Study guide

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

by William Shakespeare

Overview

Author: William Shakespeare (1564–1616), actor, sharer and principal playwright of the Lord Chamberlain's Men
Genre: Revenge tragedy, in blank verse and prose
Written: About 1599–1601, for the newly built Globe theatre; entered for publication in July 1602
Early texts: Three: the First Quarto (Q1, 1603), the much longer Second Quarto (Q2, 1604–05) and the First Folio (F, 1623)
Setting: The royal castle of Elsinore (Helsingør) in Denmark, with one scene on a plain on the road to the Polish wars
Sources: The Amleth story in Saxo Grammaticus's Latin history of the Danes (written about 1200) and its French retelling by François de Belleforest (1570); probably also a lost English play, the 'Ur-Hamlet'
Length: Shakespeare's longest play; a combined text runs to nearly 4,000 lines, and Hamlet's is the longest part in the canon
Main characters: Prince Hamlet; his uncle Claudius, now King; his mother Queen Gertrude; the Ghost of his father; Polonius and his children Laertes and Ophelia; Horatio; Fortinbras of Norway
Key scenes: The Ghost on the battlements (1.1–1.5), 'To be, or not to be' (3.1), the play within the play (3.2), the closet scene (3.4), Ophelia's madness (4.5), the graveyard (5.1), the duel (5.2)
Quote text: The modernised text of Project Gutenberg's Complete Works, which combines readings and passages from Q2 and the Folio

Context

Hamlet was written around 1599–1601, when Shakespeare was in his mid-thirties and his company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, had just moved into the Globe on the south bank of the Thames. Richard Burbage, the company's leading tragedian, created the title role. The play was entered in the Stationers' Register in July 1602 and was already famous by the time it was first printed. It belongs to the same years as Julius Caesar and Twelfth Night, and it opens the period of the great tragedies that continues with Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. Readers have often connected it with the death of Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet, in 1596, but there is no evidence that links the two beyond the similarity of the names.

The story is old. Saxo Grammaticus, writing his Latin history of the Danes around 1200, tells of Amleth, whose father is murdered by his uncle Feng; Amleth feigns idiocy, outwits spies and a woman sent to tempt him, is sent to England with a letter ordering his death, rewrites it, and returns to burn the court and kill his uncle. François de Belleforest retold the tale in French in his Histoires tragiques (1570). Shakespeare also seems to have known an English play on the subject, now lost, which scholars call the 'Ur-Hamlet'. Thomas Nashe sneered in 1589 at writers who would give 'whole Hamlets' of tragical speeches, and Thomas Lodge in 1596 remembered a ghost crying 'Hamlet, revenge!' at the Theatre. Nashe's passage has been taken to point to Thomas Kyd, author of The Spanish Tragedy, but the attribution is a guess (Bullough 1973) (Jenkins 1982).

Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (about 1587) had founded the English fashion for revenge tragedy, drawing on the Latin tragedies of Seneca. It gave the stage a ghost who demands vengeance, a revenger who hesitates and doubts, madness real and feigned, and a play within the play that becomes the instrument of slaughter. Hamlet takes up every one of these conventions and turns them into questions: Is the ghost to be trusted? Is revenge a duty or a damnation? Why does the revenger wait? (Bevington 1996) (Bowers 1940) (Kerrigan 1996)

The play survives in three early versions. The First Quarto of 1603 (Q1) is short, about 2,200 lines, with different names for some characters (Polonius is 'Corambis') and with the 'To be, or not to be' soliloquy placed earlier and worded differently. Long dismissed as a 'bad quarto' put together from actors' memories, it has more recently been read as an acting version or an early draft. The Second Quarto (Q2, 1604–05) claims on its title page to be 'enlarged to almost as much againe' and is generally thought to derive from Shakespeare's own papers. The First Folio of 1623 (F) cuts about 230 lines found in Q2, including Hamlet's last soliloquy in 4.4, and adds about 70 lines of its own, including the 'Denmark's a prison' exchange in 2.2. Most modern editions combine Q2 and F; the Arden Third Series instead prints each text separately (Thompson 2006) (Werstine 1988) (Lesser 2015). The text quoted here is such a combined, modernised text, and its scene divisions are editorial: Q1 and Q2 have none, and the Folio's divisions stop early in Act II.

The play is also a document of a religiously divided England. Hamlet is a student at Wittenberg, Luther's university, while the Ghost speaks of fires that purge sins after death, a Catholic doctrine that the Church of England had officially rejected. The Danish monarchy in the play is elective, and Claudius has 'popp'd in' between the election and Hamlet's hopes, at a time when the succession to the ageing and childless Elizabeth I was an anxious, unspoken question. Since the Romantic period the play has been read above all as a study of a mind, and its hero has become the model of the modern, self-conscious individual; much recent criticism has asked whether that reading tells us more about later centuries than about Shakespeare's (Greenblatt 2001) (de Grazia 2007).

Plot overview

On the battlements of Elsinore, sentries and Hamlet's friend Horatio see the ghost of the late King Hamlet. Denmark is arming against young Fortinbras of Norway. In the court, Claudius, the dead king's brother, has taken the throne and married the widowed Queen Gertrude within two months of the funeral. Prince Hamlet, still in mourning, despises the marriage. The Ghost tells him that Claudius poisoned him while he slept in his orchard and commands him to take revenge. Hamlet swears to do so and warns his friends that he may put on an 'antic disposition', a show of madness.

Hamlet's strange behaviour alarms the court. The old counsellor Polonius believes he is mad for love of Polonius's daughter Ophelia, whom her father has ordered to reject him. Claudius summons Hamlet's school friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on him. Hamlet, unsure whether the Ghost is honest or a devil, uses a company of travelling players to stage a play that re-enacts the murder. When Claudius breaks off the performance, Hamlet is convinced. He finds the King at prayer but spares him, then confronts his mother in her chamber, kills Polonius, who is hiding behind a tapestry, and is visited again by the Ghost.

Claudius sends Hamlet to England with sealed orders for his execution. On the way Hamlet sees Fortinbras's army marching to fight over a worthless patch of Poland and reproaches himself for his delay. Ophelia, her father dead and her lover gone, goes mad. Her brother Laertes returns from France at the head of a rebellion, and Claudius turns his anger towards Hamlet, who has escaped the voyage by boarding a pirate ship and returned to Denmark. Claudius and Laertes plot to kill him in a fencing match with an unblunted, poisoned sword and a poisoned cup. Gertrude reports that Ophelia has drowned.

In the graveyard Hamlet talks with a gravedigger, holds the skull of the jester Yorick, and then watches Ophelia's funeral; he and Laertes grapple in her grave. Back at court Hamlet tells Horatio how he sent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths in his place and accepts the challenge to fence. In the match Gertrude drinks the poisoned cup, Laertes wounds Hamlet, the swords are exchanged in a scuffle and Laertes is wounded with his own blade. Dying, Laertes reveals the plot. Hamlet kills Claudius, forgives Laertes, and, as Fortinbras arrives, gives Horatio the task of telling his story. Fortinbras inherits the kingdom and orders a soldier's funeral for the prince.

