overcome with guilt that his reaction will reveal that he’s the king’s murderer.

Claudius and Gertrude ask Rosencrantz and Guildenstern what they made of Hamlet’s behaviour, and then the King and Queen, along with Polonius, hide so they can observe Hamlet talking with Ophelia. At one point, in an aside, Claudius talks of his ‘conscience’, providing the audience with the clearest sign that he is indeed guilty of murdering Old Hamlet.

This is significant because one of the main reasons Hamlet is being cautious about exacting revenge is that he’s having doubts about whether the Ghost was really his father or not (and therefore whether it spoke truth to him). But we, the audience, know that Claudius almost certainly is guilty.

After he has meditated aloud about the afterlife, suicide, and the ways in which thinking deeply about things can make one less prompt to act (the famous ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy ), Hamlet speaks with Ophelia. He tells her he never loved her, and orders her to go to a nunnery because women do nothing but breed men who are sinners.

Ophelia is convinced Hamlet is mad for love, but Claudius believes something else is driving Hamlet’s behaviour, and resolves to send Hamlet to England, ostensibly on a diplomatic mission to get the tribute (payment) England owes Denmark.

Sure enough, Claudius responds to the performance of The Murder of Gonzago (or, as Hamlet calls this play-within-a-play, The Mousetrap ) by exclaiming and then walking out, and in doing so he convinces Hamlet that he is indeed guilty and the Ghost is right.

Now Hamlet can proceed with his plan to murder him. However, after the play, he catches Claudius at prayer, and doesn’t want to murder him as he prays because, if Claudius killed while speaking to God, he will be sent straight to heaven, regardless of his sins.

So instead, Hamlet visits Gertrude, his mother, in her chamber, and denounces her for marrying Claudius so soon after Old Hamlet’s death. The Ghost appears (visible only to Hamlet: Gertrude believes her son to be mad and that the Ghost is ‘the very coinage of [his] brain’), and spurs Hamlet on.

Hearing a sound behind the arras or tapestry, Hamlet lashes out with his sword, stabbing the figure behind, believing it to be Claudius. Unbeknownst to Hamlet, it is Polonius, having concealed himself there to spy on the prince. Polonius dies.

Claudius asks Hamlet where Polonius is, and Hamlet jokes about where he’s hid the body. Claudius dispatches Hamlet to England – ostensibly on a diplomatic mission, but in reality the King has arranged to have Hamlet murdered when he arrives in England. However, Hamlet realises this, escapes, has Rosencrantz and Guildenstern killed, and returns to Denmark.

Laertes returns from France, thinking Claudius was responsible for Polonius’ death. Claudius puts him right, and arranges for Laertes to fight Hamlet using a poisoned sword, with a chalice full of poisoned wine prepared for Hamlet should the sword fail.

As they are plotting, Gertrude comes in with the news that Polonius’ death has precipitated Ophelia’s slide into madness and, now, her suicide: Ophelia has drowned herself.

Laertes and Hamlet fight in Ophelia’s open grave, and then Hamlet challenges Laertes to a duel at court. Unbeknown to Hamlet, and as agreed with Claudius earlier on, Laertes will fight with a poisoned sword.

However, during the confusion of the duel, Hamlet and Laertes end up switching swords so both men are mortally wounded by the poisoned blade. Gertrude, in making a toast to her son and being unaware that the chalice of wine is poisoned, drinks the deadly wine.

Laertes, as he lies dying, confesses to Hamlet that Claudius hatched the plan involving the poisoned sword and wine, and Hamlet stabs Claudius with the poisoned sword, forcing him to drink the wine for good measure too – thus finally avenging his father’s murder. Hamlet dies, giving Fortinbras, the Prince of Norway, his dying vote as the new ruler of Denmark. Fortinbras arrives to take control of Denmark now the Danish royal family has been wiped out, and Horatio prepares to tell him the whole sorry tale.

Analysis of the play’s sources – and their significance

Although it’s often assumed that there must be some link between Shakespeare’s son Hamnet (who died aged 11, in 1596) and the playwright’s decision to write a play called Hamlet , it may in fact be nothing more than coincidence: Hamnet was a relatively common name at the time (Shakespeare had in fact named his son after a neighbour), he didn’t write Hamlet until a few years later, and there had already been at least one play about a character called Hamlet performed on the London stage some years earlier.

None of this rules out the idea that Shakespeare was transmuting personal grief over the death of Hamnet into universal art through writing (or, more accurately, rewriting) Hamlet , but it does need to be borne in mind when advancing a biographical analysis of Shakespeare’s greatest play.

This earlier play called Hamlet , which is referred to in letters and records from the time, was probably not written by Shakespeare but by one of his great forerunners, Thomas Kyd, master of the English revenge tragedy, whose The Spanish Tragedy  had had audiences on the edge of their seats in the late 1580s. Unfortunately, no copy of this proto- Hamlet  has survived – and we cannot be sure that Kyd was definitely the author (although he is the most likely candidate).

Most of Shakespeare’s plays are based on earlier stories or historical chronicles, and many are even based on earlier play-texts, which Shakespeare used as the basis for his own work. Indeed, very few of Shakespeare’s plays have no traceable source. But for some, in the case of Hamlet the relationship between Shakespeare’s play and the source-text is a problematic one.

The modernist poet T. S. Eliot argued in an essay of 1919 that Shakespeare’s  Hamlet was ‘an artistic failure’ because the Bard was working with someone else’s material but attempting to do something too different with the relationship between Hamlet and his mother, Gertrude.

Whether we side with Empson or Eliot or with neither, the fact is that this earlier, sadly lost version of the ‘play about Hamlet’ wasn’t itself the origin of the Hamlet story, which is instead found in a thirteenth-century chronicle written by Saxo Grammaticus. In this chronicle, Hamlet is ‘Amleth’ and is only a little boy – and it’s common knowledge that his uncle has killed his father.

Because Danish tradition expects the son to avenge his father’s death, the uncle starts to keep a close eye on little Amleth, waiting for the boy to strike in revenge. To avert suspicion and make his uncle believe that he, little Amleth, has no plans to seek revenge, Amleth pretends to be mad – the ‘antic disposition’ which Shakespeare’s Hamlet will also put on.

Because the ‘antic disposition’ no longer makes as much sense to the plot in Shakespeare’s version – why would Hamlet’s uncle have to watch his back when he murdered Hamlet’s father in secret and Hamlet surely (at least according to Claudius) has no idea that he’s the murderer? – Hamlet becomes a more complex and interesting character than he had been in the source material.

There is not as clear a reason for Hamlet to ‘put an antic disposition on’ as there had been in the source material, where pretending to be slow-witted or mad could save young Amleth’s life.

The textual variants of Hamlet

There’s more than one Hamlet . The play we read depends very much on the edition we read, since the play has been edited in a number of different ways. The problem is that the play survives in three very different versions: the First Quarto printed in 1603 (the so-called ‘Bad’ Quarto), the Second Quarto from a year later, and the version which appeared in the First Folio in 1623.

Q1 – the First or ‘Bad’ Quarto – is well-named. It was most probably a pirated edition of Shakespeare’s text, perhaps hastily written down from the (rather faulty) memory of a theatregoer or perhaps even one of the actors.

To give you a sense of just how bad the Bad Quarto was, in Q1 the play’s most famous line, ‘To be or not to be: that is the question’, which begins his famous soliloquy in which he muses on the point of life and contemplates suicide, is rendered quite differently – as ‘To be or not to be, I there’s the point’.

It also appears at a different point in the play, just after Polonius (who is called ‘Corambis’) in this version – has hatched the plot to arrange a meeting between Hamlet and Polonius’ (sorry, Corambis’) daughter, Ophelia.

What does Hamlet the play actually mean ?

What is Hamlet telling us – about revenge, about mortality and the afterlife, or about thinking versus taking action about something? The play is ambivalent about all these things: deliberately, thanks to Shakespeare’s deft use of Hamlet’s own soliloquies (which often see him thrashing out two sides of a debate by talking to himself) and the clever use of doubling in the play.

Revenge is supposed to be left to God (‘Vengeance is mine,’ saith the Lord), but both Hamlet the play and Hamlet the character imply that it’s expected in Danish society of the time that the son would take vengeance into his own hands and avenge his murdered father: he is ‘Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell’, as he says in his soliloquy at the end of II.2.

Christopher Ricks, the noted literary critic, has talked about how many great works of literature are about exploring the tension between two competing moral or pragmatic principles. Perhaps the two contradictory principles which we most clearly see in tension in Hamlet are the two axioms ‘look before you leap’ and ‘he who hesitates is lost’.

If Hamlet had been less a thinker and more a man of action, he would have made a snap judgment regarding Claudius’ guilt and then either taken revenge or resolved to leave it up to God.

But if he’d been wrong, he would have condemned an innocent man to death. However, if he’d been right, he would have spared everyone else who gets dragged into his quest for vengeance and destroyed along the way: Polonius (killed in error by Hamlet), Ophelia (killed by her own hand, but in response to her father’s death at Hamlet’s hands), Laertes (killed trying to avenge Polonius’ murder), and even – against the express wishes and commands of the Ghost himself – Hamlet’s own mother, who only drinks the poisoned wine by accident because she wants to wish her son good luck in the duel he’s fighting with Laertes.

This habit of Hamlet’s, his tendency to think things over, is both one of his most appealingly humane qualities, and yet also, in many ways, his undoing – and, ultimately, the end of the whole royal house of Denmark, since Fortinbras can come in and reclaim the land that was taken from his father by Old Hamlet all those years ago.

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A ghost resembling the recently-deceased King of Denmark stalks the ramparts of Elsinore, Denmark’s royal castle, over the course of several nights, setting all the castle’s guardsmen on edge. The terrified sentinels Marcellus , Francisco , and Barnardo convince a skeptical nobleman, Horatio , to watch along with them one night. When Horatio sees the ghost, he decides they should tell prince Hamlet —his closest friend and the dead king's son. Hamlet is also the nephew of the present king, Claudius , who not only assumed his dead brother's crown but also married the king’s widow, Gertrude . Claudius seems to be an able king, easily handling the threat of the Norwegian prince Fortinbras , who is seeking to take back the lands his own father lost in battle with Hamlet’s father. Hamlet, however, cannot accept his uncle’s rule, furious as he is about Gertrude's marriage to Claudius, and resentful of both his mother and his uncle for besmirching his father’s memory with their union. Hamlet agrees to meet the ghost, and as he speaks with it, it claims to be the spirit of his father. The ghost reveals that he did not die of natural causes, but rather was poisoned by Claudius. Hamlet, newly enraged, quickly accepts the ghost's command to seek revenge.

As the days go by, however, Hamlet is uncertain if what the ghost said is true, and struggles to decide whether he should actually kill his uncle. He delays his revenge and begins to act half-mad, contemplates suicide, and becomes furious at all women. He tells himself that his madness is a front which will allow him to investigate his uncle without the king realizing Hamlet is onto him, but as Hamlet investigates his own existential and moral center, his thoughts begin to tend toward serious distress, if not full-blown madness. The king’s obsequious old councilor, Polonius , begins to believe that Hamlet's behavior is tied to his affections for Ophelia , Polonius’s daughter. Claudius and Gertrude, unsatisfied with Polonius’s assessment, summon two of Hamlet's old school friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern , to try to find out what's wrong with him. As Polonius develops a plot to spy on a meeting between Hamlet and Ophelia—using Ophelia as a knowing pawn—Hamlet develops a plot of his own: to have a recently-arrived troupe of actors put on a play that resembles Claudius’s alleged murder of King Hamlet, and watch Claudius’s reaction. Hamlet decides that if Claudius reacts in a way that marks him as truly guilty, he will be able to avenge his father’s death without any moral doubts—in other words, he’ll have no excuse not to act decisively and kill the king.

Polonius and Claudius successfully spy on the meeting between Ophelia and Hamlet, during which Ophelia attempts to return gifts and letters Hamlet has given her over an undetermined amount of time—suggesting that Ophelia and Hamlet have had a romantic and perhaps sexual relationship for a while. Hamlet flies into a rage against women and marriage, claiming that women only breed sinners and ordering Ophelia to get herself to a nunnery and hide herself away from men. Claudius concludes Hamlet neither loves Ophelia, nor is he mad. Seeing Hamlet’s increasing instability as a threat, Claudius decides to send him away to England, where he will be less of a nuisance. At the play that night, however, as the actors perform a scene which mirrors the events of King Hamlet’s murder, Claudius runs from the room and thus proves his guilt in Hamlet’s eyes. Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, angry with Hamlet’s embarrassing behavior at the play, summons him to her quarters to talk to him about what’s going on. Hamlet nearly gets his chance for revenge when, on the way to see Gertrude, he comes upon Claudius, alone and praying in a chamber. Hamlet holds off, however—if Claudius is praying as he dies, then his soul might go to heaven. Even after determining Claudius’s guilt through his intricate plot, Hamlet is unable to take action. In Gertrude's room, Hamlet berates his mother for marrying Claudius so aggressively that she thinks he might kill her. The ghost of Hamlet’s father appears to Hamlet again, but Gertrude claims not to be able to see it, and cries out that her son is truly mad. Polonius, who is spying on the meeting from behind a tapestry, calls for help. Hamlet thinks Polonius is Claudius and stabs him through the tapestry, killing him.

Claiming that he wants to protect Hamlet from punishment for killing Polonius, Claudius sends Hamlet to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Claudius’s real motivation, however, is to have Hamlet killed—he sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern onward with a letter asking the King of England, Denmark’s ally, to execute Hamlet on sight. Meanwhile, Polonius’s son, Laertes , returns to Denmark from his studies in France to avenge his father's death. He finds that his sister, Ophelia, has gone insane with grief over her father’s death (and Hamlet’s rejection of her), and watches as she puts on a macabre and yet spellbinding display of singing old nursery rhymes alongside bawdy barroom songs, all the while passing out invisible “ flowers ” to the members of court. Claudius convinces Laertes that Polonius’s death—and Ophelia’s madness—are both Hamlet's fault. When news arrives that a pirate attack has allowed Hamlet to escape back to Denmark, Claudius comes up with a new plot in which a supposedly friendly duel between Hamlet and Laertes will actually be a trap—Laertes’s rapier will be poisoned. As a backup, Claudius will also poison some wine that he'll give to Hamlet if he wins.

Ophelia drowns in an apparent suicide, and a funeral is arranged for her. Even though suicides are not supposed to be given proper Christian burials, according to a pair of gravediggers preparing her grave, Ophelia will be buried with a limited set of rites since she is a noblewoman. Hamlet arrives back at Elsinore to find the gravediggers at work. As he observes them doing their morbid tasks merrily, he watches as they casually toss out the skull of Yorick , his father’s old court jester. Hamlet’s existentialism—and nihilism—reach new peaks as he looks at the skull, realizing that all living souls (be they great or common, good or evil) reach the same ends. When Hamlet realizes that it is Ophelia being buried, he bursts onto her memorial service, arguing that he loved her best of anyone—even as Laertes, stricken with grief, throws himself into his sister’s grave.

