Hamlet

Hamlet is the most famous play in the world and the most written-about work of literature after the Bible. Its hero is a grieving student-prince who is told by his father’s ghost that his uncle murdered his father, and who spends five acts thinking, doubting, joking, raging, feigning madness — and delaying. When he finally acts, nearly everyone dies. Out of this revenge story Shakespeare made something new: a drama of consciousness, in which the real action is a mind arguing with itself about death, truth, appearance, action and meaning.

This page tells the whole story, scene by scene — you do not need to have read the play — then explains its themes, the great interpretive debates, its philosophy, and how to use it.

At a glance

Written	c. 1599–1601
Texts	Three early versions: the “bad” First Quarto (1603), the Second Quarto (1604–05), and the First Folio (1623) — they differ substantially
Setting	Elsinore (Helsingør), the royal castle of Denmark
Sources	The Danish legend of Amleth in Saxo Grammaticus (c. 1200) and Belleforest’s French retelling; a lost earlier play (“Ur-Hamlet”, perhaps by Thomas Kyd)
Length	About 4,000 lines — the longest play Shakespeare wrote; Hamlet alone speaks over 1,400 lines
Genre	Revenge tragedy, transformed
Key themes	Death; seeming and being; thought and action; madness; corruption; providence

The characters

• Hamlet — Prince of Denmark, son of the late King Hamlet; a student at Wittenberg, about thirty. See Hamlet.
• Claudius — the late king’s brother, now King of Denmark and married to Hamlet’s mother.
• Gertrude — Queen of Denmark, Hamlet’s mother, who married Claudius within two months of her husband’s death.
• The Ghost — the spirit of Hamlet’s father.
• Polonius — the king’s chief counsellor; pompous, meddling, sententious.
• Ophelia — Polonius’s daughter, loved by Hamlet.
• Laertes — Polonius’s son, a hot-headed young man who becomes Hamlet’s foil.
• Horatio — Hamlet’s loyal friend from Wittenberg, the voice of reason.
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — school friends of Hamlet, summoned to spy on him.
• Fortinbras — Prince of Norway, whose father was killed by Hamlet’s father; a man of action.
• The Players — travelling actors; the Gravediggers; Osric, an affected courtier; Marcellus and Barnardo, soldiers.

The three sons

The play turns on three sons whose fathers were killed:

Son	Father	Response
Hamlet	King Hamlet, murdered by Claudius	Thinks, doubts, delays
Laertes	Polonius, killed by Hamlet	Rushes to revenge, is manipulated into treachery
Fortinbras	Old Fortinbras, killed by King Hamlet	Marches with an army — and inherits Denmark

Each is a commentary on the others. Hamlet himself notices: “by the image of my cause I see / The portraiture of his” (of Laertes, 5.2).

Plot summary

The Ghost

The battlements. Midnight at Elsinore, bitter cold. The sentries Barnardo and Marcellus have twice seen a ghost in armour resembling the dead King Hamlet; they bring the sceptical scholar Horatio. The Ghost appears, will not speak, and vanishes at cockcrow. Horatio explains the political background: Denmark is arming because young Fortinbras of Norway wants to recover lands his father lost to old Hamlet. They resolve to tell young Hamlet. The play’s first line is a question — “Who’s there?” — and questions never stop.

The court. Claudius, newly crowned, speaks smoothly of his “dirge in marriage” to Gertrude, sends ambassadors to Norway, and grants Laertes leave to return to Paris. Then he turns to Hamlet, still dressed in black: why does grief “seem” so particular with you? Hamlet:

Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not “seems.”… I have that within which passeth show; These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

Claudius forbids him to return to Wittenberg. Left alone, Hamlet speaks his first soliloquy:

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!… How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world!… Frailty, thy name is woman!… But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue.

Not yet knowing of any murder, he is already sick with disgust — at his mother’s “o’erhasty marriage” (“the funeral baked meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables”) and at the world. Horatio tells him of the Ghost.

Polonius’s family. Laertes, leaving for France, warns his sister Ophelia that Hamlet’s love cannot be trusted. Polonius blesses his son with a stream of advice — “Neither a borrower nor a lender be… This above all: to thine own self be true” — then orders Ophelia to stop seeing Hamlet.

The Ghost speaks. On the battlements, as Claudius carouses below (“a custom / More honoured in the breach than the observance”), the Ghost beckons Hamlet away. Marcellus: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” Alone with Hamlet, the Ghost reveals the truth: “Murder most foul, as in the best it is.” He was not stung by a serpent while sleeping in his orchard: “The serpent that did sting thy father’s life / Now wears his crown.” Claudius poured poison into his ear, and seduced his “most seeming-virtuous queen”. The Ghost was killed “unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled” — without last rites — and suffers in purgatory. “Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder… But howsoever thou pursuest this act, / Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive / Against thy mother aught: leave her to heaven.” “Adieu, adieu! Remember me.”