Scene by scene

Scene 1: Act I, Scene 1: The Ghost on the battlements

Act I, Scene 1 (the whole scene)

Summary

At midnight on the castle platform the sentry Barnardo relieves Francisco. Marcellus arrives with Horatio, a scholar who has come to judge for himself the 'dreaded sight' the guards have twice seen. The Ghost appears, armed and in the likeness of the dead King Hamlet. Horatio charges it to speak, and it stalks away.

Horatio explains why Denmark is preparing for war: old King Hamlet once killed old Fortinbras of Norway in single combat and won his lands, and young Fortinbras has now gathered a band of 'lawless resolutes' to recover them. The Ghost returns, seems about to speak, and vanishes when the cock crows. The men resolve to tell young Hamlet, believing the spirit will speak to him.

Analysis

The first line is a question, and it is asked by the wrong man: the sentry coming on duty challenges the one already on guard. The scene establishes the play's world of darkness, cold, nervous watching and uncertainty before any principal character appears. Maynard Mack saw the play's whole mode as interrogative, a world of questions without sure answers, and this opening is its model (Mack 1952).

The scene also sets up two frames that the play will close at the end. One is political: Fortinbras, the son of a king killed by a Hamlet, wants back what his father lost, and his story will run parallel to Hamlet's. The other is spiritual: Horatio, the sceptical university man, is forced to believe what he sees, but no one knows what the Ghost is or why it walks.

Who’s there?

Hamlet 1.1

The play's first words. Identity, authority and the right to question are unsettled from the start.

Most like. It harrows me with fear and wonder.

Hamlet 1.1

Horatio's response to the Ghost. To 'harrow' is to break up the ground, a violent image for the shock of the supernatural.

But look, the morn in russet mantle clad, Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill.

Hamlet 1.1

Dawn ends the scene with a moment of calm pastoral beauty, a release from the terrors of the night.

Read the text

Scene 2: Act I, Scene 2: Claudius's court and Hamlet's first soliloquy

Act I, Scene 2 (the whole scene)

Summary

In a formal session of the court Claudius speaks smoothly of his grief for his brother and of his marriage to Gertrude, made, he says, with the court's approval. He sends ambassadors to the King of Norway to restrain Fortinbras, and gives Laertes, Polonius's son, leave to return to France. He then turns to Hamlet, still dressed in black, and urges him to give up his 'obstinate condolement'. Hamlet's answers are curt and bitter. He is refused permission to return to his studies at Wittenberg and agrees, for his mother's sake, to stay.

Left alone, Hamlet wishes he could die and condemns his mother's remarriage, made 'within a month' of his father's death, to a man as far from his father as a satyr from the sun god Hyperion. Horatio, Marcellus and Barnardo come to tell him of the Ghost. He questions them closely and resolves to watch with them that night.

Analysis

Claudius's opening speech is a masterpiece of public management, balancing grief and joy in paired phrases. Hamlet's first words, an aside punning on 'kin' and 'kind', cut through the rhetoric. His reply to his mother on the word 'seems' introduces the play's concern with the gap between outward show and inner truth: he has, he says, 'that within which passeth show'. Critics have taken this line as a founding moment of the modern idea of the inward self, and others have questioned that reading (Belsey 1985) (Maus 1995).

The soliloquy shows Hamlet's state before the Ghost speaks to him. His disgust is directed less at Claudius than at his mother and at the world, 'an unweeded garden'. The Folio's 'solid' flesh (Q2 reads 'sallied', often emended to 'sullied') is a famous textual crux: the word changes the line's sense from a wish for dissolution to a sense of contamination (Thompson 2006). 'Frailty, thy name is woman!' generalises from one woman to all, a move feminist critics have examined closely (Adelman 1992).

A little more than kin, and less than kind.

Hamlet 1.2

Hamlet's first line. Claudius is now both uncle and stepfather, too much kin; 'kind' means both natural and kindly.

Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not seems.

Hamlet 1.2

Hamlet rejects the language of appearances, setting up the play's theme of seeming and being.

O that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!

Hamlet 1.2

The opening of the first soliloquy: a longing for dissolution that Christian law forbids him to act on.

Frailty, thy name is woman!

Hamlet 1.2

Hamlet's judgement of his mother becomes a judgement of all women, including, later, Ophelia.

Read the text

Scene 3: Act I, Scene 3: Polonius's family

Act I, Scene 3 (the whole scene)

Summary

Before leaving for France, Laertes warns his sister Ophelia that Hamlet's attentions cannot be trusted: a prince cannot choose freely whom he marries, and she must guard her chastity. Polonius arrives and gives his son a string of maxims for conduct abroad. He then questions Ophelia about Hamlet and, dismissing his 'tenders' of affection as traps, orders her to stop seeing or speaking with him. She promises to obey.

Analysis

This domestic scene mirrors the royal family in the scene before: another father, another son who leaves for abroad, and a daughter whose obedience is assumed. Polonius's precepts are sensible commonplaces, and their famous last line has often been quoted as wisdom, but in the mouth of a man who will set spies on his own son they sound like worldly prudence rather than integrity. Ophelia's few words show how little room the play gives her: her love is discussed by the men of her family as a matter of honour and market value.

This above all: to thine own self be true;

Hamlet 1.3

Polonius's last precept. In context it advises self-interest as much as sincerity.

I shall obey, my lord.

Hamlet 1.3

Ophelia's closing line. Her obedience to her father will cost her Hamlet's trust.

Read the text

Scene 4: Act I, Scene 4: Hamlet follows the Ghost

Act I, Scene 4 (the whole scene)

Summary

On the platform at midnight Hamlet, Horatio and Marcellus hear the noise of Claudius's drinking party, and Hamlet reflects that Danish drunkenness tarnishes the nation's reputation. The Ghost appears and beckons Hamlet. Horatio and Marcellus try to hold him back, fearing that it may lead him to madness or to the edge of a cliff, but he breaks free and follows. Marcellus sums up the mood.

Analysis

Hamlet's address to the Ghost is full of doubt about its nature: it may be 'a spirit of health or goblin damn'd'. This question, whether the apparition is the soul of his father or a devil in his shape, will drive the next two acts. His meditation on a single fault that can ruin a whole reputation (a passage found only in Q2) has often been read as a comment on Hamlet himself. Marcellus's famous line turns the play's imagery of disease and decay on the state itself (Wilson 1935).

Angels and ministers of grace defend us!

Hamlet 1.4

Hamlet's instinctive prayer when the Ghost appears, before he speaks to it.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

Hamlet 1.4

Marcellus's diagnosis. Rottenness and disease become a central image pattern of the play.