Back at the castle, Hamlet tells Horatio of his exploits on the ocean, revealing that he discovered Claudius’s plot and forged a letter in Claudius’s handwriting ordering the execution of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern instead of him, ensuring that the pair will be killed on sight when they reach England. When a courtier named Osric brings news of Laertes’s challenge to a duel, Hamlet bravely accepts. Horatio warns Hamlet that he has a bad feeling about the match, but Hamlet tells Horatio that he no longer cares whether he lives or dies—he wants to leave his fate up to God. During the match, Gertrude drinks to Hamlet's success from the poisoned glass of wine before Claudius can stop her. Laertes then wounds Hamlet with the poisoned blade, but in the scuffle they exchange swords and Hamlet wounds Laertes. Gertrude falls, saying the wine was poisoned, and dies. Laertes, realizing that he, too, is doomed by his own poison, reveals Claudius’s treachery. Hamlet kills Claudius by stabbing him with the poisoned sword and pouring wine down the man’s throat, poisoning him just as Claudius poisoned Hamlet’s father. Hamlet and Laertes forgive each another just before Laertes collapses and dies. As Hamlet dies, he hears the drums of Fortinbras's army marching through Denmark after a battle with the Polish, and tells Horatio, with his dying breath, that Fortinbras should be the one to ascend to the throne as the next King of Denmark. Looking around at the mess of spilled wine and bloody bodies, Hamlet charges Horatio with telling the world the full truth of Hamlet’s story. He dies, and Horatio bids the “sweet prince” goodbye. Fortinbras enters with a pair of ambassadors from England, who announce that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. Horatio begins to tell Hamlet's story, and Fortinbras orders Hamlet's body to be lifted up on a bier and displayed with the due honor and glory of a soldier.

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Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 25, 2020 • ( 2 )

With Shakespeare the dramatic resolution conveys us, beyond the man-made sphere of poetic justice, toward the ever-receding horizons of cosmic irony. This is peculiarly the case with Hamlet , for the same reasons that it excites such intensive empathy from actors and readers, critics and writers alike. There may be other Shakespearean characters who are just as memorable, and other plots which are no less impressive; but nowhere else has the outlook of the individual in a dilemma been so profoundly realized; and a dilemma, by definition, is an all but unresolvable choice between evils. Rather than with calculation or casuistry, it should be met with virtue or readiness; sooner or later it will have to be grasped by one or the other of its horns. These, in their broadest terms, have been—for Hamlet, as we interpret him—the problem of what to believe and the problem of how to act.

—Harry Levin, The Question of Hamlet

Hamlet is almost certainly the world’s most famous play, featuring drama’s and literature’s most fascinating and complex character. The many-sided Hamlet—son, lover, intellectual, prince, warrior, and avenger—is the consummate test for each generation’s leading actors, and to be an era’s defining Hamlet is perhaps the greatest accolade one can earn in the theater. The play is no less a proving ground for the critic and scholar, as successive generations have refashioned Hamlet in their own image, while finding in it new resonances and entry points to plumb its depths, perplexities, and possibilities. No other play has been analyzed so extensively, nor has any play had a comparable impact on our culture. The brooding young man in black, skull in hand, has moved out of the theater and into our collective consciousness and cultural myths, joining only a handful of comparable literary archetypes—Oedipus, Faust, and Don Quixote—who embody core aspects of human nature and experience. “It is we ,” the romantic critic William Hazlitt observed, “who are Hamlet.”

Hamlet also commands a crucial, central place in William Shakespeare’s dramatic career. First performed around 1600, the play stands near the midpoint of the playwright’s two-decade career as a culmination and new departure. As the first of his great tragedies, Hamlet signals a decisive shift from the comedies and history plays that launched Shakespeare’s career to the tragedies of his maturity. Although unquestionably linked both to the plays that came before and followed, Hamlet is also markedly exceptional. At nearly 4,000 lines, almost twice the length of Macbeth , Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest and, arguably, his most ambitious play with an enormous range of characters—from royals to gravediggers—and incidents, including court, bedroom, and graveyard scenes and a play within a play. Hamlet also bristles with a seemingly inexhaustible array of ideas and themes, as well as a radically new strategy for presenting them, most notably, in transforming soliloquies from expositional and motivational asides to the audience into the verbalization of consciousness itself. As Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt has asserted, “In its moral complexity, psychological depth, and philosophical power, Hamlet seems to mark an epochal shift not only in Shakespeare’s own career but in Western drama; it is as if the play were giving birth to a whole new kind of literary subjectivity.” Hamlet, more than any other play that preceded it, turns its action inward to dramatize an isolated, conflicted psyche struggling to cope with a world that has lost all certainty and consolation. Struggling to reconcile two contradictory identities—the heroic man of action and duty and the Christian man of conscience—Prince Hamlet becomes the modern archetype of the self-divided, alienated individual, desperately searching for self-understanding and meaning. Hamlet must contend with crushing doubt without the support of traditional beliefs that dictate and justify his actions. In describing the arrival of the fragmentation and chaos of the modern world, Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold declared that “the calm, cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity have disappeared, the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced.” Hamlet anticipates that dialogue by more than two centuries.

Like all of Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet makes strikingly original uses of borrowed material. The Scandinavian folk tale of Amleth, a prince called upon to avenge his father’s murder by his uncle, was first given literary form by the Danish writer Saxo the Grammarian in his late 12th century Danish History and later adapted in French in François de Belleforest’s Histoires tragiques (1570). This early version of the Hamlet story provided Shakespeare with the basic characters and relationships but without the ghost or the revenger’s uncertainty. In the story of Amleth there is neither doubt about the usurper’s guilt nor any moral qualms in the fulfillment of the avenger’s mission. In preChristian Denmark blood vengeance was a sanctioned filial obligation, not a potentially damnable moral or religious violation, and Amleth successfully accomplishes his duty by setting fire to the royal hall, killing his uncle, and proclaiming himself king of Denmark. Shakespeare’s more immediate source may have been a nowlost English play (c. 1589) that scholars call the Ur – Hamlet. All that has survived concerning this play are a printed reference to a ghost who cried “Hamlet, revenge!” and criticism of the play’s stale bombast. Scholars have attributed the Ur-Hamle t to playwright Thomas Kyd, whose greatest success was The Spanish Tragedy (1592), one of the earliest extant English tragedies. The Spanish Tragedy popularized the genre of the revenge tragedy, derived from Aeschylus’s Oresteia and the Latin plays of Seneca, to which Hamlet belongs. Kyd’s play also features elements that Shakespeare echoes in Hamlet, including a secret crime, an impatient ghost demanding revenge, a protagonist tormented by uncertainty who feigns madness, a woman who actually goes mad, a play within a play, and a final bloodbath that includes the death of the avenger himself. An even more immediate possible source for Hamlet is John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1599), another story of vengeance on a usurper by a sensitive protagonist.

Whether comparing Hamlet to its earliest source or the handling of the revenge plot by Kyd, Marston, or other Elizabethan or Jacobean playwrights, what stands out is the originality and complexity of Shakespeare’s treatment, in his making radically new and profound uses of established stage conventions. Hamlet converts its sensational material—a vengeful ghost, a murder mystery, madness, a heartbroken maiden, a fistfight at her burial, and a climactic duel that results in four deaths—into a daring exploration of mortality, morality, perception, and core existential truths. Shakespeare put mystery, intrigue, and sensation to the service of a complex, profound epistemological drama. The critic Maynard Mack in an influential essay, “The World of Hamlet ,” has usefully identified the play’s “interrogative mode.” From the play’s opening words—“Who’s there?”—to “What is this quintessence of dust?” through drama’s most famous soliloquy—“To be, or not to be, that is the question.”— Hamlet “reverberates with questions, anguished, meditative, alarmed.” The problematic nature of reality and the gap between truth and appearance stand behind the play’s conflicts, complicating Hamlet’s search for answers and his fulfillment of his role as avenger.

Hamlet opens with startling evidence that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” The ghost of Hamlet’s father, King Hamlet, has been seen in Elsinore, now ruled by his brother, Claudius, who has quickly married his widowed queen, Gertrude. When first seen, Hamlet is aloof and skeptical of Claudius’s justifications for his actions on behalf of restoring order in the state. Hamlet is morbidly and suicidally disillusioned by the realization of mortality and the baseness of human nature prompted by the sudden death of his father and his mother’s hasty, and in Hamlet’s view, incestuous remarriage to her brother-in-law:

O that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God! God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on’t! ah, fie! ’Tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. That it should come to this!

A recent student at the University of Wittenberg, whose alumni included Martin Luther and the fictional Doctor Faustus, Hamlet is an intellectual of the Protestant Reformation, who, like Luther and Faustus, tests orthodoxy while struggling to formulate a core philosophy. Brought to encounter the apparent ghost of his father, Hamlet alone hears the ghost’s words that he was murdered by Claudius and is compelled out of his suicidal despair by his pledge of revenge. However, despite the riveting presence of the ghost, Hamlet is tormented by doubts. Is the ghost truly his father’s spirit or a devilish apparition tempting Hamlet to his damnation? Is Claudius truly his father’s murderer? By taking revenge does Hamlet do right or wrong? Despite swearing vengeance, Hamlet delays for two months before taking any action, feigning madness better to learn for himself the truth about Claudius’s guilt. Hamlet’s strange behavior causes Claudius’s counter-investigation to assess Hamlet’s mental state. School friends—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—are summoned to learn what they can; Polonius, convinced that Hamlet’s is a madness of love for his daughter Ophelia, stages an encounter between the lovers that can be observed by Claudius. The court world at Elsinore, is, therefore, ruled by trickery, deception, role playing, and disguise, and the so-called problem of Hamlet, of his delay in acting, is directly related to his uncertainty in knowing the truth. Moreover, the suspicion of his father’s murder and his mother’s sexual betrayal shatter Hamlet’s conception of the world and his responsibility in it. Pushed back to the suicidal despair of the play’s opening, Hamlet is paralyzed by indecision and ambiguity in which even death is problematic, as he explains in the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy in the third act:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death— The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn No traveller returns—puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action.

The arrival of a traveling theatrical group provides Hamlet with the empirical means to resolve his doubts about the authenticity of the ghost and Claudius’s guilt. By having the troupe perform the Mousetrap play that duplicates Claudius’s crime, Hamlet hopes “to catch the conscience of the King” by observing Claudius’s reaction. The king’s breakdown during the performance seems to confirm the ghost’s accusation, but again Hamlet delays taking action when he accidentally comes upon the guilt-ridden Claudius alone at his prayers. Rationalizing that killing the apparently penitent Claudius will send him to heaven and not to hell, Hamlet decides to await an opportunity “That has no relish of salvation in’t.” He goes instead to his mother’s room where Polonius is hidden in another attempt to learn Hamlet’s mind and intentions. This scene between mother and son, one of the most powerful and intense in all of Shakespeare, has supported the Freudian interpretation of Hamlet’s dilemma in which he is stricken not by moral qualms but by Oedipal guilt. Gertrude’s cries of protest over her son’s accusations cause Polonius to stir, and Hamlet finally, instinctively strikes the figure he assumes is Claudius. In killing the wrong man Hamlet sets in motion the play’s catastrophes, including the madness and suicide of Ophelia, overwhelmed by the realization that her lover has killed her father, and the fatal encounter with Laertes who is now similarly driven to avenge a murdered father. Convinced of her son’s madness, Gertrude informs Claudius of Polonius’s murder, prompting Claudius to alter his order for Hamlet’s exile to England to his execution there.

Hamlet’s mental shift from reluctant to willing avenger takes place offstage during his voyage to England in which he accidentally discovers the execution order and then after a pirate attack on his ship makes his way back to Denmark. He returns to confront the inescapable human condition of mortality in the graveyard scene of act 5 in which he realizes that even Alexander the Great must return to earth that might be used to “stop a beer-barrel” and Julius Caesar’s clay to “stop a hole to keep the wind away.” This sobering realization that levels all earthly distinctions of nobility and acclaim is compounded by the shock of Ophelia’s funeral procession. Hamlet sustains his balance and purpose by confessing to Horatio his acceptance of a providential will revealed to him in the series of accidents on his voyage to England: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Roughhew them how we will.” Finally accepting his inability to control his life, Hamlet resigns himself to accept whatever comes. Agreeing to a duel with Laertes that Claudius has devised to eliminate his nephew, Hamlet asserts that “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.”

In the carnage of the play’s final scene, Hamlet ironically manages to achieve his revenge while still preserving his nobility and moral stature. It is the murderer Claudius who is directly or indirectly responsible for all the deaths. Armed with a poisonedtip sword, Laertes strikes Hamlet who in turn manages to slay Laertes with the lethal weapon. Meanwhile, Gertrude drinks from the poisoned cup Claudius intended to insure Hamlet’s death, and, after the remorseful Laertes blames Claudius for the plot, Hamlet, hesitating no longer, fatally stabs the king. Dying in the arms of Horatio, Hamlet orders his friend to “report me and my cause aright / To the unsatisfied” and transfers the reign of Denmark to the last royal left standing, the Norwegian prince Fortinbras. King Hamlet’s death has been avenged but at a cost of eight lives: Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencranz, Guildenstern, Laertes, Gertrude, Claudius, and Prince Hamlet. Order is reestablished but only by Denmark’s sworn enemy. Shakespeare’s point seems unmistakable: Honor and duty that command revenge consume the guilty and the innocent alike. Heroism must face the reality of the graveyard.

Fortinbras closes the play by ordering that Hamlet be carried off “like a soldier” to be given a military funeral underscoring the point that Hamlet has fallen as a warrior on a battlefield of both the duplicitous court at Elsinore and his own mind. The greatness of Hamlet rests in the extraordinary perplexities Shakespeare has discovered both in his title character and in the events of the play. Few other dramas have posed so many or such knotty problems of human existence. Is there a special providence in the fall of a sparrow? What is this quintessence of dust? To be or not to be?

Hamlet Oxford Lecture by Emma Smith

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Plays

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A Modern Perspective: Hamlet

By Michael Neill

The great Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold used to maintain that “if all the plays ever written suddenly disappeared and only Hamlet miraculously survived, all the theaters in the world would be saved. They could all put on Hamlet and be successful.” 1 Perhaps Meyerhold exaggerated because of his frustration—he was prevented from ever staging the tragedy by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who apparently thought it too dangerous to be performed—but Meyerhold’s sense of Hamlet ’s extraordinary breadth of appeal is amply confirmed by its stage history. Praised by Shakespeare’s contemporaries for its power to “please all” as well as “to please the wiser sort,” 2 it provided his company with an immediate and continuing success. It was equally admired by popular audiences at the Globe on the Bankside, by academic playgoers “in the two Universities of Cambridge and Oxford,” and at court—where it was still in request in 1637, nearly forty years after its first performance.

In the four centuries since it was first staged, Hamlet has never lost its theatrical appeal, remaining today the most frequently performed of Shakespeare’s tragedies. At the same time, it has developed a reputation as the most intellectually puzzling of his plays, and it has already attracted more commentary than any other work in English except the Bible. Even today, when criticism stresses the importance of the reader’s role in “constructing” the texts of the past, there is something astonishing about Hamlet ’s capacity to accommodate the most bafflingly different readings. 3

In the early nineteenth century, for instance, Romantic critics read it as the psychological study of a prince too delicate and sensitive for his public mission; to later nineteenth-century European intellectuals, the hero’s anguish and self-reproach spoke so eloquently of the disillusionment of revolutionary failure that in czarist Russia “Hamletism” became the acknowledged term for political vacillation and disengagement. The twentieth century, not surprisingly, discovered a more violent and disturbing play: to the French poet Paul Valéry, the tragedy seemed to embody the European death wish revealed in the carnage and devastation of the First World War; in the mid-1960s the English director Peter Hall staged it as a work expressing the political despair of the nuclear age; for the Polish critic Jan Kott, as for the Russian filmmaker Gregori Kozintsev, the play became “a drama of a political crime” in a state not unlike Stalin’s Soviet empire; 4 while the contemporary Irish poet Seamus Heaney found in it a metaphor for the murderous politics of revenge at that moment devouring his native Ulster:

I am Hamlet the Dane,

skull handler, parablist,

smeller of rot

in the state, infused

with its poisons,

pinioned by ghosts

and affections

murders and pieties 5

Even the major “facts” of the play—the status of the Ghost, or the real nature of Hamlet’s “madness”—are seen very differently at different times. Samuel Johnson, for example, writing in the 1760s, had no doubt that the hero’s “madness,” a source of “much mirth” to eighteenth-century audiences, was merely “pretended,” but twentieth-century Hamlets onstage, even if they were not the full-fledged neurotics invented by Freud and his disciple Ernest Jones, were likely to show some signs of actual madness. Modern readings, too, while still fascinated by the hero’s intellectual and emotional complexities, are likely to emphasize those characteristics that are least compatible with the idealized “sweet prince” of the Victorians—the diseased suspicion of women, revealed in his obsession with his mother’s sexuality and his needless cruelty to Ophelia, his capacity for murderous violence (he dies with the blood of five people on his hands), and his callous indifference to the killing of such relative innocents as Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern.