Hamlet swears to wipe everything from the “table of my memory” but the command. He makes Horatio and Marcellus swear secrecy — the Ghost, beneath the stage, crying “Swear!” — and warns that he may “put an antic disposition on”. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” And: “The time is out of joint: O cursèd spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!”

The antic disposition

2.1. Ophelia tells her father of a terrifying visit: Hamlet came to her closet, his doublet unbraced, stockings fouled, “pale as his shirt”, stared at her face, sighed, and left without a word. Polonius concludes that Hamlet is mad for love of her.

2.2. Claudius and Gertrude have summoned Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to find out what troubles Hamlet. The ambassadors return: Norway has restrained Fortinbras, who asks passage through Denmark to attack Poland. Polonius, in a speech of comic verbosity (“brevity is the soul of wit”), announces that Hamlet is mad from love, and reads Hamlet’s love letter to Ophelia.

Polonius tries to question Hamlet, who mocks him: asked what he reads — “Words, words, words.” “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t,” Polonius concedes. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrive; Hamlet quickly forces them to admit they were sent for. Denmark is a prison, he says — “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” — and he describes his melancholy in one of the great prose passages in English:

I have of late — but wherefore I know not — lost all my mirth… this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory… What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty!… the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.

The Players arrive. Hamlet asks the First Player to recite a speech about Pyrrhus killing old King Priam and Hecuba’s grief; the Player weeps. Alone, Hamlet erupts — “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” — at the thought that an actor can weep for Hecuba (“What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?”) while he, with real cause, does nothing. Then he makes a plan. The Ghost may be a devil sent to damn him; he needs proof. He will have the players perform a play like his father’s murder: “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.”

The play, the prayer, the closet

To be, or not to be. Claudius and Polonius plant Ophelia where Hamlet will meet her, and hide to watch. Claudius, aside, reveals his guilt for the first time: “How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience!” Hamlet enters, alone (he thinks), and speaks the most famous lines in English:

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?

Death would be sleep — “a consummation / Devoutly to be wished”. But “in that sleep of death what dreams may come”? Fear of “the undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns” makes us bear the ills we have. “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.” See To Be, or Not to Be.

He sees Ophelia, who tries to return his gifts. He turns on her savagely: “I did love you once… I loved you not… Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?” (Nunnery was also slang for a brothel.) Perhaps he realizes they are being watched. Ophelia is left devastated: “O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!” Claudius concludes that Hamlet is not mad for love but dangerous, and decides to send him to England.

The Mousetrap. Hamlet coaches the actors (“Suit the action to the word, the word to the action… to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature”) and asks Horatio to watch the king’s face. The court assembles. A dumb-show, then the play, The Murder of Gonzago, which Hamlet calls The Mousetrap: a player-king sleeps in his garden; his nephew pours poison in his ear. Claudius rises — “Give me some light: away!” — and the play breaks up in confusion. Hamlet is exultant: “I’ll take the ghost’s word for a thousand pound.”

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern come to summon him to his mother. Hamlet hands Guildenstern a recorder and asks him to play; Guildenstern cannot. “Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me… you would pluck out the heart of my mystery… ‘Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?”

The prayer. Claudius, alone, tries to pray:

O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven; It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t, A brother’s murder.

He cannot repent while still possessing the fruits of his crime — “my crown, mine own ambition and my queen”. Hamlet enters behind him with his sword drawn — and stops. If he kills Claudius at prayer, Claudius’s soul will go to heaven, while his father suffers in purgatory. He will wait for a moment when Claudius is “about some act / That has no relish of salvation in’t”. He leaves. Claudius rises: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: / Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” He had not been able to pray after all.

The closet. Hamlet confronts his mother in her private chamber. Polonius hides behind the arras (a tapestry). Hamlet is so violent that Gertrude cries for help; Polonius cries out; Hamlet stabs through the curtain — “How now! a rat? Dead, for a ducat, dead!” — hoping it is the king. It is Polonius. “Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell! / I took thee for thy better.”

Then he forces his mother to compare two portraits — her first husband, “Hyperion”, and Claudius, “a mildewed ear” — and lashes her with disgust at her sexuality. The Ghost appears again, visible only to Hamlet, to “whet thy almost blunted purpose” and to tell him to comfort his mother. Gertrude, who sees nothing, thinks him mad. Hamlet begs her not to go to Claudius’s bed, and drags Polonius’s body out: “I’ll lug the guts into the neighbour room.”

