Hamlet

Elsinore, the royal castle of Denmark, in the dead of winter. Two months before the play opens, the old king — also named Hamlet — has died suddenly in his orchard, said to have been bitten by a serpent. His brother Claudius has taken the throne and married the dead king’s widow, Queen Gertrude. Their son, Prince Hamlet, has come home from his university at Wittenberg for the funeral and stayed for the wedding, which followed within weeks. The play begins on the castle’s freezing battlements at midnight, with sentries reporting that the dead king’s ghost has been walking. Horatio, Hamlet’s scholarly friend, sees the apparition for himself and undertakes to tell the prince.

The next day Claudius opens court, sends ambassadors to Norway to head off young Fortinbras (whose father Old Hamlet killed in a single combat thirty years earlier and whose lands now belong to Denmark), grants Polonius’s son Laertes leave to return to France, and tells Hamlet to stop mourning. Hamlet’s first soliloquy — O, that this too too solid flesh would melt — reveals his disgust at his mother’s remarriage and his suicidal grief. Horatio brings news of the ghost; Hamlet undertakes to watch with him. In Polonius’s house, Laertes warns his sister Ophelia not to take Hamlet’s love seriously; their father, Polonius, forbids her to see Hamlet at all. That night, on the platform, Hamlet meets the ghost of his father, who tells him that Claudius murdered him by pouring poison in his ear and demands that Hamlet revenge the murder — but spare Gertrude, leaving her to heaven. Hamlet swears the oath. He warns Horatio and Marcellus that he may put on an antic disposition — pretend madness — and binds them, while the ghost cries swear three times from beneath the stage, never to speak of what they have seen.

Weeks pass. Hamlet, now apparently mad, terrifies Ophelia and meets the king’s investigations — conducted through Polonius and through Hamlet’s old schoolfellows Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, summoned from Wittenberg — with riddling, mocking, dangerous talk. A travelling troupe of players arrives at Elsinore. Hamlet conceives a test: he will have them perform a play (The Murder of Gonzago), reshaped to mirror Claudius’s crime, and watch the king’s reaction to confirm the ghost’s story. Before the play he delivers To be, or not to be, the most famous soliloquy in English. The play within the play succeeds: Claudius rises and flees. Hamlet, on his way to his mother’s closet, finds Claudius alone at prayer and could kill him, but holds off — killing a man at prayer would send him to heaven, the wrong revenge. In the closet scene, Hamlet confronts Gertrude with savage clarity, then hears a noise behind the arras and stabs through the curtain, killing Polonius, whom he had taken for the king. The ghost reappears (only Hamlet sees him) to whet his blunted purpose.

Claudius now has the warrant he needs. He sends Hamlet to England with sealed letters ordering his execution on arrival, escorted by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Ophelia, broken by her father’s death at her lover’s hand, goes mad; she sings fragments, distributes flowers, and drowns in a brook, half by accident. Laertes returns from France raging for vengeance; Claudius redirects him onto Hamlet. A pirate intercepts Hamlet’s ship; Hamlet, having already discovered and rewritten the warrant so that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (still carrying the letters) will be killed in his place, is set ashore in Denmark. He and Horatio come on a graveyard where two clowns are digging Ophelia’s grave; Hamlet picks up the skull of the court jester Yorick. The funeral arrives; Hamlet and Laertes grapple in the open grave.

Claudius arranges a fencing match between them. Laertes’s rapier is unbated and tipped with a poison Claudius has procured; the king also prepares a poisoned cup of wine in case the blade misses. The match goes wrong on every level. In the scuffle, the rapiers are exchanged; both Laertes and Hamlet are wounded by the poisoned blade. Gertrude drinks from the poisoned cup, against the king’s order, and dies. Laertes, dying, names Claudius the author of the plot. Hamlet stabs Claudius and forces him to drink the rest of the poisoned wine. Hamlet dies in Horatio’s arms, asking him to live and tell his story, and giving his dying voice for young Fortinbras — just arriving from his Polish wars — to inherit the kingdom. Fortinbras orders Hamlet’s body borne off the stage with the honours of a soldier. The play ends; the Danish royal line ends with it.

Written around 1600–1601, Hamlet sits at the centre of Shakespeare’s career: after the comedies and the second tetralogy of histories, after Julius Caesar, and at the head of the great-tragedy sequence (Othello, King Lear, Macbeth) that follows it through the next six years. It is the longest of his plays — about four thousand lines — and the only one preserved in three substantively different early texts: the First Quarto (Q1, 1603, sometimes called the “bad quarto”: a much shorter version, possibly a memorial reconstruction by an actor); the Second Quarto (Q2, 1604–1605, the longest version, evidently from Shakespeare’s manuscript); and the First Folio (F, 1623, with cuts and additions, presumably reflecting the play as cut for performance). Most modern editions, including the Globe / Cambridge edition this site uses, base their text on Q2 with selective additions from F. The variants matter: famous lines (solid flesh vs. sallied flesh; the “dram of eale” crux at 1.4.36–38) sit on real textual disagreements.