Hamlet ’s ability to adapt itself to the preconceptions of almost any audience, allowing the viewers, in the play’s own sardonic phrase, to “botch the words up fit to their own thoughts” ( 4.5.12 ), results partly from the boldness of its design. Over the sensationalism and rough energy of a conventional revenge plot is placed a sophisticated psychological drama whose most intense action belongs to the interior world of soliloquy: Hamlet agrees to revenge his father’s death at the urging of the Ghost, and thus steps into an old-fashioned revenge tragedy; but it is Hamlet’s inner world, revealed to us in his soliloquies (speeches addressed not to other characters but to the audience, as if the character were thinking aloud), that equally excites our attention. It is as if two plays are occurring simultaneously.

Although Hamlet is often thought of as the most personal of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Shakespeare did not invent the story of revenge that the play tells. The story was an ancient one, belonging originally to Norse saga. The barbaric narrative of murder and revenge—of a king killed by his brother, who then marries the dead king’s widow, of the young prince who must pretend to be mad in order to save his own life, who eludes a series of traps laid for him by his wicked uncle, and who finally revenges his father’s death by killing the uncle—had been elaborated in the twelfth-century Historiae Danicae of Saxo Grammaticus, and then polished up for sixteenth-century French readers in François de Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques. It was first adapted for the English theater in the late 1580s in the form of the so-called Ur- Hamlet , a play attributed to Thomas Kyd (unfortunately now lost) that continued to hold the stage until at least 1596; and it may well be that when Shakespeare began work on Hamlet about 1599, he had no more lofty intention than to polish up this slightly tarnished popular favorite. But Shakespeare’s wholesale rewriting produced a Hamlet so utterly unlike Kyd’s work that its originality was unmistakable even to playgoers familiar with Kyd’s play.

The new tragedy preserved the outline of the old story, and took over Kyd’s most celebrated contributions—a ghost crying for revenge, and a play-within-the-play that sinisterly mirrors the main plot; but by focusing upon the perplexed interior life of the hero, Shakespeare gave a striking twist to what had been a brutally straightforward narrative. On the levels of both revenge play and psychological drama, the play develops a preoccupation with the hidden, the secret, and the mysterious that does much to account for its air of mystery. In Maynard Mack’s words, it is “a play in the interrogative mood” whose action deepens and complicates, rather than answers, the apparently casual question with which it begins, “Who’s there?” 6

“The Cheer and Comfort of Our Eye”: Hamlet and Surveillance

The great subject of revenge drama, before Hamlet , was the moral problem raised by private, personal revenge: i.e., should the individual take revenge into his own hands or leave it to God? Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (and, one assumes, his lost play about Hamlet as well) captured on the stage the violent contradictions of the Elizabethan attitudes toward this form of “wild justice.” The surprising thing about Shakespeare’s Hamlet is that it barely glances at the ethical argument raised by a hero’s taking justice into his own hands—an argument central to The Spanish Tragedy. Of course, the controversy about the morality of private revenge must have provided an important context for the original performances of the play, giving an ominous force to Hamlet’s fear that the spirit he has seen “may be a devil” luring him to damnation ( 2.2.628 ). But Shakespeare simply takes this context for granted, and goes on to discover a quite different kind of political interest in his plot—one that may help to explain the paranoiac anxieties it was apparently capable of arousing in a dictator like Stalin.

Turning away from the framework of ethical debate, Shakespeare used Saxo’s story of Hamlet’s pretended madness and delayed revenge to explore the brutal facts about survival in an authoritarian state. Here too the play could speak to Elizabethan experience, for we should not forget that the glorified monarchy of Queen Elizabeth I was sustained by a vigorous network of spies and informers. Indeed, one portrait of Elizabeth shows her dressed in a costume allegorically embroidered with eyes and ears, partly to advertise that her watchers and listeners were everywhere. Shakespeare’s Elsinore, too—the castle governed by Claudius and home to Hamlet—is full of eyes and ears; and behind the public charade of warmth, magnanimity, and open government that King Claudius so carefully constructs, the lives of the King’s subjects are exposed to merciless inquisition.

It is symbolically appropriate that the play should begin with a group of anxious watchers on the battlemented walls of the castle, for nothing and no one in Claudius’s Denmark is allowed to go “unwatched”: every appearance must be “sifted” or “sounded,” and every secret “opened.” The King himself does not hesitate to eavesdrop on the heir apparent; and his chief minister, Polonius, will meet his death lurking behind a curtain in the same squalid occupation. But they are not alone in this: the wholesale corruption of social relationships, even the most intimate, is an essential part of Shakespeare’s chilling exposure of authoritarian politics. Denmark, Hamlet informs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern accurately enough, is “a prison” ( 2.2.262 ); and the treachery of these former school friends of Hamlet illustrates how much, behind the mask of uncle Claudius’s concern, his court is ruled by the prison-house customs of the stool pigeon and the informer. How readily first Ophelia and then Gertrude allow themselves to become passive instruments of Polonius’s and Claudius’s spying upon the Prince; how easily Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are persuaded to put their friendship with Hamlet at the disposal of the state. Even Laertes’s affectionate relationship with his sister is tainted by a desire to install himself as a kind of censor, a “watchman” to the fortress of her heart ( 1.3.50 ). In this he is all too like his father, Polonius, who makes himself an interiorized Big Brother, engraving his cautious precepts on Laertes’s memory ( 1.3.65 ff.) and telling Ophelia precisely what she is permitted to think and feel:

I do not know, my lord, what I should think.

Marry, I will teach you. Think yourself a baby. . . .

( 1.3.113 –14)

Polonius is the perfect inhabitant of this court: busily policing his children’s sexuality, he has no scruple about prostituting his daughter in the interests of state security, for beneath his air of senile wordiness and fatherly anxiousness lies an ingrained cynicism that allows him both to spy on his son’s imagined “drabbing” in Paris and to “loose” his daughter as a sexual decoy to entrap the Prince.

Hamlet’s role as hero at once sets him apart from this prison-house world and yet leads him to become increasingly entangled in its web of surveillance. To the admiring Ophelia, Hamlet remains “Th’ observed of all observers” ( 3.1.168 ), but his obvious alienation has resulted in his being “observed” in a much more sinister sense. He is introduced in Act 1, scene 2, as a mysteriously taciturn watcher and listener whose glowering silence calls into question the pomp and bustle of the King’s wordy show, just as his mourning blacks cast suspicion on the showy costumes of the court. Yet he himself, we are quickly made to realize, is the object of a dangerously inquisitive stare—what the King smoothly calls “the cheer and comfort of our eye” ( 1.2.120 ).

The full meaning of that silky phrase will be disclosed on Claudius’s next appearance, when, after Hamlet has met the Ghost and has begun to appear mad, Claudius engages Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to probe his nephew’s threatening transformation ( 2.2.1 –18). “Madness in great ones,” the King insists, “must not unwatched go” ( 3.1.203 ):

         There’s something in his soul

O’er which his melancholy sits on brood,

And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose

Will be some danger.                  ( 3.1.178 –81)

But of course Hamlet’s madness is as much disguise as it is revelation; and while the Prince is the most ruthlessly observed character in the play, he is also its most unremitting observer. Forced to master his opponent’s craft of smiling villainy, he becomes not merely an actor but also a dramatist, ingeniously using a troupe of traveling players, with their “murder in jest,” to unmask the King’s own hypocritical “show.”

The scene in which the Players present The Murder of Gonzago , the play that Hamlet calls “The Mousetrap,” brings the drama of surveillance to its climax. We in the audience become participants in the drama’s claustrophobic economy of watching and listening, as our attention moves to and fro among the various groups on the stage, gauging the significance of every word, action, and reaction, sharing the obsessional gaze that Hamlet describes to Horatio:

Observe my uncle. . . . Give him heedful note,

For I mine eyes will rivet to his face,

And, after, we will both our judgments join

In censure of his seeming.             ( 3.2.85 –92)

“The Mousetrap” twice reenacts Claudius’s murder of his brother—first in the dumb show and then in the play proper—drawing out the effect so exquisitely that the King’s enraged interruption produces an extraordinary discharge of tension. An audience caught up in Hamlet’s wild excitement is easily blinded to the fact that this seeming climax is, in terms of the revenge plot, at least, a violent anticlimax. Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy had developed the play-within-the-play as a perfect vehicle for the ironies of revenge, allowing the hero to take his actual revenge in the very act of staging the villain’s original crime. Hamlet’s play, however, does not even make public Claudius’s forbidden story. Indeed, while it serves to confirm the truth of what the Ghost has said, the only practical effect of the Prince’s theatrical triumph is to hand the initiative decisively to Claudius. In the scenes that follow, Hamlet shows himself capable of both instinctive violence and of cold-blooded calculation, but his behavior is purely reactive. Otherwise he seems oddly paralyzed by his success—a condition displayed in the prayer scene ( 3.3.77 –101) where he stands behind the kneeling Claudius with drawn sword, “neutral to his will and matter,” uncannily resembling the frozen revenger described in the First Player’s speech about Pyrrhus standing over old Priam ( 2.2.493 ff.). All Hamlet can do is attempt to duplicate the triumph of “The Mousetrap” in his confrontation with Gertrude by holding up to her yet another verbal mirror, in which she is forced to gaze in horror on her “inmost part” ( 3.4.25 ).

Hamlet’s sudden loss of direction after the “Mousetrap” scene lasts through the fourth act of the play until he returns from his sea voyage in that mysteriously altered mood on which most commentators remark—a kind of fatalism that makes him the largely passive servant of a plot that he now does little to advance or impede. It is as if the springing of the “Mousetrap” leaves Hamlet with nowhere to go—primarily because it leaves him with nothing to say. But from the very beginning, his struggle with Claudius has been conceived as a struggle for the control of language—a battle to determine what can and cannot be uttered.

Speaking the Unspeakable: Hamlet and Memory

If surveillance is one prop of the authoritarian state, the other is its militant regulation of speech. As Claudius flatters the court into mute complicity with his theft of both the throne and his dead brother’s wife, he genially insists “You cannot speak of reason to the Dane / And lose your voice” ( 1.2.44 –45); but an iron wall of silence encloses the inhabitants of his courtly prison. While the flow of royal eloquence muffles inconvenient truths, ears here are “fortified” against dangerous stories ( 1.1.38 ) and lips sealed against careless confession: “Give thy thoughts no tongue,” Polonius advises Laertes, “. . . Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice . . . reserve thy judgment” ( 1.3.65 –75). Hamlet’s insistent warnings to his fellow watchers on the battlements “Never to speak of this that you have seen” ( 1.5.174 ) urge the same caution: “Let it be tenable in your silence still . . . Give it an understanding but no tongue” ( 1.2.269 –71). What for them is merely common prudence, however, is for the hero an absolute prohibition and an intolerable burden: “. . . break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue” ( 1.2.164 ).

Hamlet has only two ways of rupturing this enforced silence. The “pregnant” wordplay of his “mad” satire, as Polonius uneasily recognizes ( 2.2.226 –27), is one way, but it amounts to no more than inconclusive verbal fencing. Soliloquy is a more powerful resource because, since it is heard by no one (except the audience), its impenetrable privacy defines Hamlet’s independence from the corrupt public world. From his first big speech in the play, he has made such hiddenness the badge of his resistance to the King and Queen: “I have that within which passes show” ( 1.2.88 ), he announces. What is at issue here is not simply a contrast between hypocrisy and true grief over the loss of his king and father: rather, Hamlet grounds his very claim to integrity upon a notion that true feeling can never be expressed: it is only “that . . . which passes show ” that can escape the taint of hypocrisy, of “acting.” It is as if, in this world of remorseless observation, the self can survive only as a ferociously defended secret, something treasured for the very fact of its hiddenness and impenetrability. Unlike Gertrude, unlike Ophelia, unlike those absorbent “sponges” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet must insist he is not made of “penetrable stuff.”

If Hamlet’s “antic disposition” is the guardian of his rebellious inwardness, soliloquy is where this inwardness lives, a domain which (if we except Claudius’s occasional flickers of conscience) no other character is allowed to inhabit. Hamlet’s soliloquies bulk so large in our response to the play because they not only guarantee the existence of the hero’s secret inner life; they also, by their relentless self-questioning, imply the presence of still more profoundly secret truths “hid . . . within the center” ( 2.2.170 –71): “I do not know / Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do,’ / Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means / To do ’t” ( 4.4.46 –49). The soliloquies are the focus of the play’s preoccupation with speaking and silence. Hamlet is set apart from those around him by his access to this region of private utterance: in it he can, as it were, “be bounded in a nutshell and count [himself] a king of infinite space” ( 2.2.273 –74).

Yet there is a paradox here: the isolation of soliloquy is at once his special strength and the source of peculiar anguish. It saves him from the fate of Ophelia, who becomes “Divided from herself and her fair judgment” ( 4.5.92 ) by her grief at Polonius’s death and hasty burial; accustomed to speak only in the voice that others allow her, dutifully resolved to “think nothing, my lord” ( 3.2.124 ), she is left with no language other than the disconnected fragments of her madness to express outrage at a murder which authority seems determined to conceal. Hamlet, by contrast, finds in soliloquy an arena where the unspeakable can be uttered. But the very fact that these are words that others do not hear also makes soliloquy a realm of noncommunication, of frustrating silence—a prison as well as a fortress in which the speaker beats his head unavailingly against the walls of his own cell. Thus the soliloquy that ends Act 2 reproaches itself for a kind of speechlessness—the mute ineffectuality of a “John-a-dreams,” who, unlike the Player, “can say nothing”—and at the same time mocks itself as a torrent of empty language, a mere unpacking of the heart with words ( 2.2.593 –616). For all their eloquence, the soliloquies serve in the end only to increase the tension generated by the pressure of forbidden utterance.

It is from this pressure that the first three acts of the play derive most of their extraordinary energy; and the energy is given a concrete dramatic presence in the form of the Ghost. The appearance of a ghost demanding vengeance was a stock device borrowed from the Roman playwright Seneca; and the Ur- Hamlet had been notorious for its ghost, shrieking like an oysterwife, “Hamlet, revenge!” But the strikingly unconventional thing about Shakespeare’s Ghost is its melancholy preoccupation with the silenced past and its plangent cry of “Remember me” ( 1.5.98 ), which makes remembrance seem more important than revenge. “The struggle of humanity against power,” the Czech novelist Milan Kundera has written, “is the struggle of memory against forgetfulness”; and this Ghost, which stands for all that has been erased by the bland narratives of King Claudius, is consumed by the longing to speak that which power has rendered unspeakable. The effect of the Ghost’s narrative upon Hamlet is to infuse him with the same desire; indeed, once he has formally inscribed its watchword—“Remember me”—on the tables of his memory, he is as if possessed by the Ghost, seeming to mime its speechless torment when he appears to Ophelia, looking “As if he had been loosèd out of hell / To speak of horrors” ( 2.1.93 –94).