Read the text

Scene 5: Act I, Scene 5: The Ghost's command

Act I, Scene 5 (the whole scene)

Summary

Alone with Hamlet, the Ghost declares that he is his father's spirit, condemned for a time to walk by night and to burn by day until the sins of his life are purged. He reveals that he was not stung by a serpent while asleep in his orchard, as Denmark was told, but murdered by Claudius, who poured poison into his ear. He was killed before he could confess or receive the last rites. Claudius had also seduced Gertrude, 'my most seeming-virtuous queen'. The Ghost commands revenge but forbids Hamlet to harm his mother: he must leave her to heaven and to her conscience. As dawn approaches the Ghost departs with the words 'Remember me'.

Hamlet vows to wipe everything else from his memory. When Horatio and Marcellus find him he is wild and evasive. He makes them swear on his sword never to reveal what they have seen, while the Ghost's voice cries 'Swear' from under the stage. He warns them that he may choose to behave strangely, and ends lamenting that he was born to set the disjointed time right.

Analysis

The Ghost's description of his sufferings places him in Purgatory, a doctrine that the Church of England had rejected as a 'Romish' invention. Hamlet's oath 'by Saint Patrick', the saint whose cave in Ireland was famous as an entrance to Purgatory, points the same way. Stephen Greenblatt has argued that the play stages the cultural memory of an abolished belief, the bond between the living and the dead that Purgatory sustained (Greenblatt 2001). Protestant writers on apparitions taught instead that such spirits were angels or, more often, devils, and Hamlet's later doubts follow that teaching (Wilson 1935) (Prosser 1967).

The command itself is double: revenge, and remember. Much of the rest of the play is about what it means to remember the dead, and whether remembering can become action. Hamlet's response is to write in his 'tables', the student's notebook, that one may smile and be a villain: thought and record come before deed. The comic business with the voice in the 'cellarage' (the space under the stage, traditionally hell's mouth) is unsettling, and some critics have taken it as a hint of the diabolical.

The 'antic disposition' introduces the problem of Hamlet's madness. From this point the audience cannot always tell where performance ends and genuine disturbance begins, and the play seems to keep the question open.

Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night, And for the day confin’d to fast in fires, Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purg’d away.

Hamlet 1.5

The Ghost's account of himself, which describes Purgatory without naming it.

O my prophetic soul!

Hamlet 1.5

Hamlet's cry when Claudius is named: he had already suspected him.

That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain!

Hamlet 1.5

Hamlet's first lesson from the Ghost is about the gap between appearance and reality.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Hamlet 1.5

A rebuke to rationalist scepticism; 'your' means philosophy in general, not only Horatio's.

The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right.

Hamlet 1.5

Hamlet sees his task as the repair of a whole dislocated age, and resents it.

Read the text

Scene 6: Act II, Scene 1: Polonius's spies and Ophelia's report

Act II, Scene 1 (the whole scene)

Summary

Polonius instructs his servant Reynaldo to go to Paris and find out how Laertes is behaving, by spreading small slanders about him and watching how his acquaintances respond. Ophelia then enters, frightened. Hamlet has come to her room with his clothes in disorder, pale and trembling, has stared at her face, sighed, and left without a word. Polonius decides that Hamlet is mad with love because Ophelia has rejected him and goes to tell the King.

Analysis

The comedy of Polonius's instructions, in which he loses the thread of his own sentence, shows the court's method in miniature: truth is to be caught by indirection and bait. Ophelia's report gives us Hamlet's first appearance after the Ghost, but only at second hand. Whether the silent visit is an act, a genuine collapse or a farewell to love is left for the audience to decide, and Polonius's confident diagnosis is the least likely answer.

By indirections find directions out.

Hamlet 2.1

Polonius's motto, which could stand for the whole court's way of discovering the truth.

Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbrac’d,

Hamlet 2.1

Ophelia's description of Hamlet's disordered dress, the conventional signs of the melancholy lover.

This is the very ecstasy of love,

Hamlet 2.1

Polonius's diagnosis: 'ecstasy' here means madness.

Read the text

Scene 7: Act II, Scene 2: Spies, players and 'rogue and peasant slave'

Act II, Scene 2 (the whole scene)

Summary

Claudius and Gertrude welcome Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet's old school friends, and ask them to find out what is troubling him. The ambassadors return from Norway: the old king has restrained Fortinbras, who will now lead his army against Poland and asks safe passage through Denmark. Polonius reads out a love letter from Hamlet to Ophelia and proposes to 'loose' his daughter to Hamlet while he and the King watch in hiding.

Hamlet enters reading and baffles Polonius with insults disguised as nonsense. With Rosencrantz and Guildenstern he is warm at first, then suspicious, and forces them to admit that they were sent for. He describes his melancholy in a great prose speech on the glory and nothingness of man. They tell him that a company of actors is coming, players now losing audiences to the fashionable boy companies. Hamlet welcomes the players and asks the First Player for a speech about the killing of King Priam by Pyrrhus and the grief of Priam's queen, Hecuba. The actor weeps as he speaks.

Hamlet arranges for the players to perform The Murder of Gonzago the next night, with a short speech of his own inserted. Alone, he condemns himself for doing nothing while an actor can weep for a fictional queen. He then explains his plan: the Ghost may be a devil sent to damn him, so he will watch Claudius's face during a play that re-enacts the murder.

Analysis

This long scene is built of a series of tests, in which everyone tries to read Hamlet and Hamlet reads them in turn. His 'madness' with Polonius is pointed: 'words, words, words', the old man's daughter, the slanders of satirists on old age. Polonius himself suspects 'method' in it. The exchange about Denmark as a prison, found only in the Folio, shows how inner state and outer world mirror each other for Hamlet: 'there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so'.

The Pyrrhus speech, in an archaic, heavily ornamented style, offers Hamlet a portrait of an avenger: Pyrrhus too is avenging a father, and his sword pauses in the air before it falls. The First Player's tears provoke the second great soliloquy, in which Hamlet's self-accusation ('Am I a coward?') spills into abuse of Claudius and then of himself for cursing 'like a whore'. The soliloquy ends not with action but with a plan to test the Ghost, a rational doubt grounded in contemporary teaching about spirits (Prosser 1967).

The scene also reflects on the theatre of 1600. The passage about the 'little eyases', the children's companies who were then fashionable, appears only in the Folio. Throughout, acting is both a metaphor for hypocrisy and a means of uncovering truth.

Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.

Hamlet 2.2

Polonius's aside: even he senses purpose behind Hamlet's riddles.

Denmark’s a prison.

Hamlet 2.2

Part of a Folio-only passage. For Hamlet the court has become a place of confinement and surveillance.

What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties,

Hamlet 2.2

The opening of Hamlet's prose praise of man, which ends in the 'quintessence of dust'.

O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!

Hamlet 2.2

The second great soliloquy opens in self-reproach after the actor's performance.

The play’s the thing Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.

Hamlet 2.2

Hamlet's plan to test the Ghost's story by watching Claudius's response to a play.