The story is older than Shakespeare. The earliest version is a Danish chronicle by Saxo Grammaticus (c. 1200) about a prince called Amleth who feigns madness to revenge his father; the French humanist François de Belleforest retold it in his Histoires Tragiques (1570). Around 1589 a now-lost English play on the subject — usually called the Ur-Hamlet, often attributed to Thomas Kyd — was already on the London stage; contemporary references show it had a ghost crying “Hamlet, revenge!” Shakespeare almost certainly knew it. What he made of the material was something the genre had not produced: a revenge tragedy whose hero refuses, for nearly four hours, to revenge.

The play was written under Elizabeth I, in the last years of her reign, and is anxious about succession in ways that feel pointed. Elizabeth had no heir; the question of who would succeed her dominated the political class. Three of Shakespeare’s plays in 1599–1601 (Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Henry V) put royal succession at the centre of their plots. Hamlet’s Denmark is an elective monarchy in the Old Norse style — the throne passes by election, not strict primogeniture — so when Hamlet at the end gives his “dying voice” for Fortinbras, he is exercising a real political prerogative and not a poetic flourish.

The play’s intellectual context is the late-Renaissance world: Wittenberg, where Hamlet and Horatio study, was Luther’s university and a centre of Protestant reform; the ghost who walks at night and reports a Catholic Purgatory (fast in fires … foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away) is therefore theologically suspect to the Wittenberg-trained Hamlet, who must consider whether the spirit is actually his father or a demon trying to damn him. The skeptical philosophical vocabulary — Montaigne’s Essais appeared in English in 1603 — is everywhere in the soliloquies: doubt about the soul, doubt about appearances, doubt about action itself. Hamlet, who tells Horatio that there are more things in heaven and earth … than are dreamt of in your philosophy, is the first character in English drama to make philosophical scepticism a personal style.

The play was performed at the Globe Theatre by Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (renamed the King’s Men under James I in 1603). Shakespeare may have played the Ghost; Richard Burbage almost certainly played Hamlet first. The text itself shows the play conscious of its medium: the Players’ arrival in Act II prompts Hamlet’s lecture on acting (3.2), one of the earliest English-language critiques of theatrical performance. The references to the “little eyases” (the boy actors of the children’s companies stealing audience from the adult houses) date the F-text precisely: 1600–1601, the height of the so-called “War of the Theatres.”

Revenge and delay. The play’s engine is a revenge command from a ghost: revenge his foul and most unnatural murder. The genre Hamlet has been dropped into — the Elizabethan revenge tragedy, of which Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1587) is the model — expects the hero to plot, kill, and die in the last act. Hamlet does kill, and does die, but he does not plot in any straight line, and the play’s most famous question is why. He delays for four acts. The reasons proliferate: doubt about the ghost’s honesty, philosophical scruple, depression, the wish for a perfect revenge that will damn Claudius spiritually as well as kill him, the simple impossibility of action in a world where conscience does make cowards of us all. The play does not settle on one answer. Critics have argued for almost every reading; the question itself, four centuries on, is one of the play’s permanent gifts to literature.

Madness, real and feigned. Hamlet warns Horatio that he may put on an antic disposition. The play then runs the question through the whole second half: how much of his madness is performed, how much is real grief uncovering itself, how much is the disguise becoming the man. Ophelia’s madness in Act IV is unambiguously real, and unambiguously a consequence of the men in her life: her brother gone, her father killed by her lover, her lover banished by her father’s killer. The two madnesses sit in counterpoint; Hamlet’s, knowing and rhetorical, is contrasted with Ophelia’s, fragmented and song-bound. The play takes mental illness more seriously, and earlier, than almost any drama before it.

Acting and seeming. The word seems appears in Hamlet’s first scene-long speech (Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not ‘seems’) and the gap between seeming and being is the play’s sustained anxiety. Claudius seems benevolent and is a murderer. Gertrude seems to mourn and remarried in a month. The ghost may be Hamlet’s father or a devil in his shape. Hamlet himself adopts a disposition that may or may not be acted. The arrival of the players in Act II and the play within the play in Act III make the metaphor explicit: the only way Hamlet can find out the truth is by staging a fiction; the only thing that breaks Claudius’s mask is watching a mask of his own crime. Theatre is the play’s preferred epistemology.