For all its pathos of silenced longing, the Ghost remains profoundly ambivalent, and not just because Elizabethans held such contradictory beliefs about ghosts. 7 The ambivalence is dramatized in a particularly disturbing detail: as the Ghost pours his story into Hamlet’s ear (the gesture highlighted by the Ghost’s incantatory repetition of “hear” and “ear”), we become aware of an uncanny parallel between the Ghost’s act of narration and the murder the Ghost tells about:

’Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,

A serpent stung me. So the whole ear of Denmark

Is by a forgèd process of my death

Rankly abused. . . .

Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole

With juice of cursèd hebona in a vial

And in the porches of my ears did pour

The leprous distilment. . . .               ( 1.5.42 –71)

If Claudius’s propaganda has abused “the whole ear of Denmark” like a second poisoning, the Ghost’s own story enters Hamlet’s “ears of flesh and blood” (line 28) like yet another corrosive. The fact that it is a story that demands telling, and that its narrator is “an honest ghost,” cannot alter the fact that it will work away in Hamlet’s being like secret venom until he in turn can vent it in revenge.

The “Mousetrap” play is at once a fulfillment and an escape from that compulsion. It gives, in a sense, a public voice to the Ghost’s silenced story. But it is only a metaphoric revenge. Speaking daggers and poison but using none, Hamlet turns out only to have written his own inability to bring matters to an end. It is no coincidence, then, that he should foresee the conclusion of his own tragedy as being the product of someone else’s script: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will” ( 5.2.11 –12).

“To Tell My Story”: Unfinished Hamlet

In the last scene of the play, the sense that Hamlet’s story has been shaped by Providence—or by a playwright other than Hamlet—is very strong: the swordplay with Laertes is a theatrical imitation of dueling that becomes the real thing, sweetly knitting up the paralyzing disjunction between action and acting; at the same time, revenge is symmetrically perfected in the spectacle of Claudius choking on “a poison tempered by himself,” Laertes “justly killed with his own treachery,” and the Queen destroyed in the vicious pun that has her poisoned by Claudius’s “union.” Yet Hamlet’s consoling fatalism does not survive the final slaughter. Instead, he faces his end tormented by a sense of incompleteness, of a story still remaining to be told:

You that look pale and tremble at this chance,

That are but mutes or audience to this act,

Had I but time (as this fell sergeant, Death,

Is strict in his arrest), O, I could tell you—

But let it be.                                     ( 5.2.366 –70)

Within a few lines Hamlet’s distinctive voice, which has dominated his own tragedy like that of no other Shakespearean hero, will be cut off in midsentence by the arrest of death—and “the rest is silence” ( 5.2.395 ).

The play is full of such unfinished, untold, or perhaps even untellable tales, from Barnardo’s interrupted story of the Ghost’s first appearance to the Player’s unfinished rendition of “Aeneas’ tale to Dido” and the violently curtailed performance of The Murder of Gonzago. In the opening scene the Ghost itself is cut off, before it can speak, by the crowing of a cock; and when it returns and speaks to Hamlet, it speaks first about a story it cannot tell:

                 But that I am forbid

To tell the secrets of my prison house,

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy

 young blood . . .                   ( 1.5.18 –21)

Even the tale it is permitted to unfold is, ironically, one of murderous interruption and terrible incompleteness:

Cut off , even in the blossoms of my sin,

Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled,

No reck’ning made, but sent to my account

With all my imperfections on my head.

( 1.5.83 –86)

Act 5 at last produces the formal reckoning of this imperfect account, yet it leaves Hamlet once again echoing the Ghost’s agony of frustrated utterance.

But what, we might ask, can there be left to tell, beyond what we have already seen and heard? It seems to be part of the point, a last reminder of Hamlet’s elusive “mystery,” that we shall never know. The Prince has, of course, insisted that Horatio remain behind “to tell my story”; but the inadequacy of Horatio’s response only intensifies the sense of incompleteness. All that his stolid imagination can offer is that bald plot summary of “accidental judgments [and] casual slaughters,” which, as Anne Barton protests, leaves out “everything that seems important” about the play and its protagonist. 8 Nor is Fortinbras’s attempt to make “The soldier’s music and the rite of war / Speak loudly for [Hamlet]” ( 5.2.445 –46) any more satisfactory, for the military strongman’s cannon are no better tuned to speak for Hamlet than the player’s pipe.

It would be a mistake, of course, to underestimate the dramatic significance of Horatio’s story or of the “music and the rite of war”—these last gestures of ritual consolation—especially in a play where, beginning with the obscene confusion of Claudius’s “mirth in funeral” and including Polonius’s “hugger-mugger” interment and Ophelia’s “maimed rites,” we have seen the dead repeatedly degraded by the slighting of their funeral pomps. In this context it matters profoundly that Hamlet alone is accorded the full dignity of obsequies suited to his rank, for it signals his triumph over the oblivion to which Claudius is fittingly consigned, and, in its gesture back toward Hamlet’s story as Shakespeare has told it (so much better than Horatio does), it brings Hamlet’s story to a heroic end.

“The Undiscovered Country”: Hamlet and the Secrets of Death

How we respond to the ending of Hamlet —both as revenge drama and as psychological study—depends in part on how we respond to yet a third level of the play—that is, to Hamlet as a prolonged meditation on death. The play is virtually framed by two encounters with the dead: at one end is the Ghost, at the other a pile of freshly excavated skulls. The skulls (all but one) are nameless and silent; the Ghost has an identity (though a “questionable” one) and a voice; yet they are more alike than might at first seem. For this ghost, though invulnerable “as the air,” is described as a “dead corse,” a “ghost . . . come from the grave,” its appearance suggesting a grotesque disinterment of the buried king ( 1.4.52 –57; 1.5.139 ). The skulls for their part may be silent, but Hamlet plays upon each to draw out its own “excellent voice” (“That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once”; 5.1.77 –78), just as he engineered that “miraculous organ” of the Ghost’s utterance, the “Mousetrap.”

There is a difference, however: Hamlet’s dressing up the skulls with shreds of narrative (“as if ’twere Cain’s jawbone . . . This might be the pate of a politician . . . or of a courtier . . . Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer”; 5.1.78 –101) only serves to emphasize their mocking anonymity, until the Gravedigger offers to endow one with a precise historical identity: “This same skull . . . was . . . Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester” ( 5.1.186 –87). Hamlet is delighted: now memory can begin its work of loving resurrection. But how does the Gravedigger know? The answer is that of course he cannot; and try as Hamlet may to cover this bare bone with the flesh of nostalgic recollection, he cannot escape the wickedly punning reminder of “this same skull” that all skulls indeed look frightfully the same. Ironically, even Yorick’s distinctive trademark, his grin, has become indistinguishable from the mocking leer of that grand jester of the Danse Macabre , Death the Antic: “Where be your gibes now? . . . Not one now to mock your own grinning?”; so that even as he holds it, the skull’s identity appears to drain away into the anonymous memento mori sent to adorn “my lady’s” dressing table. It might as well be Alexander the Great’s; or Caesar’s; or anyone’s. It might as well be what it will one day become—a handful of clay, fit to stop a beer barrel.

It is significant that (with the trivial exception of 4.4) the graveyard scene is the only one to take place outside the confines of Claudius’s castle-prison. As the “common” place to which all stories lead, the graveyard both invites narrative and silences it. Each blank skull at once poses and confounds the question with which the tragedy itself began, “Who’s there?,” subsuming all human differences in awful likeness: “As you are now,” goes the tombstone verse, “so once was I / As I am now, so shall you be.” In the graveyard all stories collapse into one reductive history (“Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust”; 5.1.216 –17). In this sense the Gravedigger is the mocking counterpart of the Player: and the houses of oblivion that gravediggers make challenge the players’ memorial art by lasting “till doomsday” ( 5.1.61 ). Hamlet shares with the Gravedigger the same easy good-fellowship he extends to the play’s other great outsider, the First Player; but the Gravedigger asserts a more sinister kind of intimacy with his claim to have begun his work “that very day that young Hamlet was born” ( 5.1.152 –53). In this moment he identifies himself as the Prince’s mortal double, the Sexton Death from the Danse Macabre who has been preparing him a grave from the moment of birth.

If there is a final secret to be revealed, then, about that “undiscovered country” on which Hamlet’s imagination broods, it is perhaps only the Gravedigger’s spade that can uncover it. For his digging lays bare the one thing we can say for certain lies hidden “within” the mortal show of the flesh—the emblems of Death himself, that Doppelgänger who shadows each of us as the mysterious Lamord ( La Mort ) shadows Laertes. If there is a better story, one that would confer on the rough matter of life the consolations of form and significance, it is, the play tells us, one that cannot finally be told; for it exists on the other side of language, to be tantalizingly glimpsed only at the point when Hamlet is about to enter the domain of the inexpressible. The great and frustrating achievement of this play, its most ingenious and tormenting trick, the source of its endlessly belabored mystery, is to persuade us that such a story might exist, while demonstrating its irreducible hiddenness. The only story Hamlet is given is that of a hoary old revenge tragedy, which he persuades himself (and us) can never denote him truly; but it is a narrative frame that nothing (not even inaction) will allow him to escape. The story of our lives, the play wryly acknowledges, is always the wrong story; but the rest, after all, is silence.

• Dmitri Shostakovich, Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich , as related to and edited by Solomon Volkow, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (London: Faber, 1981), p. 84.
• See F. E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion, 1564–1964 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), pp. 435, 209; see also pp. 262 and 403.
• The most lucid guide to this critical labyrinth, though he deals with no work later than 1960, is probably still Morris Weitz, Hamlet and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (London: Faber, 1964).
• Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (London: Methuen, 1964).
• Excerpt from “Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces” from Poems, 1965–1975 by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 1975, 1980 by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. Permission for use of these lines from North by Seamus Heaney, published by Faber and Faber Limited, is also acknowledged.
• See Mack’s classic essay, “The World of Hamlet,” Yale Review 41 (1952): 502–23; Mack’s approach is significantly extended in Harry Levin’s The Question of Hamlet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959).
• The most balanced treatment of this and other contentious historical issues in the play is in Roland M. Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
• Introduction to T. J. B. Spencer, ed., Hamlet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 52. See also James L. Calderwood’s To Be and Not To Be: Negation and Meta-drama in “Hamlet” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

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Read our detailed notes below on the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Our notes cover Hamlet summary, themes, characters and analysis.

Introduction

Hamlet is a tragic play written by William Shakespeare somewhat in 1599. The exact date of publication is unknown, however, many believe that it was published between 1601 and 1603. The play is set in Denmark.

Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, is Shakespeare’s longest play and is well-thought-out as the most influential literary work of literature. The play stages the revenge that Hamlet is to wreak upon his uncle, Claudius, for killing his (Hamlet’s) father.

The story of Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, is supposed to be derived from the fable of Amleth, written in the 13th century and reiterated in the 16th century by a scholar named Francois de Belleforest. We can assume the popularity of the play by this that throughout centuries, the role of Hamlet is staged by the highly skillful artist.

Hamlet has different version published at different ages. Each version is different from others as it includes lines or excludes them making them entirely different from other. The main characters of the play are Hamlet, the protagonist; Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle; Queen Gertrude; Polonius; Ophelia; Laertes. The major themes of the play include fate, free will, revenge, political instability, mortality, and madness. Yorick’s skull is the major symbol used by the writer to introduce artistic effect in the play.

Hamlet by William Shakespeare Summary

The play opens with Prince Hamlet being summoned to Denmark from Germany for his father’s funeral. When he reaches there, he finds that his mother Queen Gertrude has already remarried to his fraternal uncle, Claudius. For Hamlet, this marriage was a big shock and considered it “foul incest”. Even worse than this, Claudius has crowned himself disregard of the fact that being King’s son, this crown belongs to Hamlet. Hamlet doubts the whole scenario as foul play.

All of Hamlet’s doubts and suspicions are confirmed when his father’s ghost visits the Castle and complains that because he is murdered, he is unable to rest in peace. Moreover, the ghost claims that Claudius had poured poison in the ear of King Hamlet when he was sleeping causing his death. The king’s ghost, impotent to confess and find redemption, is now condemned to pass his days in despair and walk on earth at night. He persuades and begs his son Hamlet to take revenge from Claudius, however, he asks to spare Gertrude and let her fate decided by heaven.

Hamlet pledges to avenge his father’s death and wears a mask of madness so that he would be able to observe the interactions among people in the castle. However, by doing so, Hamlet finds himself somewhat very confused and questions the trustworthiness of the ghost. What if the ghost is a devil’s agent directed to allure him? What if by killing Claudius consequences Hamlet to revive his memory throughout for life? Hamlet cannot stop himself from over-thinking and worries over his thought and perceive them as his cowardice. Words restrict action, however, the world in which he lives pay back every action.

To test the sincerity of the Ghost. Hamlet takes help from the troupe of actors who staged a play named The Murder of Gonzago. Hamlet added few scenes to play that resembles the murder of the King Hamlet as described by the ghost. Hamlet named this revised play as “The Mousetrap”. The play is proved successful as the Claudius reacted to the play and seems to be conscience-stricken, as hoped by Prince Hamlet. Claudius immediately leaves the place as he faces difficulty to breathe. Prince Hamlet, being convinced by the sincerity of the ghost, vows to avenge his father’s death and decided to kill Claudius. But “conscience doth make cowards of us all”, as observed by Hamlet.

Hamlet, by his unwillingness to avenge Claudius, causes six subsidiary deaths. The first victim is Polonius, an old man, who is stabbed by Hamlet through a wall hanging as Polonius spies on hamlet and his mother. Claudius banishes Hamlet to England to punish him for Polonius’ death and instructs Hamlet’s school chums, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to handover him to English king for execution. Hamlet, during the journey, discovers what is going on and arranges a plot for the execution of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Ophelia, highly upset on her father’s death and Hamlet’s behavior, drown herself while singing a song and lamenting over the fate of a despised lover. Laertes, her brother, follows next.

When Laertes returned to Denmark to kill Claudius to avenge his father’s death, sees that Ophelia, his sister, has drowned by madness. Laertes, in the love of her sister, pledges to kill Hamlet for being the cause of Ophelia’s death. Through his creative words, Laertes convinced Claudius to kill Hamlet. Hamlet and Laertes have a sword fight. In the middle of the fight, Laertes drops his poisoned sword that is retrieved by Hamlet and wounds Laertes. Laertes tells Hamlet of the poisoned sword and as Hamlet is already been wounded by the sword, he, too, will die soon. Meanwhile, Horatio informs Hamlet that “Queen Falls”. Gertrude has drunk a sip from the poisoned cup, that was prepared by Claudius for Hamlet and she dies.

Laertes, before he dies, made another confession to Hamlet of his part in the plot and tell him the Claudius is responsible for Gertrude’s death. Enraged Hamlet stabs the poisoned sword into Claudius and pours the remaining poisoned wine into Claudius’ throat.

Before he dies, the throne should pass to the Prince Fortibras of Norway, declares Hamlet. He also begs his friend Horatio to tell him accurately the events that lead to such bloodshed.

The play ends with a grand funeral for Prince Hamlet as ordered by King Fortinbras of Denmark.