Read the text

Scene 8: Act III, Scene 1: 'To be, or not to be' and the nunnery scene

Act III, Scene 1 (the whole scene)

Summary

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern report that they have learned nothing, but that Hamlet is pleased with the players. Claudius and Polonius arrange to hide while Ophelia meets Hamlet as if by chance. In an aside Claudius admits that Polonius's words have stung his conscience. Hamlet enters and, apparently unaware of Ophelia, meditates on whether it is nobler to endure suffering or to end it, and why fear of what comes after death keeps us from suicide.

Ophelia tries to return his gifts. Hamlet denies that he ever loved her, asks whether she is honest (chaste), condemns himself and all men, attacks women's painted faces, and repeatedly tells her to go to a nunnery. At one point he asks where her father is. When he leaves, Ophelia laments the ruin of his noble mind. Claudius, unconvinced that love is the cause, decides to send Hamlet to England; Polonius proposes one more test, a private talk with his mother.

Analysis

'To be, or not to be' is the most famous speech in English, and it is unusual among the soliloquies in never saying 'I'. It is a general meditation on life, death and action, often understood as a debate about suicide, though it has also been read as weighing whether to act against Claudius. Its conclusion, that 'conscience', meaning both moral scruple and consciousness, makes cowards of us all, has been central to arguments about Hamlet's delay since the Romantics (Bradley 1904). In Q1 the speech comes earlier, before the arrival of the players, and the different placing has fed debate about the shape of the play (Thompson 2006) (Lesser 2015).

The nunnery scene is one of the play's great problems in performance. Many productions have Hamlet notice the hidden watchers, which explains his question 'Where's your father?' and his cruelty, though the text gives no stage direction for it. 'Nunnery' may also have carried the slang sense of a brothel. Whatever his motive, Hamlet's disgust with his mother here falls on Ophelia, and feminist critics have stressed how she is used as bait by her father and as a target by her lover (Showalter 1985).

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Hamlet 3.1

The opening of the speech poses the question in the most abstract terms possible: existence itself.

The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn No traveller returns,

Hamlet 3.1

Death as an unknown land; 'bourn' means boundary. The line sits oddly with the returned Ghost.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

Hamlet 3.1

Thought and moral awareness inhibit action: a key text for the debate about delay.

O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!

Hamlet 3.1

Ophelia's lament for Hamlet, the only portrait we have of him as he was before the play began.

Read the text

Scene 9: Act III, Scene 2: The play within the play

Act III, Scene 2 (the whole scene)

Summary

Hamlet instructs the players to speak naturally and not to overact. He tells Horatio what the Ghost revealed and asks him to watch the King. The court assembles; Hamlet lies at Ophelia's feet, teasing her with obscene puns. A dumb show mimes the whole plot: a king poisoned in his garden by a man who then wins the queen. The spoken play follows. The Player Queen swears she will never remarry, and the Player King doubts her. Hamlet asks his mother how she likes the play. When the murderer Lucianus, 'nephew to the king', pours poison in the sleeper's ear, Claudius rises and calls for lights, and the performance breaks up.

Hamlet is jubilant and declares he will take the Ghost's word 'for a thousand pound'. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern bring word that his mother wants to see him. Hamlet offers Guildenstern a recorder and, when he says he cannot play it, rebukes him for trying to play upon Hamlet himself. Alone, Hamlet works himself up for the night and resolves to speak 'daggers' to his mother but use none.

Analysis

Hamlet's advice to the players states an ideal of acting as holding a mirror up to nature, but the scene that follows is anything but natural: a dumb show, a rhyming play in an old-fashioned style, and a prince acting as a commentator. The play within the play is a test of conscience, but it is also aimed at Gertrude: much of The Murder of Gonzago is about a wife's faithfulness.

Why does Claudius not react to the dumb show, which shows the murder plainly? W. W. Greg used the problem to argue that Claudius did not murder his brother in the way the Ghost describes, and that the Ghost's story may be Hamlet's hallucination; John Dover Wilson replied that the King was not watching (Greg 1917) (Wilson 1935). It is also notable that Hamlet makes the murderer the king's nephew: the court may see a threat from Hamlet to Claudius as easily as a confession by Claudius.

Hamlet's praise of Horatio as a man who is not 'passion's slave' shows the ideal of Stoic balance that Hamlet himself cannot reach. The recorder episode returns to the theme of being 'played upon': the spies treat him as an instrument, and he insists on the mystery of the self.

to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature;

Hamlet 3.2

Hamlet's theory of acting, often taken as a statement of Shakespeare's own aims.

Give me that man That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him In my heart’s core,

Hamlet 3.2

Hamlet's tribute to Horatio, the friend governed by reason.

The lady protests too much, methinks.

Hamlet 3.2

Gertrude's response to the Player Queen's vows. 'Protest' means vow, not object.

Give me some light. Away.

Hamlet 3.2

Claudius halts the play; for Hamlet this is proof of guilt.

I will speak daggers to her, but use none;

Hamlet 3.2

Hamlet remembers the Ghost's command to spare his mother.

Read the text

Scene 10: Act III, Scene 3: Claudius at prayer

Act III, Scene 3 (the whole scene)

Summary

Claudius orders Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to take Hamlet to England, and Polonius goes to hide behind the arras in Gertrude's room. Alone, Claudius confesses his brother's murder and tries to pray, but knows he cannot be forgiven while he keeps the crown, his ambition and his queen. He kneels. Hamlet enters, sees him praying, and draws his sword, but decides that to kill Claudius at prayer would send his soul to heaven, while his own father died unprepared. He will wait for a moment when Claudius is drunk, angry or in bed, and leaves. Claudius rises: his prayer has failed.

Analysis

This is the only moment in the play where Claudius is clearly shown to be guilty, and it comes only after Hamlet's test. His soliloquy is a precise piece of Christian moral reasoning: he cannot be pardoned and 'retain th'offence'. Hamlet's reasoning is the opposite: he wants to damn his enemy's soul as well as kill his body. Samuel Johnson found this speech too horrible to be read or spoken. Some critics think Hamlet is rationalising another delay; others take his motive at face value as the logic of revenge (Bradley 1904) (Prosser 1967). The dramatic irony is complete: the prayer Hamlet fears will save Claudius has already failed.

O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven;

Hamlet 3.3

Claudius's confession, using the imagery of rottenness that runs through the play.

Now might I do it pat, now he is praying.

Hamlet 3.3

Hamlet's opportunity, which he refuses for theological reasons.

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

Hamlet 3.3

Claudius's closing couplet reveals the irony of Hamlet's decision.

Read the text

Scene 11: Act III, Scene 4: The closet scene

Act III, Scene 4 (the whole scene)

Summary

Polonius hides behind the arras in the Queen's private room ('closet'). Hamlet enters and answers his mother's rebukes with accusations. When he seizes her she cries for help, Polonius calls out, and Hamlet stabs through the arras, hoping it is the King. Finding Polonius, he calls him a 'wretched, rash, intruding fool' and turns back to Gertrude. He accuses her of a deed 'almost as bad' as killing a king and marrying his brother, which she does not seem to understand.