Mortality and the body. The play opens with a corpse-king walking and ends with five bodies on the stage; in between, Hamlet thinks about death almost constantly. To be, or not to be turns over suicide; the closet scene threatens his mother; the graveyard scene, with the skulls of Yorick and the unknown lawyer, gives him the play’s most direct meditation on the body’s decay. The famous question — to die: to sleep; / No more — is one Hamlet asks under the suspicion that the soul does not survive the body’s end, and that the “undiscover’d country” from which no traveller returns may not be a country at all. The play does not resolve the question; it ends with Horatio’s farewell, flights of angels sing thee to thy rest, which is a hope, not a certainty.

Memory. The ghost’s last words are Hamlet, remember me. The injunction defines the rest of the play: Hamlet’s task is to remember a man whom everyone else, including his mother, has forgotten with frightening speed. The first soliloquy turns on the brevity of mourning (but two months dead: nay, not so much); the closet scene is a forced act of remembrance directed at Gertrude (look here, upon this picture, and on this); the graveyard scene has Hamlet hold Yorick’s skull and remember the man who carried him a thousand times. The play ends with Hamlet’s most insistent request: Horatio, … report me and my cause aright. The play we have just watched is the report.

Politics and rotten states. Marcellus’s line in 1.4 — Something is rotten in the state of Denmark — is the play’s political diagnosis. Claudius’s court is luxurious, well-spoken, and quietly criminal; the official explanations are forged; the surveillance machine (Polonius behind the arras, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern reporting on Hamlet, the spied-on Ophelia) is constant. The play’s politics are not abstract. They are the daily texture of life under a regime that cannot survive the truth being known. Fortinbras’s arrival at the end — a soldier-prince from outside the court, taking the kingdom by election — is one possible answer; the play is open about the fact that he, too, may be a worse one.

Hamlet is the most quoted single work in English. Lines from the play that have escaped into ordinary speech without their speakers include to be or not to be, the lady doth protest too much, brevity is the soul of wit, though this be madness, yet there is method in ’t, frailty, thy name is woman, more in sorrow than in anger, something is rotten in the state of Denmark, the play’s the thing, more honour’d in the breach than the observance, there’s the rub, more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, conscience does make cowards of us all, method in his madness, good night, sweet prince, and dozens more. The role of Hamlet is the single most performed in English-language theatre; nearly every actor of stature attempts it once. The play has been filmed dozens of times, set in Edwardian Denmark and twentieth-century New York and corporate boardrooms and present-day Bhutan; it has been a ballet, an opera (Thomas; Brett Dean), a graphic novel, a Disney film (The Lion King, indirectly), and a Tom Stoppard comedy turning on its minor characters (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead).

Critically, Hamlet is the play that put psychological complexity at the centre of English literature. Earlier dramatic heroes had reasons for their actions, and audiences understood them. Hamlet has reasons that contradict each other, and the play is interested in the contradictions. He is the first major literary character whose interior is presented as larger than the action and not in service to it. T. S. Eliot called the play, in a famous and contested 1919 essay, an “artistic failure” precisely on the grounds that the emotion exceeds any objective correlative the plot can supply — which is, read another way, what makes the play modern. Freud read Hamlet’s delay as Oedipal; Coleridge read it as the paralysis of an over-refined intellect; Greg read the closet scene as evidence the ghost was a hallucination; Bradley read Hamlet as a soul in a melancholic crisis; Goethe read him as a costly vase shattered by a load it was not made to bear. Each generation of critics finds the question they brought to the play already inside it.

For a first-time reader, the play is hard but worth it. The verse is denser than Romeo and Juliet, the philosophical reflection more sustained than anywhere else in Shakespeare; some passages (Polonius’s precepts; the closet scene; the gravediggers) are easier than the soliloquies; some scenes (1.1, 3.4, 5.1) compose almost as cleanly as a one-act play. The text rewards re-reading more than first-reading: the second pass picks up the verbal echoes and the political detail; the third sees what is being hidden and from whom. The play’s reputation as a difficult masterpiece is true. It is also a thriller, a ghost story, a domestic tragedy, a court satire, and a study of grief, and almost any reader can find at least one of those strands a way in.

The play’s last permanent claim is structural. Almost no other Shakespeare play (perhaps King Lear) is so much itself; almost none is so much a single gesture of imagination given four hours to unfold. Hamlet proposes a question — how should a thinking man live in a corrupt world — and refuses to answer it, leaving the question with the reader. Four centuries of readers have not been able to put it down.