Themes in Hamlet

The question of life and death is introduced just as the play opens. Hamlet, throughout the play, ponders the complexity of life and considers the meaning of life. Throughout the play, many questions emerge as what happens when one dies? Will someone directly goes to heaven, if he/she is murdered? etc. Furthermore, Hamlet is very uncertain about the afterlife and causes him to quit suicide. The death of almost all the major characters of the play, towards the end of the play, doesn’t fully answer the question of mortality. The character of Hamlet represents exploration and discussion disregard of a true perseverance.

Hamlet, after hearing confessions from the ghost acts like a mad person to fool people in order to know the reality of the people around him. He acts so to prove himself harmless. However, this madness was recognized by Polonius. The irony arises when he falsely believes that Hamlet’s method stems from his love for Ophelia. It was impressive of Polonius that he recognizes the method behind Hamlet’s madness.

However, Hamlet starts losing his hold on reality by acting mad. He faces difficulty in handling the circumstances that are emotionally driven. Surrendering himself to physical violence displays that he has more issues than merely acting mad. This all scenario comes up with a question that what compels Hamlet to act such without considering the consequences?

There are only two female characters in the play Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother and Ophelia, Polonius’ daughter and Hamlet’s beloved.

Hamlets seem to be nervous while communicating with both of the women. In Hamlet’s life, both of these women have a special position, however, he is suspicious of both. The too early remarriage of her made him very suspicious of her mother. Secondly, Ophelia is in cahoots with her family and Hamlet realizes it when he starts acting mad.

Both of the ladies let Hamlet down. However, Ophelia is viewed as a victim of Hamlet brutality while Gertrude is represented as the more flexible character.

Political Livelihood

With the death of King Hamlet, the nation of Denmark starts deteriorating as the death of a king causes political turmoil in the country. Hamlet erratic behavior leads to unrest in the country. At various points in the play, the mad behavior of Hamlet is linked with the political livelihood of the country.

Hamlet Characters Analysis

He is the Prince of Denmark and son of the deceased king. He is called from Wittenberg University in Germany to attend his father’s funeral. When he reaches Denmark, he comes to know that his mother has remarried very soon to his uncle. Moreover, his uncle has crowned himself. This makes Hamlet very suspicious. These suspicious changes to reality when Hamlet encounters his father’s ghost. After hearing his father’s confession he vows to avenge his father’s death. Hamlet, in the play, is a highly confused person that leads to the bloody end of the play. To be or not to be is one the most celebrated dialogue of Hamlet and representation of his confused state of mind.

He is the present king of Denmark and brother of the deceased king, King Hamlet. He is accused of killing his brother and remarries widow of the Queen.

She is the Queen of Denmark and also the wife of deceased King Hamlet. She immediately remarries to Claudius, brother of King Hamlet.

He is a son of Polonius and brother of Ophelia. He is a student in Paris. Who first appears at the funeral of the King Hamlet and secondly at the death of his sister, Ophelia.

He is a loyal friend and a schoolmate of Prince Hamlet.

He is an old chief counselor of Claudius. He is murdered by Prince Hamlet when caught him spying.

She is the daughter of Polonius, sister of Laertes and Hamlet’s beloved. She commits suicide after her father’s death.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

The classmates of Hamlet at Wittenberg whom Claudius called to spy on him.

The minor characters of the play are:

He is King of Norway, who vows to avenge his father’s death who was killed by the Danes’ hands.

A minor character who acts as the messenger between Hamlet and Laertes.

Voltimand and Cornelius

They are the courtiers of Danish kingdom who are directed as diplomats to the Courtyard of Norway.

Marcellus and Barnardo

They are Danish officers who guard the castle of Elsinore.

A Danish soldier to guard castle of Elsinore.

A young man whom Polonius trains to spy on his son and report him.

Hamlet Literary Analysis

Throughout the play, Hamlets seems to be highly confused regarding the idea of death. His famous soliloquies line “to be or not to be” shows Hamlet confused mindset for suicide; whether he should suicide or not; what would be an afterlife.

The play has a turning point where Hamlet realizes at the graveyard and encounters the skull of a man whom he is fond of. In his contemplation, Hamlet realizes that death vanishes the class difference among society. Everything is created by man himself. All these differences are illusions that diminish with death.

The play demonstrates a conflict between fate and free will and this what the classical tragedians appreciated. In every great tragedy, there lies a struggle between the predisposition a man to accept the fate and his natural desire to control his destiny.

Whether it is Sophocles or Shakespeare, both demonstrate that there is a continuous struggle between destiny and choice to control human life. To Shakespeare, man’s dilemma is represented when he is given to choose between good and bad. In the play, Hamlet was well aware of his shortcomings and his powerlessness to stand for what is right and to correct what seems to be wrong to him.

He, through his intellectual guidance, tries to pursue his fate. Hamlet resembles a modern man who is tossed between good and bad. To him, there is nothing good or bad, it is what our thinking makes it so. Like Hamlet, every man struggles to live between what he expects and what he gets; the battle that a man never wins. God asks man one thing and he demands another.

More From William Shakespeare

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• The Merchant of Venice
• Twelfth Night
• The Taming of the Shrew
• As You Like It
• Much Ado About Nothing
• The Comedy of Errors

107 Exceptional Hamlet Essay Topics: Questions & Prompts

Every academic paper starts with a captivating idea, and Hamlet research paper or essay shouldn’t be an exception. In the list below, our team has collected unique and inspiring topics for you. You can use them in your writing or develop your own idea according to the format.

Here are some Hamlet essay topics for you:

• Elaborate on the weather in Denmark. How does it reflect the state of affairs and mood in the country? How does it change throughout the play? Start this Hamlet essay by describing the foggy weather in the first scene and gradually provide more examples as evidence.
• Think of irony in Hamlet . How and for what purposes did Shakespeare incorporate it in the play? Provide examples of the lines and situations that can be considered ironic.
• Reflect on Gertrude’s marriages. Why did she marry Claudius? Did they have an affair when King Hamlet was alive? Or did she agree on the new marriage to help the country?
• Compare and contrast Claudius and King Oedipus from Oedipus the King . What character traits do they share? Who is a better politician? Why?
• Explain whether you think Gertrude is on Hamlet’s or Claudius’ side. Did she switch the side by the end of the play? Analyze her conversation with Hamlet and how she later told Claudius that Hamlet was mad. Why did she drink the suspicious (poisoned) wine?
• Analyze the fact that dying Hamlet asked Horatio to spread his story. Will Horatio retell it without changes? Can he tell the truth about what happened at all?
• Examine an approach to violence in Hamlet . Are violence and aggression excessive in the play? How do characters react to it? Comment on how violence is mainly linked to vengeance.
• Consider the Ghost of Old Hamlet and all his appearances in Hamlet . Who saw him? Who do you think can see him? In your Hamlet essay, analyze every scene where he occurred and elaborate on why he did so.
• Talk about the relationship between Gertrude and Old Hamlet. Analyze what we know about their marriage and her reaction to her husband’s death. Did Gertrude see the Ghost in the scene with Hamlet? Could she have pretended that she didn’t?
• If Hamlet had survived, would he have been a good king? Analyze his strengths and weaknesses concerning the matter. Did he prove to be a good leader or politician in the play? Consider that Fortinbras explicitly stated that Hamlet could’ve become a good ruler.
• Elaborate on the way Hamlet killed Polonius in act 3, scene 4. Why did Hamlet act so quickly and calmly when he hesitates to kill his enemy, Claudius? Was this murder intentional? Did Hamlet regret it or freak out about it?
• Explore Hamlet’s mental state. How did grief affect him? His depression and suicidal tendencies are apparent. How do they change throughout the play?
• Compare Hamlet’s attitude towards the only women in the play, Ophelia and Gertrude. Why does he shame both of them for their sexual relationships? Examine his dialogues with his mother and his (ex)girlfriend, where he expresses cruelty. Elaborate on how his mother’s remarriage affected his relationships with the women.
• Examine the madness that Hamlet may or may not obtain. Thanks to his dialogue with Horatio, we know that he fakes his insanity. But could it have changed by the end of the play? What could’ve caused it? Analyze the evidence of his abnormal behavior and whether you can consider it natural, not acted.
• Analyze how Hamlet reflects on suicide. Provide examples from the soliloquies where Hamlet presumably tells the truth about his feelings. He considers suicide as an option, way out of the situation. Why doesn’t he commit it? Or was his death close to suicide?
• Consider whether the Ghost exists or not. A few people have seen him, but may it have been a case of mass hysteria? Hamlet may have gone mad over the death of his father and his mother’s remarriage. What if he imagined his dialogues with deceased King Hamlet? Provide evidence for that opinion or refute it.
• Elaborate on Hamlet’s trust issues. He suspects everyone from the start except for one person. Why does Hamlet trust Horatio? Analyze how the prince never lies during their conversations, even when the truth is a little insane. Why does Horatio believe everything he says?
• Examine friendship in Hamlet . Most of the relationships in the play are based on manipulation and benefit. Who can you see as friends in Hamlet ? Reflect on whether Hamlet values his friendship with Horatio. What can you say about Hamlet’s friends from childhood?
• Analyze the literary period during which Shakespeare came up with Hamlet . What features of the Elizabethan era does he illustrate in the play? Examplify various scenes and dialogues to prove your point.
• Consider prominent theatrical productions of Hamlet . How did they change over the centuries? What does modern theatre do that the Medieval one could not? Did theatrical performances evolve?
• Compare and contrast the original play and Lion King by Disney corporation. What are the key differences that were made in the cartoon? Why did Disney decide to come up with them? Analyze which version do you like more and why.
• Comment on the theme of death and mortality What events and objects made Hamlet obsessed with death? Elaborate on the role that religion plays in his considerations concerning the matter.
• Examine Claudius’ soliloquy . What’s its role in the play? What’s the crucial idea of his speech? Elaborate on the reasons why Claudius, the villain, has a soliloquy in Hamlet .
• Analyze all the symbols of death in the play What symbols from Hamlet refer to mortality? Speculate whether you can call fences, poison, unweeded gardens, flowers, and so on a symbol of death.
• Explore the conflicts of Hamlet . The play combines inner and outer conflicts, which are addressed mainly through Hamlet’s monologues. List the fundamental oppositions and lines that exemplify them.
• Reflect on Hamlet’s relationship with Gertrude Why is he upset with her? How does it affect his actions and opinion about all the women? Does Gertrude love her son?
• Analyze the setting of the play. Does the fact that Hamlet takes place in Denmark play any crucial role? Speculate why Shakespeare may have decided upon this country and support your opinion with evidence.
• Elaborate on Hamlet’s relationship with Ophelia. Does the prince consider her significant? Does he care about her? Compare how he treated Ophelia before and after her death.
• Comment on Hamlet’s religious beliefs Does religion have an impact on the prince’s decisions? Why is Hamlet considered a protestant? Prove your point by providing evidence from the play.
• Reflect on the theme of revenge Why does everyone value revenge in the play? Why do people passionately seek it in the society presented in Hamlet ? Elaborate on what impact it has on the characters’ motivations and decisions.
• Consider the language of Hamlet . Explain that Shakespeare’s play is well-known for its rich language and broad vocabulary. He composed a few characters who pay close attention to the words they say and hear. Why is language crucial for Hamlet?
• Examine Fortinbras. Who is he? Why is he a character foil for Hamlet? Analyze why he succeeded in everything he did and even became the king of Denmark.
• Analyze imagery and descriptions in the play. How does Shakespeare enhance each scene by alternating descriptions of the weather and nature? Provide examples of prominent images presented in the play and elaborate on their purpose.
• Compare Hamlet to Oedipus Rex . What do the characters of the famous plays have in common? Do they have a similar goal? Elaborate on how their character traits affect the endings of the respective plays.
• Explore the deception in Hamlet . What things and events are built on lies? Why and how do characters try to manipulate each other throughout the whole play?
• Elaborate on the imagery of rot and diseases How do unweeded gardens reflect the state of affairs? Explain how ill atmosphere foreshadows and represents problems caused by the actions of the royal court’s members.
• Comment on the role of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the play. Speculate whether they are simply comic relief characters or they have another purpose in Hamlet . Why did Shakespeare decide that he needed such characters in the play?
• Analyze Gertrude’s attitude towards Ophelia. Elaborate on the scenes where Gertrude communicates with Ophelia and mentions her. What does the queen think of her and her relationships with Hamlet? How does Gertrude comments on Ophelia’s death?
• Compare Hamlet’s and Horatio’s character traits. In what ways are they different and similar? What Horatio’s qualities Hamlet explicitly admires and lacks?
• Speculate on Shakespeare’s opinion about theatre. Examine a few references to the English stage of the Elizabethan era that the author put in the play in Act 2. How does he comment on the theatre of his own time through Hamlet’s lines of dialogue?
• Explore the relationships between Hamlet and Claudius. Why does Hamlet suspect his uncle from the start? Does Claudius think of Hamlet as dangerous? When does he become highly aware of his nephew’s capabilities?
• Consider the death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. When and how did they die? Why does a reader find out about it after the deaths of the royal family members? Speculate on the reasons why it was structured to be so anticlimactic. Why did W. S. Gilbert write a short comic play about them?
• Analyze the reception and comprehension of Hamlet . Why is it one of the most popular Shakespeare’s plays even today? Is it still relevant? Explain why nowadays our understanding of the play differs from the one from the writer’s era.
• Comment on the appearance vs. reality in Hamlet . Why do so many characters pretend to have another personality or obtain character traits that they don’t have? Why does Hamlet see through the pretense?
• Elaborate on Ophelia’s death . Was it a suicide, how gravediggers presumed, or an accident, as Gertrude claimed? Explain in your Hamlet essay the reasons for Ophelia to commit suicide. Did she have a choice?
• Reflect on political corruption. What characters represent corrupted politicians in the play? How do they manipulate public opinion?
• Analyze one movie adaptation of Hamlet . Write about the changes that were made in the film version. What differences from the play did you like? What changes were you surprised to see?
• Examine the political situation in the play. What war did Fortinbras lead? Why? How does it affect Denmark during the play and after it’s the last scene?
• Explore the role of women in Hamlet . The play presents the social norms that were relevant for people of this period. What parts of women’s lives did men explicitly control? Provide examples from the play.
• Compare Laertes and Hamlet . Laertes is known as Hamlet’s character foil. Examine similarities and differences in their character traits.
• Consider the doubt and indecisiveness of Hamlet . Why are such traits uncommon for the genre? What do they say about the prince as a character? Explain how these qualities affect the plot and Hamlet’s thought process.
• Elaborate on the symbolism in the play. Finding symbolism can be challenging as the interpretations differ. Some individuals consider particular objects as symbols, while others don’t. What do you view as examples of symbolism in the play? Why? What role do they play in understanding the story?
• Reflect on the Oedipus complex. Comment on whether Hamlet has it or not. Provide evidence from the play, especially from the scene with Gertrude, to prove your point. How can this idea be approached on the stage? Find examples of theatrical productions where Hamlet and Gertrude had a conversation in her closet.
• Compare and contrast Claudius and Polonius. What character traits do they have in common? Explain how they are not who they are trying to appear. Who is better at lying and manipulating others? Why?
• Examine how revenge affected characters in Hamlet . Three characters wish to avenge their fathers: Laertes, Hamlet, and Fortinbras. How does revenge affect their lives? Who succeeded in getting their revenge?
• Consider the family theme. What role does family play for various characters? Elaborate on how blood ties motivate multiple characters.
• Reflect on Yorick’s role in the play. Who was Yorick? What impact did he have on Hamlet during the prince’s childhood and present time? Elaborate on how Yorick led Hamlet to his last soliloquy.
• Analyze the religious conflict of the play. How did events from Shakespeare’s time affect the theme of religion? Explain how Hamlet presents the conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism through the prince and King Hamlet.
• Comment on the theme of madness. Who went mad in the play? Compare Hamlet’s and Laerte’s insanity to Ophelia’s one. How was her madness different from the other examples?
• Explore Polonius’ character. What was Polonius’ motivation throughout the play? Whom did he manipulate, and why? Explain why he tried to appear a good person and a parent.
• Elaborate on the reasons why Hamlet is the protagonist of the story. What makes him a tragic hero? Why is he considered a good person after every crime he committed and every cruel thing he said to his mother and Ophelia?
• Think of the conflict of good and evil. What imagery is associated with each of them in the play? Does evil spread like a disease?
• Explain how Hamlet differs from other plays of Shakespeare’s time . What new features and connections within the story did the writer present? How did Shakespeare make characters contribute to the plot?
• Analyze the “To be or not to be” speech. It’s one of the most famous lines in history, but what meaning is behind it? Elaborate on the circumstances around the monologue and whether Hamlet is partially lying.
• Reflect on performances of Hamlet. Choose a couple of performances on the stage or in a movie and compare them. Whose version of the character you prefer and why?
• Elaborate on the movie Ophelia (2018). What’s intriguing about a story told from Ophelia’s point of view? Exemplify the differences from the original play and how the change of perspective affected the story.
• Explore Hamlet’s obsession with inaction and action . What stops Hamlet from acting decisively? Exemplify situations from the play when characters act quickly, without any doubt compared to Hamlet’s almost constant hesitance.
• Compare Hamlet and King Lear. What similar character traits have an impact on the respective plays? Can we call the prince and the king victims of the social norms?
• Think of how the play’s themes are relevant nowadays . Which of them remained timeless, relevant for any period? Are any themes become obsolete and useless in today’s world? Elaborate on each theme separately with examples from the play.
• Reflect on Hamlet’s mood swings . Provide examples of how the prince’s mood affects his actions and speech. What can and did influence his mood?
• Examine Polonius’ death. Why was he hiding behind the tapestry during the scene? Was it his idea? How did he die? Elaborate on irony in the way he was murdered. How did it affect the plot?
• Analyze Hamlet as an actor. Is he good at playing a character? Elaborate on his dialogue with the First Player and his opinion about acting.
• Consider the motif of betrayal. Who betrays Hamlet? Explain how the attitude towards this act varies from character to character. How does Hamlet’s betrayal affect Ophelia?
• Explore the connection between honor and revenge . Explain why it’s the principal motivation for such characters as Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras. Comment on scenes where it reveals itself through actions and conversations.
• Elaborate on Hamlet’s death. Was it the only logical conclusion for Hamlet’s psychological and emotional development? Was he satisfied?
• Comment on the genre of the play . Can we call it revenge tragedy without any reservation? How did Shakespeare ruin the genre by Hamlet ?
• Compare Hamlet and the Ghost. What can you say about the language that the characters use? List the lines that state that Hamlet and the Ghost look similar.
• Think of the father-son relationships in the play . Analyze the relationships between Hamlet and King Hamlet and compare them to those of Laertes and Polonius. Which features are common for both of them?
• Elaborate on the name Hamlet . What does it mean? What’s its country of origin? Add a sentence or two about Amleth.
• Consider allusions to historical figures in the play. Why does Hamlet mention Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar in act 5? Why did Shakespeare include allusions at all?
• Examine soliloquies in Hamlet . What’s their role in the play? Provide lines from soliloquies that let us dive into the thoughts and intentions of a character. Does anyone lie during such a speech?
• Compare the two film adaptations of the play. Elaborate on different film techniques and alterations of the plot. Concentrate on one scene in particular and explain what changes were made.
• Explore Hamlet’s nihilism. When does Hamlet start to display features that are inherent to this school of thought? Explain how the prince came to nihilism, what pushed him to this.
• List the most painful moments of Hamlet’s life and elaborate on them. Include events that happened before the first act and within the play. Prove your point with evidence from the prince’s lines.
• Think of what poison represents. What does it refer to? Who dies from poison in the play?
• Consider the play from the public’s perspective. How does Claudius manipulate the public’s opinion? What do people think of the new king and Hamlet?
• Compare and contrast Gertrude and Ophelia. What traits do they have in common? Explain differences and similarities in their affection towards Hamlet. Who controls these women?
• Elaborate on the villain of the story. Who can be considered an antagonist of the play? Why do some people regard Hamlet as a villain?
• Imagine how Hamlet could’ve reacted to modern society. What aspects of the future would he appreciate? What social norms would shock him? Would he be more comfortable in our period?
• Evaluate all the relationships in Hamlet’s life. What’s the most significant one? Why? What relationships changed throughout the play?
• Comment on contradictions in the play. What contradictions does Hamlet face? Is he himself a contradictory character? Provide examples of Hamlet’s contradictions
• Explore the fencing in the last scene of Hamlet . What does it contribute to the story? Does it affect the end of the duel?
• Elaborate on the gravediggers. How did their job affect their attitude towards death? Comment on their humor and whether it’s a coping mechanism. Does it illustrate their perception of life?
• Compare Claudius and King Hamlet. What qualities differentiate them? What do they have in common? Speculate on who was a more talented politician and a better leader.
• Think of comic relief in Hamlet . Comment on how Polonius, Osric, gravediggers, and Hamlet’s dialogues with them enlighten the mood. Was the humor appropriate for revenge tragedies before Shakespeare?
• Consider foreshadowing in the play. What events are foreshadowed early on in Hamlet ? Present lines and features from act 1 that indicate the tragic end.
• Elaborate on justice and truth . How does Shakespeare show attitude towards justice common for this time? Does Hamlet approach fairness differently from the others? Elaborate on how Hamlet both pursue the truth and ignores it.
• Examine the “Get thee to a nunnery, go.” sentence. Why did Hamlet say so to Ophelia? What made the prince think that she was vicious?
• Comment on Hamlet’s cruelty. When does Hamlet become cruel towards other characters? Is he cruel towards himself? Analyze situations where Hamlet talks viciously and whether it’s intentional or not.
• Explore Hamlet’s character . Why is the prince such an unusual figure for revenge tragedies? Explain how Shakespeare created the hero who struggles to act with firmness and constantly reflects on his actions and decisions. Is he easy to understand and relate to?
• Analyze the play within the play. What’s its role in plot development? Why did Hamlet let the play take place? Explain what scene he added and why. Elaborate on the title The Mousetrap .
• Examine the consequences of revenge . What conclusion does Shakespeare provide for the theme of revenge? Explain how does it influence the deaths of Hamlet and Laertes, the absolute victory of Fortinbras.
• Reflect on Hamlet’s hesitance to kill Claudius . Why does he consider murdering his uncle in act 1? What stops him? Illustrate all the occasions when Hamlet could’ve killed Claudius but didn’t, and one time he did. What pushed him in the end?
• Compare Claudius to Laertes. Are there any similarities? How do these characters form an alliance by the end of the play?
• Comment on Gertrude’s guiltiness . Hamlet considers his mother guilty of too many crimes, but was she guilty of anything? Speculate whether she participated in King Hamlet’s murder or had an affair with Claudius before her husband’s death. Was she loyal to Hamlet?
• Elaborate on the “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark …“ line. Who says it? Explain the context of the line, its meaning, and what it foreshadows.
• Examine Polonius’ advice to Laertes. Provide its meaning and reflect on Polonius’ intentions. Why is this speech ironic?