Hamlet compares portraits of his father and Claudius and attacks her sexuality in violent terms. The Ghost appears, visible only to Hamlet, to 'whet' his 'almost blunted purpose' and to ask him to comfort his mother. Gertrude, who sees nothing, thinks he is mad. Hamlet insists that he is not and begs her to confess, to avoid Claudius's bed and not to betray that his madness is feigned. She agrees. He tells her he must go to England and that he distrusts his schoolfellows, and drags out Polonius's body.

Analysis

The killing of Polonius is the turning point of the action: it is Hamlet's first deed, and it is rash, mistaken and unrepented. It makes him a murderer and gives Laertes the same cause for revenge that Hamlet has against Claudius. Hamlet's line about killing a king is the only time Gertrude is directly accused of knowledge of the murder, and her bewildered reply suggests she had none. Q1 is more explicit: there the Queen swears she never knew of the murder and promises to help Hamlet, and the Ghost enters in his 'night gown' (Thompson 2006).

Hamlet's obsessive language about his mother's sexuality has been central to psychoanalytic readings, and Olivier's 1948 film staged the scene in a bedroom on the basis of Ernest Jones's Oedipal reading (Jones 1949). Feminist critics have read it differently: Janet Adelman sees in the scene Hamlet's attempt to purify the mother and the maternal body, and Carolyn Heilbrun argued that Gertrude is a stronger, more intelligent woman than criticism had allowed (Adelman 1992) (Heilbrun 1957). Why Gertrude cannot see the Ghost is never explained; possibilities include a spirit's power to choose who sees it, Gertrude's moral blindness, and Hamlet's hallucination.

Mother, you have my father much offended.

Hamlet 3.4

Hamlet mirrors Gertrude's line, which means Claudius, to mean his dead father.

How now? A rat?

Hamlet 3.4

Hamlet's first act of violence is blind and impulsive.

A bloody deed. Almost as bad, good mother, As kill a king and marry with his brother.

Hamlet 3.4

The play's only direct accusation that Gertrude was involved in the murder; she seems not to understand it.

I must be cruel, only to be kind:

Hamlet 3.4

Hamlet justifies his harshness to his mother as moral medicine.

Read the text

Scene 12: Act IV, Scene 1: Gertrude reports the killing

Act IV, Scene 1 (the whole scene)

Summary

Gertrude tells Claudius that Hamlet, in a fit of madness, has killed Polonius and now weeps for what he has done. Claudius sees that he himself would have been the victim, worries about how to explain the killing to the people, and sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to find Hamlet and the body.

Analysis

Gertrude keeps her promise: she presents Hamlet as truly mad, and her claim that he weeps over the body is unsupported by what we have seen. Claudius's first concern is for himself and for public opinion. In the Folio this short scene follows directly on the closet scene without a break, and the act division here is an editors' convention.

Mad as the sea and wind, when both contend Which is the mightier.

Hamlet 4.1

Gertrude's description of Hamlet, which protects him by confirming the madness he asked her to keep secret was feigned.

Read the text

Scene 13: Act IV, Scene 2: Hamlet hides the body

Act IV, Scene 2 (the whole scene)

Summary

Hamlet has hidden Polonius's body. When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern demand to know where it is, he mocks them as sponges who soak up the King's favour and will be squeezed dry, and then runs off.

Analysis

Hamlet's riddles in prose are cruel but lucid. His remark about the King and the body plays on the doctrine of the king's two bodies, the mortal man and the undying office, and hints that Claudius's body will soon be separated from the kingship.

The body is with the King, but the King is not with the body.

Hamlet 4.2

A riddle on the king's natural and political bodies.

Read the text

Scene 14: Act IV, Scene 3: 'At supper'

Act IV, Scene 3 (the whole scene)

Summary

Claudius explains that he cannot punish Hamlet openly because the people love him. Hamlet is brought in and tells the King that Polonius is at supper, 'not where he eats, but where he is eaten', by worms. He describes how a king may pass through the guts of a beggar, and finally reveals where the body is. Claudius tells him he must leave for England at once. Alone, Claudius reveals that his letters order the English king to put Hamlet to death.

Analysis

Hamlet's meditation on the worm is a grotesque version of the medieval theme that death levels all ranks, and it anticipates the graveyard scene. Claudius's soliloquy confirms that he has moved from guilt to new murder: he compares Hamlet to a fever ('the hectic') raging in his blood and sees killing him as the cure.

A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.

Hamlet 4.3

Hamlet's lesson to Claudius on the progress of a king through a beggar.

Diseases desperate grown By desperate appliance are reliev’d, Or not at all.

Hamlet 4.3

Claudius uses the play's language of disease to justify killing Hamlet.

Read the text

Scene 15: Act IV, Scene 4: Fortinbras's army and 'How all occasions'

Act IV, Scene 4 (the whole scene)

Summary

Fortinbras and his army cross Denmark on their way to Poland. Hamlet, on his way to the ship, learns from a Captain that they are going to fight for a patch of ground not worth five ducats. Alone, he contrasts the readiness of thousands to die for an eggshell with his own failure to act when he has every cause, and ends by vowing that his thoughts will be bloody.

Analysis

The soliloquy appears only in Q2: in the Folio the scene is a few lines long and Hamlet does not appear. It is the clearest statement of Fortinbras's role as Hamlet's foil, the man of action who does not stop to think. Yet the comparison is ambiguous. Hamlet sees the absurdity of the Polish war even as he admires it, and his conclusion, that true greatness is to fight for honour even over a straw, is a strange lesson to draw (de Grazia 2007). He has no means of acting now, since he is being sent out of Denmark, and he will not speak of revenge again in this way.

How all occasions do inform against me, And spur my dull revenge.

Hamlet 4.4

Hamlet's last soliloquy, found only in Q2, again accuses himself of delay.

My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth.

Hamlet 4.4

The resolution is for thoughts, not deeds.

Read the text

Scene 16: Act IV, Scene 5: Ophelia's madness and Laertes' return

Act IV, Scene 5 (the whole scene)

Summary

A Gentleman reports that Ophelia has gone mad. She enters singing fragments of ballads about a dead man and a seduced maid. Claudius blames her father's death and lists the troubles that have come together. Laertes bursts in with a mob that calls for him to be king and demands his father. Claudius calms him, insisting that he is innocent. Ophelia returns and distributes flowers and herbs, each with a meaning. Laertes is overwhelmed; Claudius promises him satisfaction.

Analysis

Ophelia's madness contrasts with Hamlet's: his is verbal, witty and possibly performed; hers is expressed through songs, flowers and broken speech, and it is real. Her songs mix grief for a father with sexual knowledge that shocks the court. Elaine Showalter has traced how Ophelia became, in painting, psychiatry and the theatre, the model of female madness, and has asked what it would mean to tell her story rather than Hamlet's (Showalter 1985).

Laertes is the conventional avenger that Hamlet is not: he acts at once, in public, and says he would cut his father's murderer's throat in a church. His rebellion shows how fragile Claudius's rule is, and Claudius's appeal to the 'divinity' that protects kings is grimly ironic from a king-killer.