England, Ophelia, Laertes

3. Claudius, alarmed, sends Hamlet to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — and secret letters ordering the English king to execute him. Hamlet jokes grimly about where Polonius is: “At supper… Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him.” A king may go “a progress through the guts of a beggar”.

Fortinbras. On his way to the ship, Hamlet sees Fortinbras’s army marching to fight for “a little patch of ground / That hath in it no profit but the name”. Twenty thousand men going to their graves “for a fantasy and trick of fame”. His last soliloquy (cut from the Folio): “How all occasions do inform against me, / And spur my dull revenge!… O, from this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!”

Ophelia’s madness. Ophelia has gone mad — her father killed by the man she loved, and Hamlet gone. She wanders the court singing fragments of bawdy songs and ballads of death, handing out flowers: “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray, love, remember: and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts… There’s fennel for you, and columbines: there’s rue for you… I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died.” Laertes returns from France at the head of a mob, crying for revenge. Claudius calms him: “Let him demand his fill.”

4.6. A letter from Hamlet to Horatio: his ship was attacked by pirates; in the fight he boarded their ship, which took him back to Denmark. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sail on to England.

The plot, and the willow. Claudius and Laertes plot Hamlet’s death: a fencing match, ostensibly friendly; Laertes will use an unblunted, poisoned rapier (“I bought an unction of a mountebank”); as backup, Claudius will poison a cup of wine. Gertrude enters with news: Ophelia has drowned. Her speech is one of the most beautiful in the play:

There is a willow grows aslant a brook, That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream… There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke; When down her weedy trophies and herself Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide; And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up… Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay To muddy death.

(Millais’s painting Ophelia, 1851–52, shows this moment.)

The graveyard and the duel

The graveyard. Two gravediggers (“clowns”) joke as they dig Ophelia’s grave, debating whether a suicide deserves Christian burial (only because she was a gentlewoman, they suspect). Hamlet and Horatio, returned, watch; skulls are thrown up. Whose were they — a politician’s, a courtier’s, a lawyer’s? The gravedigger tells Hamlet he began his trade the day young Hamlet was born — thirty years ago — and hands him a skull: Yorick’s, the king’s jester.

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times… Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs?… Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come.

He follows the dust of Alexander the Great to a stopper in a beer-barrel. See Alas, Poor Yorick.

Ophelia’s funeral procession arrives with “maimed rites”. Laertes leaps into the grave; Hamlet, revealing himself — “This is I, / Hamlet the Dane” — leaps in after him, and they grapple: “I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers / Could not, with all their quantity of love, / Make up my sum.”

The end. Hamlet tells Horatio what happened on the ship: unable to sleep, he stole the sealed commission, found the order for his execution, and forged a new one ordering the execution of the bearers — Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. “They are not near my conscience.” Something has changed in him: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will.”

The foppish courtier Osric brings Laertes’s challenge to a fencing match. Horatio senses danger. Hamlet:

We defy augury: there is 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. Since no man knows aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.

The duel. Hamlet apologizes to Laertes. They fence; Hamlet scores. Claudius drops a “union” (a pearl — the poison) into the cup. Gertrude drinks to Hamlet’s success from the poisoned cup, despite Claudius’s “Gertrude, do not drink.” Laertes wounds Hamlet with the poisoned blade; in a scuffle they exchange rapiers, and Hamlet wounds Laertes. The queen falls: “the drink, the drink! I am poisoned.” Laertes, dying, confesses: “The king, the king’s to blame.” Hamlet stabs Claudius with the poisoned sword and forces him to drink the poisoned wine — “Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damnèd Dane… Follow my mother.” Laertes and Hamlet exchange forgiveness.

Horatio tries to drink the rest of the poison; Hamlet wrests the cup from him:

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story.

Fortinbras’s drum is heard; ambassadors arrive from England: “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.” Hamlet gives his “dying voice” to Fortinbras as king, and dies: “The rest is silence.” Horatio: “Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince: / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” Fortinbras orders a soldier’s funeral: “Go, bid the soldiers shoot.”

The great themes

Death

No play is so obsessed with death: the dead father, the Ghost from purgatory, Polonius’s corpse at supper with the worms, Ophelia’s drowning, the gravediggers’ skulls, Alexander’s dust, the final heaps of bodies. Hamlet moves from fearing death (“what dreams may come”) to accepting it (“the readiness is all”). See Death and the Great Question How Should We Face Death?.

Seeming and being

“Seems, madam? Nay, it is.” Everyone in Elsinore performs: Claudius the grieving brother, Gertrude the loving wife, Polonius the wise counsellor, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the old friends, Hamlet the madman. The play-within-the-play makes theatre itself the instrument of truth. Hamlet’s advice to the players — to “hold the mirror up to nature” — is the play’s own aim.