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Jeffrey R. Wilson

Essays on hamlet.

Written as the author taught Hamlet every semester for a decade, these lightning essays ask big conceptual questions about the play with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover, and answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. In doing so, Hamlet becomes a lens for life today, generating insights on everything from xenophobia, American fraternities, and religious fundamentalism to structural misogyny, suicide contagion, and toxic love.

Prioritizing close reading over historical context, these explorations are highly textual and highly theoretical, often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Readers see King Hamlet as a pre-modern villain, King Claudius as a modern villain, and Prince Hamlet as a post-modern villain. Hamlet’s feigned madness becomes a window into failed insanity defenses in legal trials. He knows he’s being watched in “To be or not to be”: the soliloquy is a satire of philosophy. Horatio emerges as Shakespeare’s authorial avatar for meta-theatrical commentary, Fortinbras as the hero of the play. Fate becomes a viable concept for modern life, and honor a source of tragedy. The metaphor of music in the play makes Ophelia Hamlet’s instrument. Shakespeare, like the modern corporation, stands against sexism, yet perpetuates it unknowingly. We hear his thoughts on single parenting, sending children off to college, and the working class, plus his advice on acting and writing, and his claims to be the next Homer or Virgil. In the context of four centuries of Hamlet hate, we hear how the text draws audiences in, how it became so famous, and why it continues to captivate audiences.

At a time when the humanities are said to be in crisis, these essays are concrete examples of the mind-altering power of literature and literary studies, unravelling the ongoing implications of the English language’s most significant artistic object of the past millennium.

Publications

Why is Hamlet the most famous English artwork of the past millennium? Is it a sexist text? Why does Hamlet speak in prose? Why must he die? Does Hamlet depict revenge, or justice? How did the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, transform into a story about a son dealing with the death of a father? Did Shakespeare know Aristotle’s theory of tragedy? How did our literary icon, Shakespeare, see his literary icons, Homer and Virgil? Why is there so much comedy in Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy? Why is love a force of evil in the play? Did Shakespeare believe there’s a divinity that shapes our ends? How did he define virtue? What did he think about psychology? politics? philosophy? What was Shakespeare’s image of himself as an author? What can he, arguably the greatest writer of all time, teach us about our own writing? What was his theory of literature? Why do people like Hamlet ? How do the Hamlet haters of today compare to those of yesteryears? Is it dangerous for our children to read a play that’s all about suicide? 

These are some of the questions asked in this book, a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet stemming from my time teaching the play every semester in my Why Shakespeare? course at Harvard University. During this time, I saw a series of bright young minds from wildly diverse backgrounds find their footing in Hamlet, and it taught me a lot about how Shakespeare’s tragedy works, and why it remains with us in the modern world. Beyond ghosts, revenge, and tragedy, Hamlet is a play about being in college, being in love, gender, misogyny, friendship, theater, philosophy, theology, injustice, loss, comedy, depression, death, self-doubt, mental illness, white privilege, overbearing parents, existential angst, international politics, the classics, the afterlife, and the meaning of it all. 

These essays grow from the central paradox of the play: it helps us understand the world we live in, yet we don't really understand the text itself very well. For all the attention given to Hamlet , there’s no consensus on the big questions—how it works, why it grips people so fiercely, what it’s about. These essays pose first-order questions about what happens in Hamlet and why, mobilizing answers for reflections on life, making the essays both highly textual and highly theoretical. 

Each semester that I taught the play, I would write a new essay about Hamlet . They were meant to be models for students, the sort of essay that undergrads read and write – more rigorous than the puff pieces in the popular press, but riskier than the scholarship in most academic journals. While I later added scholarly outerwear, these pieces all began just like the essays I was assigning to students – as short close readings with a reader and a text and a desire to determine meaning when faced with a puzzling question or problem. 

The turn from text to context in recent scholarly books about Hamlet is quizzical since we still don’t have a strong sense of, to quote the title of John Dover Wilson’s 1935 book, What Happens in Hamlet. Is the ghost real? Is Hamlet mad, or just faking? Why does he delay? These are the kinds of questions students love to ask, but they haven’t been – can’t be – answered by reading the play in the context of its sources (recently addressed in Laurie Johnson’s The Tain of Hamlet [2013]), its multiple texts (analyzed by Paul Menzer in The Hamlets [2008] and Zachary Lesser in Hamlet after Q1 [2015]), the Protestant reformation (the focus of Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory [2001] and John E. Curran, Jr.’s Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency [2006]), Renaissance humanism (see Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness [2017]), Elizabethan political theory (see Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet [2007]), the play’s reception history (see David Bevington, Murder Most Foul: Hamlet through the Ages [2011]), its appropriation by modern philosophers (covered in Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster’s The Hamlet Doctrine [2013] and Andrew Cutrofello’s All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity [2014]), or its recent global travels (addressed, for example, in Margaret Latvian’s Hamlet’s Arab Journey [2011] and Dominic Dromgoole’s Hamlet Globe to Globe [2017]). 

Considering the context and afterlives of Hamlet is a worthy pursuit. I certainly consulted the above books for my essays, yet the confidence that comes from introducing context obscures the sharp panic we feel when confronting Shakespeare’s text itself. Even as the excellent recent book from Sonya Freeman Loftis, Allison Kellar, and Lisa Ulevich announces Hamlet has entered “an age of textual exhaustion,” there’s an odd tendency to avoid the text of Hamlet —to grasp for something more firm—when writing about it. There is a need to return to the text in a more immediate way to understand how Hamlet operates as a literary work, and how it can help us understand the world in which we live. 

That latter goal, yes, clings nostalgically to the notion that literature can help us understand life. Questions about life send us to literature in search of answers. Those of us who love literature learn to ask and answer questions about it as we become professional literary scholars. But often our answers to the questions scholars ask of literature do not connect back up with the questions about life that sent us to literature in the first place—which are often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Those first-order questions are diluted and avoided in the minutia of much scholarship, left unanswered. Thus, my goal was to pose questions about Hamlet with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover and to answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. 

In doing so, these essays challenge the conventional relationship between literature and theory. They pursue a kind of criticism where literature is not merely the recipient of philosophical ideas in the service of exegesis. Instead, the creative risks of literature provide exemplars to be theorized outward to help us understand on-going issues in life today. Beyond an occasion for the demonstration of existing theory, literature is a source for the creation of new theory.

Chapter One How Hamlet Works

Whether you love or hate Hamlet , you can acknowledge its massive popularity. So how does Hamlet work? How does it create audience enjoyment? Why is it so appealing, and to whom? Of all the available options, why Hamlet ? This chapter entertains three possible explanations for why the play is so popular in the modern world: the literary answer (as the English language’s best artwork about death—one of the very few universal human experiences in a modern world increasingly marked by cultural differences— Hamlet is timeless); the theatrical answer (with its mixture of tragedy and comedy, the role of Hamlet requires the best actor of each age, and the play’s popularity derives from the celebrity of its stars); and the philosophical answer (the play invites, encourages, facilitates, and sustains philosophical introspection and conversation from people who do not usually do such things, who find themselves doing those things with Hamlet , who sometimes feel embarrassed about doing those things, but who ultimately find the experience of having done them rewarding).

Chapter Two “It Started Like a Guilty Thing”: The Beginning of Hamlet and the Beginning of Modern Politics

King Hamlet is a tyrant and King Claudius a traitor but, because Shakespeare asked us to experience the events in Hamlet from the perspective of the young Prince Hamlet, we are much more inclined to detect and detest King Claudius’s political failings than King Hamlet’s. If so, then Shakespeare’s play Hamlet , so often seen as the birth of modern psychology, might also tell us a little bit about the beginnings of modern politics as well.

Chapter Three Horatio as Author: Storytelling and Stoic Tragedy

This chapter addresses Horatio’s emotionlessness in light of his role as a narrator, using this discussion to think about Shakespeare’s motives for writing tragedy in the wake of his son’s death. By rationalizing pain and suffering as tragedy, both Horatio and Shakespeare were able to avoid the self-destruction entailed in Hamlet’s emotional response to life’s hardships and injustices. Thus, the stoic Horatio, rather than the passionate Hamlet who repeatedly interrupts ‘The Mousetrap’, is the best authorial avatar for a Shakespeare who strategically wrote himself and his own voice out of his works. This argument then expands into a theory of ‘authorial catharsis’ and the suggestion that we can conceive of Shakespeare as a ‘poet of reason’ in contrast to a ‘poet of emotion’.