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, But in battalions.

Hamlet 4.5

Claudius's summary of the disasters, in a military image.

There’s such divinity doth hedge a king,

Hamlet 4.5

The murderer of a king appeals to the sanctity of kingship.

There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray love, remember.

Hamlet 4.5

Ophelia's flowers return to the play's theme of remembering the dead.

Read the text

Scene 17: Act IV, Scene 6: Hamlet's letter to Horatio

Act IV, Scene 6 (the whole scene)

Summary

Sailors bring Horatio a letter from Hamlet. Pirates attacked his ship; in the fight Hamlet boarded their vessel and was taken prisoner. The pirates have treated him well, expecting a favour in return, and have brought him back to Denmark. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sail on to England.

Analysis

The pirate episode is told, not shown, and its improbable good luck has puzzled critics. It frees Hamlet from Claudius's trap without any plan of his own, and prepares for his later sense that the world is governed by providence rather than by his own designs.

They have dealt with me like thieves of mercy.

Hamlet 4.6

Hamlet's paradox for the pirates, who prove kinder than the court.

Read the text

Scene 18: Act IV, Scene 7: The plot against Hamlet; Ophelia's death

Act IV, Scene 7 (the whole scene)

Summary

Claudius convinces Laertes that Hamlet killed Polonius and explains why he did not punish him: the Queen loves him and the people would take his side. A letter arrives announcing that Hamlet is back in Denmark. Claudius devises a fencing match in which Laertes will use an unblunted foil; Laertes adds that he will dip it in a deadly poison, and Claudius prepares a poisoned drink in case the sword fails. Gertrude enters and describes how Ophelia fell from a willow into a brook and drowned, singing, as her clothes grew heavy with water.

Analysis

Claudius manipulates Laertes with skill, questioning whether his grief is real in the same way Hamlet questioned his own. Laertes' readiness to kill Hamlet 'i' th' church' shows a revenge without limits, the opposite of Hamlet's scruple at Claudius's prayer. Gertrude's description of the drowning is an elaborate set piece: it leaves open whether Ophelia's death was an accident or suicide, the question the gravediggers and the priest will raise. The passage inspired many nineteenth-century paintings, most famously John Everett Millais's Ophelia (Showalter 1985).

To cut his throat i’ th’ church.

Hamlet 4.7

Laertes' answer to what he would do to prove himself his father's son.

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,

Hamlet 4.7

The start of Gertrude's account of Ophelia's drowning.

Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia, And therefore I forbid my tears.

Hamlet 4.7

Laertes' grief is expressed in a characteristically elaborate conceit.

Read the text

Scene 19: Act V, Scene 1: The graveyard

Act V, Scene 1 (the whole scene)

Summary

Two gravediggers (called 'clowns' in the early texts) debate whether the woman whose grave they are digging deserves Christian burial, since she may have drowned herself, and agree that she would not get it if she were not a gentlewoman. Hamlet and Horatio arrive. Hamlet wonders whose skulls the gravedigger throws up: a politician's, a courtier's, a lawyer's. The gravedigger tells him he took up his trade on the day young Hamlet was born and shows him the skull of Yorick, the King's jester, who carried Hamlet on his back when he was a child. Hamlet reflects that even Alexander the Great returned to dust.

A funeral procession enters with 'maimed rites'. The priest says that Ophelia's death was doubtful and that she is given more ceremony than she deserves. Hamlet learns whose funeral it is. Laertes leaps into the grave to embrace his sister; Hamlet comes forward, declares himself 'Hamlet the Dane', and leaps in too. They grapple and are separated. Hamlet claims that he loved Ophelia more than forty thousand brothers, then leaves. Claudius reminds Laertes of their plan.

Analysis

The scene is the play's great meditation on death, conducted largely in prose and comedy. The gravedigger's legal jokes parody the coroner's law on suicide, and his indifference to rank anticipates Hamlet's own levelling thoughts. The details of his service suggest that Hamlet is thirty years old, an age that sits awkwardly with the university student of Act I; the inconsistency is one of many in the play's handling of time.

Holding Yorick's skull, Hamlet confronts mortality not as an abstract idea, as in 'To be, or not to be', but as a physical fact, and his tone has changed: he is calm, even amused. His naming of himself 'the Dane', the title of a king, marks a new self-assertion. His leap into the grave is often seen as a sign of real grief, and also as a theatrical rivalry with Laertes, whose grief he dismisses as rant.

Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest,

Hamlet 5.1

The most famous image of the play: the prince with the jester's skull.

Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.

Hamlet 5.1

Hamlet's rhyme on the fate of great men.

Sweets to the sweet. Farewell.

Hamlet 5.1

Gertrude scatters flowers on Ophelia's grave and reveals that she had hoped Ophelia would marry Hamlet.

I lov’d Ophelia; forty thousand brothers Could not, with all their quantity of love, Make up my sum.

Hamlet 5.1

Hamlet's only direct declaration of love for Ophelia, made at her grave.

Read the text

Scene 20: Act V, Scene 2: The duel and the deaths

Act V, Scene 2 (the whole scene)

Summary

Hamlet tells Horatio how, unable to sleep on the ship, he opened Claudius's commission, found the order for his death, forged a new one ordering the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and sealed it with his father's signet. He feels no guilt for them. The affected courtier Osric brings a wager from the King on a fencing match between Hamlet and Laertes. Hamlet has misgivings but accepts, saying that 'the readiness is all'.

Before the match Hamlet asks Laertes' pardon, blaming his madness. In the second bout Gertrude drinks from the poisoned cup to Hamlet's health. Laertes wounds Hamlet with the poisoned sword; in a scuffle the weapons are exchanged and Hamlet wounds Laertes. Gertrude dies crying that she has been poisoned. Laertes confesses the plot and accuses the King. Hamlet stabs Claudius with the poisoned sword and forces him to drink the rest of the cup. Laertes and Hamlet exchange forgiveness. Hamlet stops Horatio from drinking the poison too and asks him to tell his story. He gives his dying vote to Fortinbras and dies. Fortinbras arrives with English ambassadors who announce that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. Fortinbras claims the kingdom and orders that Hamlet be carried off like a soldier, to the sound of a salute.

Analysis

The Hamlet of the final scene is changed. He speaks of a divinity that shapes our ends and of a 'special providence' in the fall of a sparrow, echoing Matthew 10:29. Critics debate whether this is Christian faith, Stoic acceptance or a fatalism that excuses his lack of a plan. The revenge, when it comes, is not something Hamlet engineers; it is improvised in response to the treachery of others, and it kills nearly everyone on stage (Bradley 1904) (Kerrigan 1996).

The Folio adds a short passage in which Hamlet tells Horatio that 'the interim is mine', and shows more remorse about Laertes. Hamlet's last words, 'the rest is silence', stop the flow of language that has defined him, and Horatio's farewell offers him the angels that the Ghost's Purgatory had made uncertain. Fortinbras's arrival closes the frame opened in 1.1: the son of the king old Hamlet killed now takes the throne, without a blow. The ending can be staged as the restoration of order or as a foreign takeover of a ruined state (de Grazia 2007).