Thought and action

“Conscience does make cowards of us all, / And thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” Hamlet is the first great hero of reflection — and its first great victim.

Corruption and disease

The imagery is of rot, ulcers, poison, weeds and smells: “an unweeded garden / That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely”; “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”; Claudius’s offence “smells to heaven”. The literary critic Caroline Spurgeon showed how imagery of disease saturates the play.

Providence and fate

At first Hamlet feels “the time is out of joint” and he alone must set it right. By Act 5 he has surrendered to providence: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends.” Is this wisdom, fatalism, or exhaustion?

Women

Hamlet’s disgust with his mother (“Frailty, thy name is woman!”) and his cruelty to Ophelia have made the play central to feminist criticism. Elaine Showalter’s essay “Representing Ophelia” (1985) traced Ophelia’s afterlife as the icon of female madness in Victorian art and psychiatry.

Why does Hamlet delay?

The most famous question in literary criticism. The main answers:

1. He doesn’t really delay — there are external obstacles (Claudius is always guarded) and he needs proof the Ghost is honest.
2. Too much thought (Coleridge, Schlegel): Hamlet has “a great, an almost enormous, intellectual activity, and a proportionate aversion to real action”.
3. A sensitive soul given an impossible task (Goethe, Wilhelm Meister): “an oak tree planted in a costly jar”.
4. Melancholy (A. C. Bradley, 1904): the shock of his mother’s remarriage has plunged him into a pathological depression that paralyses will.
5. The Oedipus complex (Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 1900; Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus, 1949): Claudius has done what Hamlet unconsciously wished to do — kill the father and possess the mother — so Hamlet cannot punish him without punishing himself.
6. Knowledge kills action (Friedrich Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy §7): Hamlet resembles the Dionysian man who has looked into the essence of things and been nauseated; action can change nothing in the eternal nature of things.
7. Christian scruple: revenge is forbidden; the Ghost may be a devil; killing Claudius at prayer would send him to heaven.
8. The play needs it: T. S. Eliot (“Hamlet and His Problems”, 1919) called the play “an artistic failure” because Hamlet’s emotion exceeds any “objective correlative” — the facts cannot account for the feeling.

Hamlet and philosophy

• Scepticism: Hamlet’s “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” and “There are more things in heaven and earth” echo Michel de Montaigne, whose Essays Shakespeare probably knew.
• Suicide: “To be or not to be” weighs the question Albert Camus called the only serious philosophical problem.
• Consciousness: Harold Bloom argued that Hamlet “overhears himself” — thinks about his thinking — and so invented the modern self. Hegel saw in him the modern tragic hero whose conflict is inward.
• Nihilism: “What is this quintessence of dust?” — see Nihilism.
• Turgenev’s Hamlet: Ivan Turgenev‘s essay “Hamlet and Don Quixote” (1860) made Hamlet the type of the self-absorbed, doubting intellectual, against Don Quixote, the self-sacrificing believer.
• Existentialism: Hamlet’s anguish before action anticipates Søren Kierkegaard‘s anxiety and Jean-Paul Sartre‘s freedom.

Afterlives

• Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) — the play from the point of view of the two forgettable courtiers, as an absurdist comedy.
• Films: Laurence Olivier (1948, “the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind”), Grigori Kozintsev (1964, music by Shostakovich), Kenneth Branagh (1996, uncut), Michael Almereyda (2000, in corporate Manhattan), Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider (2014, in Kashmir). The Lion King (1994) borrows its plot.
• Painting: Delacroix’s lithographs, Millais’s Ophelia.
• Music: Tchaikovsky’s fantasy-overture, Liszt’s symphonic poem.
• Philosophy: Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba (1956), Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993), which takes “the time is out of joint” as its motto.

Keywords

Antic disposition

Hamlet's feigned madness — "I am but mad north-north-west".

The Mousetrap

The play-within-the-play that catches Claudius's conscience.

Soliloquy

Hamlet's seven great solo speeches — the record of a mind thinking.

Revenge tragedy

The popular Elizabethan genre (Kyd's Spanish Tragedy) that Hamlet inherits and transforms.

Purgatory

The Ghost's place of suffering — a Catholic idea in a Protestant England, which some critics see as central.

Wittenberg

Hamlet's university — Luther's, and Faustus's.

Using Hamlet in conversation

• Get the speakers right: “Something is rotten…” is Marcellus; “To thine own self be true” and “brevity is the soul of wit” are Polonius.
• On indecision: “the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought”.
• On perception: “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”.
• On humanity: “What a piece of work is a man!… And yet… this quintessence of dust”.