Chapter Four “To thine own self be true”: What Shakespeare Says about Sending Our Children Off to College

What does “To thine own self be true” actually mean? Be yourself? Don’t change who you are? Follow your own convictions? Don’t lie to yourself? This chapter argues that, if we understand meaning as intent, then “To thine own self be true” means, paradoxically, that “the self” does not exist. Or, more accurately, Shakespeare’s Hamlet implies that “the self” exists only as a rhetorical, philosophical, and psychological construct that we use to make sense of our experiences and actions in the world, not as anything real. If this is so, then this passage may offer us a way of thinking about Shakespeare as not just a playwright but also a moral philosopher, one who did his ethics in drama.

Chapter Five In Defense of Polonius

Your wife dies. You raise two children by yourself. You build a great career to provide for your family. You send your son off to college in another country, though you know he’s not ready. Now the prince wants to marry your daughter—that’s not easy to navigate. Then—get this—while you’re trying to save the queen’s life, the prince murders you. Your death destroys your kids. They die tragically. And what do you get for your efforts? Centuries of Shakespeare scholars dumping on you. If we see Polonius not through the eyes of his enemy, Prince Hamlet—the point of view Shakespeare’s play asks audiences to adopt—but in analogy to the common challenges of twenty-first-century parenting, Polonius is a single father struggling with work-life balance who sadly choses his career over his daughter’s well-being.

Chapter Six Sigma Alpha Elsinore: The Culture of Drunkenness in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Claudius likes to party—a bit too much. He frequently binge drinks, is arguably an alcoholic, but not an aberration. Hamlet says Denmark is internationally known for heavy drinking. That’s what Shakespeare would have heard in the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth, English writers feared Denmark had taught their nation its drinking habits. Synthesizing criticism on alcoholism as an individual problem in Shakespeare’s texts and times with scholarship on national drinking habits in the early-modern age, this essay asks what the tragedy of alcoholism looks like when located not on the level of the individual, but on the level of a culture, as Shakespeare depicted in Hamlet. One window into these early-modern cultures of drunkenness is sociological studies of American college fraternities, especially the social-learning theories that explain how one person—one culture—teaches another its habits. For Claudius’s alcoholism is both culturally learned and culturally significant. And, as in fraternities, alcoholism in Hamlet is bound up with wealth, privilege, toxic masculinity, and tragedy. Thus, alcohol imagistically reappears in the vial of “cursed hebona,” Ophelia’s liquid death, and the poisoned cup in the final scene—moments that stand out in recent performances and adaptations with alcoholic Claudiuses and Gertrudes.

Chapter Seven Tragic Foundationalism

This chapter puts the modern philosopher Alain Badiou’s theory of foundationalism into dialogue with the early-modern playwright William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . Doing so allows us to identify a new candidate for Hamlet’s traditionally hard-to-define hamartia – i.e., his “tragic mistake” – but it also allows us to consider the possibility of foundationalism as hamartia. Tragic foundationalism is the notion that fidelity to a single and substantive truth at the expense of an openness to evidence, reason, and change is an acute mistake which can lead to miscalculations of fact and virtue that create conflict and can end up in catastrophic destruction and the downfall of otherwise strong and noble people.

Chapter Eight “As a stranger give it welcome”: Shakespeare’s Advice for First-Year College Students

Encountering a new idea can be like meeting a strange person for the first time. Similarly, we dismiss new ideas before we get to know them. There is an answer to the problem of the human antipathy to strangeness in a somewhat strange place: a single line usually overlooked in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . If the ghost is “wondrous strange,” Hamlet says, invoking the ancient ethics of hospitality, “Therefore as a stranger give it welcome.” In this word, strange, and the social conventions attached to it, is both the instinctual, animalistic fear and aggression toward what is new and different (the problem) and a cultivated, humane response in hospitality and curiosity (the solution). Intellectual xenia is the answer to intellectual xenophobia.

Chapter Nine Parallels in Hamlet

Hamlet is more parallely than other texts. Fortinbras, Hamlet, and Laertes have their fathers murdered, then seek revenge. Brothers King Hamlet and King Claudius mirror brothers Old Norway and Old Fortinbras. Hamlet and Ophelia both lose their fathers, go mad, but there’s a method in their madness, and become suicidal. King Hamlet and Polonius are both domineering fathers. Hamlet and Polonius are both scholars, actors, verbose, pedantic, detectives using indirection, spying upon others, “by indirections find directions out." King Hamlet and King Claudius are both kings who are killed. Claudius using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet mirrors Polonius using Reynaldo to spy on Laertes. Reynaldo and Hamlet both pretend to be something other than what they are in order to spy on and detect foes. Young Fortinbras and Prince Hamlet both have their forward momentum “arrest[ed].” Pyrrhus and Hamlet are son seeking revenge but paused a “neutral to his will.” The main plot of Hamlet reappears in the play-within-the-play. The Act I duel between King Hamlet and Old Fortinbras echoes in the Act V duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Claudius and Hamlet are both king killers. Sheesh—why are there so many dang parallels in Hamlet ? Is there some detectable reason why the story of Hamlet would call for the literary device of parallelism?

Chapter Ten Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Why Hamlet Has Two Childhood Friends, Not Just One

Why have two of Hamlet’s childhood friends rather than just one? Do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have individuated personalities? First of all, by increasing the number of friends who visit Hamlet, Shakespeare creates an atmosphere of being outnumbered, of multiple enemies encroaching upon Hamlet, of Hamlet feeling that the world is against him. Second, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not interchangeable, as commonly thought. Shakespeare gave each an individuated personality. Guildenstern is friendlier with Hamlet, and their friendship collapses, while Rosencrantz is more distant and devious—a frenemy.

Chapter Eleven Shakespeare on the Classics, Shakespeare as a Classic: A Reading of Aeneas’s Tale to Dido

Of all the stories Shakespeare might have chosen, why have Hamlet ask the players to recite Aeneas’ tale to Dido of Pyrrhus’s slaughter of Priam? In this story, which comes not from Homer’s Iliad but from Virgil’s Aeneid and had already been adapted for the Elizabethan stage in Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Dido, Pyrrhus – more commonly known as Neoptolemus, the son of the famous Greek warrior Achilles – savagely slays Priam, the king of the Trojans and the father of Paris, who killed Pyrrhus’s father, Achilles, who killed Paris’s brother, Hector, who killed Achilles’s comrade, Patroclus. Clearly, the theme of revenge at work in this story would have appealed to Shakespeare as he was writing what would become the greatest revenge tragedy of all time. Moreover, Aeneas’s tale to Dido supplied Shakespeare with all of the connections he sought to make at this crucial point in his play and his career – connections between himself and Marlowe, between the start of Hamlet and the end, between Prince Hamlet and King Claudius, between epic poetry and tragic drama, and between the classical literature Shakespeare was still reading hundreds of years later and his own potential as a classic who might (and would) be read hundreds of years into the future.

Chapter Twelve How Theater Works, according to Hamlet

According to Hamlet, people who are guilty of a crime will, when seeing that crime represented on stage, “proclaim [their] malefactions”—but that simply isn’t how theater works. Guilty people sit though shows that depict their crimes all the time without being prompted to public confession. Why did Shakespeare—a remarkably observant student of theater—write this demonstrably false theory of drama into his protagonist? And why did Shakespeare then write the plot of the play to affirm that obviously inaccurate vision of theater? For Claudius is indeed stirred to confession by the play-within-the-play. Perhaps Hamlet’s theory of people proclaiming malefactions upon seeing their crimes represented onstage is not as outlandish as it first appears. Perhaps four centuries of obsession with Hamlet is the English-speaking world proclaiming its malefactions upon seeing them represented dramatically.

Chapter Thirteen “To be, or not to be”: Shakespeare Against Philosophy

This chapter hazards a new reading of the most famous passage in Western literature: “To be, or not to be” from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . With this line, Hamlet poses his personal struggle, a question of life and death, as a metaphysical problem, as a question of existence and nothingness. However, “To be, or not to be” is not what it seems to be. It seems to be a representation of tragic angst, yet a consideration of the context of the speech reveals that “To be, or not to be” is actually a satire of philosophy and Shakespeare’s representation of the theatricality of everyday life. In this chapter, a close reading of the context and meaning of this passage leads into an attempt to formulate a Shakespearean image of philosophy.

Chapter Fourteen Contagious Suicide in and Around Hamlet

As in society today, suicide is contagious in Hamlet , at least in the example of Ophelia, the only death by suicide in the play, because she only becomes suicidal after hearing Hamlet talk about his own suicidal thoughts in “To be, or not to be.” Just as there are media guidelines for reporting on suicide, there are better and worse ways of handling Hamlet . Careful suicide coverage can change public misperceptions and reduce suicide contagion. Is the same true for careful literary criticism and classroom discussion of suicide texts? How can teachers and literary critics reduce suicide contagion and increase help-seeking behavior?

Chapter Fifteen Is Hamlet a Sexist Text? Overt Misogyny vs. Unconscious Bias

Students and fans of Shakespeare’s Hamlet persistently ask a question scholars and critics of the play have not yet definitively answered: is it a sexist text? The author of this text has been described as everything from a male chauvinist pig to a trailblazing proto-feminist, but recent work on the science behind discrimination and prejudice offers a new, better vocabulary in the notion of unconscious bias. More pervasive and slippery than explicit bigotry, unconscious bias involves the subtle, often unintentional words and actions which indicate the presence of biases we may not be aware of, ones we may even fight against. The Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet exhibited an unconscious bias against women, I argue, even as he sought to critique the mistreatment of women in a patriarchal society. The evidence for this unconscious bias is not to be found in the misogynistic statements made by the characters in the play. It exists, instead, in the demonstrable preference Shakespeare showed for men over women when deciding where to deploy his literary talents. Thus, Shakespeare's Hamlet is a powerful literary example – one which speaks to, say, the modern corporation – showing that deliberate efforts for egalitarianism do not insulate one from the effects of structural inequalities that both stem from and create unconscious bias.

Chapter Sixteen Style and Purpose in Acting and Writing

Purpose and style are connected in academic writing. To answer the question of style ( How should we write academic papers? ) we must first answer the question of purpose ( Why do we write academic papers? ). We can answer these questions, I suggest, by turning to an unexpected style guide that’s more than 400 years old: the famous passage on “the purpose of playing” in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . In both acting and writing, a high style often accompanies an expressive purpose attempting to impress an elite audience yet actually alienating intellectual people, while a low style and mimetic purpose effectively engage an intellectual audience.

Chapter Seventeen 13 Ways of Looking at a Ghost

Why doesn’t Gertrude see the Ghost of King Hamlet in Act III, even though Horatio, Bernardo, Francisco, Marcellus, and Prince Hamlet all saw it in Act I? It’s a bit embarrassing that Shakespeare scholars don’t have a widely agreed-upon consensus that explains this really basic question that puzzles a lot of people who read or see Hamlet .

Chapter Eighteen The Tragedy of Love in Hamlet

The word “love” appears 84 times in Shakespeare’s Hamlet . “Father” only appears 73 times, “play” 60, “think” 55, “mother” 46, “mad” 44, “soul” 40, “God" 39, “death” 38, “life” 34, “nothing” 28, “son” 26, “honor” 21, “spirit” 19, “kill” 18, “revenge” 14, and “action” 12. Love isn’t the first theme that comes to mind when we think of Hamlet , but is surprisingly prominent. But love is tragic in Hamlet . The bloody catastrophe at the end of that play is principally driven not by hatred or a longing for revenge, but by love.

Chapter Nineteen Ophelia’s Songs: Moral Agency, Manipulation, and the Metaphor of Music in Hamlet

This chapter reads Ophelia’s songs in Act IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the context of the meaning of music established elsewhere in the play. While the songs are usually seen as a marker of Ophelia’s madness (as a result of the death of her father) or freedom (from the constraints of patriarchy), they come – when read in light of the metaphor of music as manipulation – to symbolize her role as a pawn in Hamlet’s efforts to deceive his family. Thus, music was Shakespeare’s platform for connecting Ophelia’s story to one of the central questions in Hamlet : Do we have control over our own actions (like the musician), or are we controlled by others (like the instrument)?

Chapter Twenty A Quantitative Study of Prose and Verse in Hamlet

Why does Hamlet have so much prose? Did Shakespeare deliberately shift from verse to prose to signal something to his audiences? How would actors have handled the shifts from verse to prose? Would audiences have detected shifts from verse to prose? Is there an overarching principle that governs Shakespeare’s decision to use prose—a coherent principle that says, “If X, then use prose?”

Chapter Twenty-One The Fortunes of Fate in Hamlet : Divine Providence and Social Determinism

In Hamlet , fate is attacked from both sides: “fortune” presents a world of random happenstance, “will” a theory of efficacious human action. On this backdrop, this essay considers—irrespective of what the characters say and believe—what the structure and imagery Shakespeare wrote into Hamlet say about the possibility that some version of fate is at work in the play. I contend the world of Hamlet is governed by neither fate nor fortune, nor even the Christianized version of fate called “providence.” Yet there is a modern, secular, disenchanted form of fate at work in Hamlet—what is sometimes called “social determinism”—which calls into question the freedom of the individual will. As such, Shakespeare’s Hamlet both commented on the transformation of pagan fate into Christian providence that happened in the centuries leading up to the play, and anticipated the further transformation of fate from a theological to a sociological idea, which occurred in the centuries following Hamlet .

Chapter Twenty-Two The Working Class in Hamlet

There’s a lot for working-class folks to hate about Hamlet —not just because it’s old, dusty, difficult to understand, crammed down our throats in school, and filled with frills, tights, and those weird lace neck thingies that are just socially awkward to think about. Peak Renaissance weirdness. Claustrophobicly cloistered inside the castle of Elsinore, quaintly angsty over royal family problems, Hamlet feels like the literary epitome of elitism. “Lawless resolutes” is how the Wittenberg scholar Horatio describes the soldiers who join Fortinbras’s army in exchange “for food.” The Prince Hamlet who has never worked a day in his life denigrates Polonius as a “fishmonger”: quite the insult for a royal advisor to be called a working man. And King Claudius complains of the simplicity of "the distracted multitude.” But, in Hamlet , Shakespeare juxtaposed the nobles’ denigrations of the working class as readily available metaphors for all-things-awful with the rather valuable behavior of working-class characters themselves. When allowed to represent themselves, the working class in Hamlet are characterized as makers of things—of material goods and services like ships, graves, and plays, but also of ethical and political virtues like security, education, justice, and democracy. Meanwhile, Elsinore has a bad case of affluenza, the make-believe disease invented by an American lawyer who argued that his client's social privilege was so great that it created an obliviousness to law. While social elites rot society through the twin corrosives of political corruption and scholarly detachment, the working class keeps the machine running. They build the ships, plays, and graves society needs to function, and monitor the nuts-and-bolts of the ideals—like education and justice—that we aspire to uphold.

Chapter Twenty-Three The Honor Code at Harvard and in Hamlet

Students at Harvard College are asked, when they first join the school and several times during their years there, to affirm their awareness of and commitment to the school’s honor code. But instead of “the foundation of our community” that it is at Harvard, honor is tragic in Hamlet —a source of anxiety, blunder, and catastrophe. As this chapter shows, looking at Hamlet from our place at Harvard can bring us to see what a tangled knot honor can be, and we can start to theorize the difference between heroic and tragic honor.