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will.

Hamlet 5.2

Hamlet's new sense that providence, not his own planning, governs events.

The readiness is all.

Hamlet 5.2

Hamlet's acceptance of death: what matters is being prepared, not choosing the moment.

Absent thee from felicity awhile,

Hamlet 5.2

Hamlet asks Horatio to live and tell his story, even though death would be bliss.

Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Hamlet 5.2

Horatio's farewell gives Hamlet the blessing his father never received.

Go, bid the soldiers shoot.

Hamlet 5.2

The last line of the play: Fortinbras's order for a military salute.

Read the text

Characters

Royal family

Hamlet: Prince of Denmark, son of the dead king and of Gertrude, recently a student at Wittenberg. Brilliant, witty, melancholy and self-critical, he is charged by the Ghost with revenge and spends most of the play testing, doubting and delaying. He plays the madman, kills Polonius by mistake, sends two old friends to their deaths, and finally kills Claudius in a scene he does not plan. He has the longest role in Shakespeare, and his soliloquies have made him the image of the reflective modern mind.
Claudius: Hamlet's uncle, who murdered his brother, took the crown and married the widowed queen. He is an efficient, eloquent ruler and a skilled manipulator, who tries to repent and finds he cannot. He spies on Hamlet, sends him to die in England, and plots with Laertes to kill him. His soliloquy at prayer is one of the few moments when we see into his mind.
Gertrude: Queen of Denmark, Hamlet's mother, who married Claudius within two months of her husband's death. The play never makes clear whether she knew of the murder, and after the closet scene she appears to protect her son. She drinks the poisoned cup, possibly knowingly, after Claudius tells her not to.
The Ghost: The spirit of Hamlet's father, King Hamlet, who appears in armour and tells his son that he was murdered. He speaks of his sufferings in a place like Purgatory and commands revenge. Hamlet doubts whether he is a true ghost or a devil; tradition holds that Shakespeare himself played the part.

Polonius's family

Polonius: The Lord Chamberlain, a garrulous and pedantic old counsellor who believes Hamlet is mad for love of his daughter. He spies on everyone, including his own son, and is killed by Hamlet while hiding behind the arras in the Queen's room. In Q1 he is called Corambis.
Ophelia: Polonius's daughter, loved by Hamlet, whom she rejects on her father's orders. Used as bait in the nunnery scene and humiliated at the play, she goes mad after her father's death and drowns. Her songs and flowers make her one of the most painted and discussed figures in the play.
Laertes: Polonius's son, a young man of fashion who lives in Paris. When his father is killed he returns to lead a rebellion and agrees to Claudius's treacherous plan. He is a foil to Hamlet: a son with a dead father to avenge who acts without hesitation. Dying, he confesses and exchanges forgiveness with Hamlet.
Reynaldo: Polonius's servant, sent to spy on Laertes in Paris.

Friends

Horatio: Hamlet's friend from Wittenberg, a sceptical scholar and a man of balance and loyalty. He sees the Ghost, watches the King during the play, and survives to tell Hamlet's story.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Hamlet's school friends, summoned by Claudius to spy on him. They are almost interchangeable, and they escort Hamlet to England with the letter ordering his death. Hamlet rewrites it, and they are executed in his place.

Norway

Fortinbras: Prince of Norway, whose father was killed by old King Hamlet. He first threatens Denmark, then leads an army against Poland, and arrives at the end to claim the Danish throne. He is a foil to Hamlet as a decisive man of action.

The watch

Marcellus, Barnardo and Francisco: Officers and soldiers of the guard. Marcellus and Barnardo see the Ghost and bring Horatio to watch.

The court

Voltemand and Cornelius: Ambassadors sent by Claudius to the King of Norway.
Osric: An affected young courtier who brings the challenge for the fencing match and acts as judge. Hamlet mocks his elaborate language.

Players

The Players: A company of travelling actors from the city, whom Hamlet knows and admires. The First Player's speech about Pyrrhus and Hecuba moves Hamlet to his second soliloquy, and the company performs The Murder of Gonzago.

Graveyard

The Gravediggers: Two clowns who dig Ophelia's grave. The first, witty and unimpressed by rank, talks with Hamlet and shows him Yorick's skull.
The Priest: The cleric who conducts Ophelia's 'maimed rites' and says she has received more ceremony than her doubtful death deserves.

Themes

Revenge and justice

The play is a revenge tragedy that questions revenge. The Ghost demands it as a son's duty, and the conventions of the genre support him, but Christian teaching reserved vengeance to God, and Hamlet's own doubts about the Ghost make the duty uncertain. The play sets three sons beside one another: Hamlet, who hesitates; Laertes, who rushes to revenge and is corrupted by it; and Fortinbras, who renounces his father's claim and inherits a kingdom anyway (Bowers 1940) (Prosser 1967).

When the revenge comes it is not the controlled, public act of justice Hamlet wanted. It happens by accident, after his own death is certain, and it is made possible only by the King's treachery. Whether the ending fulfils or undermines revenge depends on how much weight one gives Hamlet's last speeches about providence (Kerrigan 1996).

Seeming and being

From Hamlet's 'I know not seems' the play is concerned with the difference between appearances and reality. Claudius smiles and is a villain; Polonius uses indirection; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern pretend friendship; Hamlet himself puts on madness. Acting is a figure for falsehood, but the actors are also the means by which the truth comes out.

This theme connects with the play's interest in the inner self. Hamlet claims to have 'that within which passeth show', an inwardness that cannot be performed, and his soliloquies seem to give us access to it. Critics have debated whether this represents something new in English drama or a later reading of the text (Belsey 1985) (Maus 1995) (de Grazia 2007).

Death and mortality

Hamlet is a play about the dead and their claim on the living. It opens with a ghost and ends with a stage full of bodies. In between, Hamlet thinks about suicide, the afterlife and the fate of the body: from the 'undiscover'd country' of 'To be, or not to be' to the worms who feast on Polonius and the skull of Yorick. The progression from abstract dread to calm acceptance in Act V is one of the play's main arcs.

Madness

Hamlet announces that he will play mad, and much of his 'madness' is pointed wit. But his behaviour with Ophelia and his mother, and his own words about his melancholy, leave room to think that the performance is not only a performance. Ophelia's madness, by contrast, is real and has no strategy. The play uses madness to speak truths that cannot be spoken in a court, and to raise the question of how anyone can know another's mind (Bradley 1904) (Showalter 1985).

Corruption of the state

The crime at the centre of the play is political as well as private: a king murdered by his brother. The images of rot, disease, poison and an 'unweeded garden' link the moral corruption of the court to the health of the whole kingdom. Claudius rules competently, but the play suggests that a state founded on a hidden crime cannot be healthy, and it ends with the crown passing to a foreign prince (Mack 1952).