Chapter Twenty-Four The Meaning of Death in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

By connecting the ways characters live their lives in Hamlet to the ways they die – on-stage or off, poisoned or stabbed, etc. – Shakespeare symbolized hamartia in catastrophe. In advancing this argument, this chapter develops two supporting ideas. First, the dissemination of tragic necessity: Shakespeare distributed the Aristotelian notion of tragic necessity – a causal relationship between a character’s hamartia (fault or error) and the catastrophe at the end of the play – from the protagonist to the other characters, such that, in Hamlet , those who are guilty must die, and those who die are guilty. Second, the spectacularity of death: there exists in Hamlet a positive correlation between the severity of a character’s hamartia (error or flaw) and the “spectacularity” of his or her death – that is, the extent to which it is presented as a visible and visceral spectacle on-stage.

Chapter Twenty-Five Tragic Excess in Hamlet

In Hamlet , Shakespeare paralleled the situations of Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras (the father of each is killed, and each then seeks revenge) to promote the virtue of moderation: Hamlet moves too slowly, Laertes too swiftly – and they both die at the end of the play – but Fortinbras represents a golden mean which marries the slowness of Hamlet with the swiftness of Laertes. As argued in this essay, Shakespeare endorsed the virtue of balance by allowing Fortinbras to be one of the very few survivors of the play. In other words, excess is tragic in Hamlet .

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Hamlet Character Analysis

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Introduction, motivations and ambivalence, identity and madness, morality and conscience, impact on the narrative.

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Summary of Hamlet: A Comprehensive Overview

Hamlet, also known as The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is perhaps William Shakespeare's most famous play, believed to have been written around 1600 and set in Denmark. At its core, the story follows young Prince Hamlet's quest for justice after his uncle Claudius kills Hamlet's father, the King. However, Hamlet is not your typical revenge-driven character. He's complex, grappling with moral questions and constantly questioning his actions.

This inner turmoil makes Hamlet a compelling and relatable character, which is why the play has been retold and adapted countless times, even in popular culture like The Lion King. It's considered a masterpiece of literature, resonating with audiences throughout the ages.

Let's continue reading to explore the main themes and symbolism further with our essay writing service . Whether you're looking for a brief Hamlet summary in 100 words or a more detailed analysis, our seamless breakdown has you covered.

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Hamlet Characters

Let's first delve into a brief character analysis of the key figures in William Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Hamlet , the Prince of Denmark, is the son of the late King Hamlet and Queen Gertrude. Returning from his studies, he is confronted with his father's death and his mother's hasty marriage to his uncle Claudius. Hamlet's suspicions are confirmed when the ghost of his father appears, revealing Claudius as the culprit behind his murder. This revelation sets Hamlet on a path of vengeance.

King Claudius , the brother of the deceased King Hamlet, seizes power by murdering his brother and marrying Queen Gertrude. He is depicted as cunning and manipulative, driven by base desires. Unlike Hamlet, Claudius acts impulsively without much regard for morality, as seen in his poisoning of King Hamlet before the play begins.

Gertrude , Hamlet's mother, remarries Claudius shortly after King Hamlet's death. Despite the circumstances, she appears unconcerned about her husband's murder, leading Hamlet to resent her.

Polonius , the chief counselor of the King, is the father of Ophelia and Laertes. He is portrayed as an unlikeable character, described by Hamlet as a "tedious old fool." His meddling in Hamlet's affairs ultimately leads to his accidental death at the hands of the prince.

Ophelia , Hamlet's love interest, is Polonius's daughter and Laertes's sister. Despite her affection for Hamlet, she is manipulated by her father and brother, which contributes to her descent into madness and eventual suicide.

The Ghost of Hamlet's Father appears to Hamlet, urging him to seek revenge against Claudius. His appearances throughout the play serve as catalysts for Hamlet's actions.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern , childhood friends of Hamlet, are tasked by Claudius to spy on the prince. However, Hamlet sees through their deception, and they meet their demise at the hands of pirates.

Horatio , described as Hamlet's true friend, is the only character who remains loyal to him. While his background remains unclear, he serves as a steadfast companion to Hamlet and survives the events of the play.

Hamlet Summary

This Hamlet summary offers a concise look at the play's plot, serving as a handy guide. Despite its lengthy and detailed nature, understanding the sequence of events, themes, and symbolism can greatly enhance your essay on Hamlet. Keep reading our Hamlet analysis to discover key themes explored in the play. And while you're at it, don't miss out on the Lord of the Flies book summary for more insights.

Prince Hamlet serves as the central character in the play. Prior to the events of the play, Claudius kills King Hamlet, Hamlet's father, marries Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, and claims the throne.

The setting of the play is the Kingdom of Denmark, which has long been at odds with Norway, fostering fears of invasion. One chilly night, while on patrol, two sentries, Bernardo and Marcellus, along with Hamlet's friend Horatio, encounter the ghost of King Hamlet. They pledge to inform Hamlet about the apparition.

The following day, during the court proceedings presided over by King Claudius and Queen Gertrude, Hamlet is consumed by despair. He struggles to come to terms with his mother's swift marriage to Claudius following his father's death.

Act 1, Scene 2 “A little more than kin and less than kind”

Horatio meets Hamlet and tells him about the ghost, and Hamlet is determined to see it. Elsewhere, during the royal court, we meet Polonius, his son Laertes, and his daughter Ophelia. Polonius says his farewells to Laertes, who is heading off to France, giving him solid fatherly advice:

Act 1, Scene 3 “This above all: to thine own self be true”

Before he leaves, Laertes warns his sister Ophelia to avoid Hamlet and to stop overthinking his attention towards her.

At night, on the ramparts, the ghost appears to Hamlet, and tells him that Claudius is behind is murder. The ghost urges Hamlet to avenge his death and vanishes. Hamlet tells his sentries and Horatio that they must put on an act, acting was if Hamlet had gone mad to disguise his plans for revenge. However, deep inside, Hamlet is unsure of whether to trust this ghost.

The scene opens with Ophelia hurriedly reporting to her father, Polonius, about Hamlet's peculiar behavior. Polonius advises her to ignore Hamlet's advances, attributing his behavior to love-induced madness. He then proceeds to inform King Claudius and Queen Gertrude about Hamlet's demeanor. In the royal chambers, we are introduced to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, childhood friends of Hamlet, whom the king and queen have tasked with investigating Hamlet's odd conduct.

Polonius shares his concerns about Hamlet's behavior and his theory about Hamlet's love interest. He even attempts to converse with Hamlet directly, but Hamlet feigns madness and mocks Polonius. Upon meeting his old friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet quickly discerns their role as spies.

The two acquaintances, having arrived with a troupe of actors, stage a play about the Trojan War at Hamlet's request. Impressed by their performance, Hamlet devises a plan to present another play, 'The Murder of Gonzago,' before Claudius. The plot mirrors the circumstances of King Hamlet's death, and Hamlet hopes to gauge Claudius's reaction to determine his guilt or innocence.

Act 2, Scene 2 “The spirit that I have seen

May be a devil…

I’ll have grounds

More relative than this”

Hamlet does not trust the ghost and seeks firmer evidence against Claudius.

In the next act, we see Polonius forcing Ophelia to return to Hamlet all of his tokens of love and study Hamlet’s reaction. Meanwhile, Hamlet is walking around the halls, giving his famous monologue.

Act 3, Scene 1 “To be or not to be, that is the question

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing, end them.”

Hamlet reflects on the bleakness of life, expressing his belief that suffering outweighs joy and that fear of the unknown prevents people from ending their lives.

When Ophelia returns tokens of love to Hamlet, he reacts with anger, leaving uncertainty about whether his emotions are genuine or if he is merely feigning madness. Claudius observes Hamlet's response and concludes that his madness is not love-induced.

During the performance of "The Murder of Gonzago," organized by Hamlet, he closely watches Claudius and studies his reactions. The play deeply disturbs Claudius, prompting him to abruptly leave and decide to send Hamlet to England. Hamlet, having observed Claudius's response, becomes convinced of his guilt in King Hamlet's murder.

Gertrude summons Hamlet to her chambers in distress. On his way, he encounters Claudius praying. Hamlet decides not to kill Claudius while he is praying, fearing that it would send his soul to heaven.

Upon reaching Gertrude's chambers, Hamlet engages in a heated argument with his mother. Hearing a noise behind a curtain, he impulsively stabs through it, mistakenly killing Polonius, who was hiding there.

The ghost of King Hamlet appears to Hamlet, warning him not to delay his revenge or further distress his mother. As Gertrude cannot see the ghost, she becomes more convinced of Hamlet's madness. The scene concludes with Hamlet dragging Polonius's corpse away.

Gertrude informs Claudius about Hamlet's actions, revealing that he has killed Polonius. In response, Claudius arranges for Hamlet to be sent to England, secretly plotting his demise there. He entrusts Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with a sealed letter for the King of England, ordering Hamlet's execution. However, Hamlet discovers the letter and switches it with a forged one, condemning Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to death instead. Meanwhile, King Fortinbras of Norway is mobilizing his army to invade Poland, crossing through Denmark.

As these events unfold, Ophelia descends into madness following her father's death and Hamlet's rejection. She wanders the countryside, distributing symbolic flowers and speaking in nonsensical rhymes. Her madness escalates until she drowns, though it remains unclear whether her death is accidental or intentional.

Laertes, Ophelia's brother, returns from France and is infuriated by his father's death and his sister's descent into madness. Convinced by Claudius that Hamlet is to blame, Laertes agrees to a plan for revenge. Claudius proposes a fencing match between Laertes and Hamlet, with Laertes wielding a poison-tipped foil. Additionally, Claudius plans to poison Hamlet's wine as a backup measure. However, the match is interrupted by Gertrude's sudden announcement of Ophelia's tragic demise.

In the fifth act, we encounter an iconic scene featuring two gravediggers discussing Ophelia's death or possible suicide while preparing her grave. Hamlet, accompanied by Horatio, joins the conversation and interacts with one of the gravediggers, who presents him with the skull of a jester from Hamlet's childhood. Reflecting on mortality, Hamlet muses, 'Alas, poor Yorick,' contemplating the inevitability of death.

Act 5, Scene 1 “That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once… This might be the pate of a politician, which this ass now o’er-reaches; one that would circumvent God”.

Hamlet reflects on how even those attempting to evade divine punishment cannot escape death's grasp.

As Ophelia's funeral procession approaches with Laertes leading, Hamlet and Horatio conceal themselves. Upon realizing Ophelia's identity, Hamlet reveals himself, leading to a tense confrontation between him and Laertes at the graveside, which is ultimately interrupted.

Back at Elsinore, Hamlet confides in Horatio about his journey, revealing Claudius's plot to have him killed. Hamlet's manipulation of Claudius's letter to ensure the demise of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is disclosed. Soon after, a courtier delivers a fencing challenge to Hamlet, which he accepts despite Horatio's protests.

Before the duel, Hamlet discovers Claudius's bet on his victory, part of a scheme to cover up his attempt on Hamlet's life. Uninterested in earning his uncle's respect, Hamlet proceeds with the match.

During the duel, Hamlet gains the upper hand, prompting Gertrude to raise a toast with the poisoned goblet intended for Hamlet by Claudius. As she drinks, Claudius attempts to intervene, but it's too late. Laertes, realizing the plan is unraveling, wounds Hamlet with the poisoned rapier. In the ensuing struggle, they exchange weapons, and Laertes is also injured by the poisoned blade. Gertrude collapses and succumbs to the poison.

In his final moments, Laertes reconciles with Hamlet, revealing Claudius's treachery. Hamlet, accepting Laertes's apology, rushes to Claudius and kills him.

As Hamlet feels the poison taking hold, he learns of Fortinbras's approach and appoints him as his successor to the throne. Horatio, nearly succumbing to despair, is urged by Hamlet to live and recount their story before Hamlet breathes his last in his friend's arms.

Fortinbras arrives at the palace, where he discovers the entire Danish royal family deceased. Assuming the throne, Fortinbras orders a dignified military funeral for Hamlet, honoring him as a fallen soldier.

Understanding Main Hamlet Themes

There are many themes within this iconic play, causing it to be one of the most discussed pieces of literature ever.

Action vs. Inaction: This theme revolves around Hamlet's internal conflict regarding whether to take action or remain passive. He constantly questions the morality of his decisions, particularly when it comes to seeking revenge for his father's murder. Hamlet's indecision drives discussions on morality throughout the play, ultimately leading to profound contemplations on life and death.

Religion, Honor, and Revenge: In Hamlet, characters often lecture each other on how to behave according to religious and aristocratic values. These values demand honor and justify seeking revenge to uphold one's reputation. However, as the story progresses, Hamlet becomes conflicted by the conflicting moral codes, leading to confusion about what constitutes justice and honorable behavior.

Appearance vs. Reality: This theme highlights the contrast between how things appear and their true nature. Characters in Hamlet often hide their true intentions behind facades, leading to misunderstandings and deception. Everyone is engaged in spying and attempting to decipher each other's true motives, adding layers of complexity to the relationships and events in the play.

Women's Roles: Hamlet's perception of women and their societal roles is explored throughout the play. He harbors a dark view of women, influenced by his mother's actions and his own experiences. Hamlet's disillusionment with women leads him to view them as deceitful and driven by sexual desire, shaping his interactions with female characters like Ophelia and Gertrude.

Historical and Societal Values: Hamlet also delves into broader themes related to historical and societal values prevalent in Elizabethan England. The play offers insights into the codes of conduct and power dynamics of the time, exposing the corruption within the monarchy and reflecting on the moral complexities of society. Through various scenes and characters, Hamlet sheds light on the social and political landscape of its time.

Dissecting Symbolism in Hamlet

This play does contain symbols but does not exaggerate their use. Here are a brief breakdown of the main symbols from our college essay writing service :

The Ghost: The Ghost in Hamlet serves as a symbol of impending doom and unrest in the state of Denmark. It is often interpreted as a harbinger of troubled times and represents the unresolved issues surrounding King Hamlet's death.

Ophelia's Flowers: Ophelia's flowers symbolize her descent into madness and her feelings of betrayal. As she distributes flowers to various characters, each flower carries symbolic meaning, reflecting Ophelia's inner turmoil and cry for help. Shakespeare may also use this symbolism to critique the characters' inability to understand or interpret symbols effectively.

The Skull of the Jester: Perhaps one of the most famous symbols in the play, the skull of the jester represents death, decay, and the futility of human existence. When Hamlet encounters the skull, it prompts reflections on mortality and the transient nature of life.

Poison: Poison serves as a symbol of deceit, betrayal, and corruption throughout the play. Claudius's use of poison to murder King Hamlet foreshadows the tragic events that unfold. The innocent-looking fencing match between Hamlet and Laertes, tainted by poisoned blades and wine, underscores the pervasive corruption within the royal family.

Weather: Shakespeare utilizes the weather as a symbolic element to set the mood and foreshadow events. Bad weather often serves as an omen of impending trouble or unrest, while good weather symbolizes hope or positive developments. However, these symbols can be ambiguous and prone to overinterpretation, serving primarily to enhance the atmosphere of the play.

For an in-depth look at the symbolism, check our article: WHAT IS SYMBOLISM? REVIEWING EXAMPLES IN LITERATURE .

Final Words

In wrapping up, we hope this summary of Hamlet has shed light on its timeless brilliance, offering you valuable insights into its themes and symbolism. As one of Shakespeare's most celebrated works, Hamlet continues to captivate audiences with its exploration of morality, deception, and the human condition. And remember, you can always buy essay writing service from us whenever you need them.

We trust that our breakdown has provided clarity and depth, empowering students to engage more deeply with this iconic play. For those eager for more literary exploration, be sure to check out our Pride and Prejudice summary . Happy reading!

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