Women, sexuality and the mother

The two women of the play are seen largely through the eyes of men. Hamlet's revulsion at his mother's remarriage colours his attitude to Ophelia and to women in general, and his language about Gertrude's body is obsessive. Psychoanalytic critics have seen in this an Oedipal crisis, and feminist critics have explored how the play makes women bear the burden of male anxieties about origin, contamination and loss (Jones 1949) (Adelman 1992) (Rose 1985).

Motifs

Disease and rottenness

Denmark is 'rotten', Claudius's offence 'smells to heaven', Hamlet's mind is sick, and Claudius calls Hamlet 'the hectic in my blood'. The language of hidden infection, 'rank corruption, mining all within' and diseases that need desperate cures, connects private sin and public disorder.

Ears and poison

The murder is committed by poison in the ear, and the play is full of ears that are abused: Denmark's ear is deceived with a false story, Claudius poisons Laertes' ear against Hamlet, and the climax uses poison in a cup and on a sword. Words themselves are a kind of poison.

Spying and watching

Almost everyone watches someone else. Polonius sends Reynaldo after Laertes, hides to watch Hamlet and Ophelia, and dies spying in Gertrude's room; Claudius uses Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; Hamlet and Horatio watch Claudius during the play. The play's audience joins in this watching.

Remembrance

The Ghost's command 'Remember me' echoes through the play: in Hamlet's tables, in the brevity of Gertrude's mourning, in Ophelia's rosemary 'for remembrance', in Yorick's skull, and in Hamlet's last request that Horatio tell his story (Greenblatt 2001).

Acting and the theatre

The players, Hamlet's advice to them, the Pyrrhus speech, the play within the play, the 'antic disposition' and the fencing match staged as a court entertainment all make the play reflect on its own medium.

Symbols

The Ghost

The Ghost stands for the claims of the past on the present, and for everything uncertain in the play: is it a father's soul, a devil, or something in Hamlet's own mind? It is seen by soldiers in Act I, but only by Hamlet in the closet scene.

Yorick's skull

The skull of the jester who carried Hamlet as a child is the play's emblem of mortality, the memento mori in which laughter and death meet. It replaces the Ghost as the image of the dead: silent, physical, harmless.

Ophelia's flowers

The herbs and flowers that Ophelia gives away carry traditional meanings: rosemary for remembrance, pansies for thoughts, fennel and columbines (often linked with flattery and infidelity), rue for sorrow and repentance, and violets, for faithfulness, which 'wither'd all' when her father died.

The Mousetrap

Hamlet's name for The Murder of Gonzago turns the play into a trap for the King's conscience, and makes it a symbol of the power of fiction to reveal the truth.

The poisoned cup and sword

The instruments of the final scene return the play to the poison of the first murder. Both turn against their makers: Claudius's cup kills the Queen and then the King himself, and Laertes is wounded with his own blade.

Critical debates

Q1, Q2 and the Folio: which Hamlet?

Because the three early texts differ so much, there is no single Hamlet. The traditional view held that Q2 was printed from Shakespeare's draft, the Folio from a later theatrical version, and Q1 from a pirate's memorial reconstruction, perhaps by the actor who played Marcellus. Editors from the eighteenth century onwards combined Q2 and F into one long text (Jenkins 1982) (Edwards 1985).

From the 1980s scholars began to see the texts as versions of a play revised over time. Paul Werstine questioned the confidence of the narratives that editors told about the texts, and the Arden Third Series edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (2006) printed Q2, Q1 and F as three separate plays. Zachary Lesser has shown how the rediscovery of Q1 in 1823 changed what the play was taken to be (Werstine 1988) (Thompson 2006) (Lesser 2015).

Why does Hamlet delay?

The question was first made central by the Romantics. Goethe saw in Hamlet a sensitive soul crushed by a task too great for it; Coleridge saw a mind in which thought overbalances action. A. C. Bradley rejected these explanations and argued that Hamlet suffers from a deep melancholy brought on by his mother's remarriage, which paralyses his will (Bradley 1904).

Others have denied that the delay needs a psychological explanation. Some have pointed to external obstacles, such as Claudius's guards and the need for proof; others to the conventions of revenge tragedy, in which the revenger always waits until the final act. Eleanor Prosser argued that Hamlet's hesitation is a moral recoil from a duty that his religion condemned (Prosser 1967) (Bowers 1940).

Eliot and the 'objective correlative'

In an essay of 1919, collected in The Sacred Wood (1920), T. S. Eliot called the play an artistic failure. He argued that art expresses emotion through an 'objective correlative', a set of objects, a situation or a chain of events that evokes the emotion in the reader, and that Hamlet's disgust exceeds anything in the facts as presented, especially in Gertrude, who is too negligible a figure to justify it (Eliot 1920).

The essay was influential because it moved criticism away from the study of Hamlet as a person to the play as a construction. It has also been criticised for its dismissive account of Gertrude: Jacqueline Rose argued that Eliot's complaint repeats Hamlet's own fear of the woman who cannot be fully explained (Rose 1985).

Freud, Jones and the Oedipal Hamlet

In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud suggested that Hamlet cannot kill Claudius because Claudius has done what Hamlet unconsciously wanted to do: kill his father and possess his mother. His disciple Ernest Jones developed the idea in an essay of 1910 and in the book Hamlet and Oedipus (1949) (Freud 1900) (Jones 1949).

The Oedipal reading shaped performances, most famously Laurence Olivier's 1948 film. Critics have objected that it treats a character as if he were a patient with a childhood, but later psychoanalytic and feminist work, such as Janet Adelman's, has shifted the focus from Hamlet's repressed desires to the play's fantasies about the maternal body (Adelman 1992).

The Ghost: soul in Purgatory or devil?

The Ghost describes Purgatory, which the Church of England had rejected, while Hamlet, the Wittenberg student, fears it may be a devil, as Protestant writers on apparitions taught. John Dover Wilson argued that an Elizabethan audience would have recognised these competing theologies; Eleanor Prosser went further and argued that the Ghost is demonic, leading Hamlet towards damnation (Wilson 1935) (Prosser 1967).

Stephen Greenblatt read the play as a work of mourning for the abolished doctrine of Purgatory and the rituals that connected the living with the dead. W. W. Greg had earlier suggested that the Ghost's story may be Hamlet's hallucination (Greenblatt 2001) (Greg 1917).

Gertrude and Ophelia: feminist readings

For a long time Gertrude was read as weak and sensual, and Ophelia as a pathetic victim. Carolyn Heilbrun's essay of 1957 argued that Gertrude is intelligent and articulate, and that the traditional view reflects the prejudices of critics. Elaine Showalter traced the representation of Ophelia in art, psychiatry and theatre and asked how a feminist criticism should tell her story (Heilbrun 1957) (Showalter 1985).

Janet Adelman argued that Hamlet's revulsion at his mother's sexuality expresses a fantasy of maternal contamination that shapes Shakespeare's later tragedies, and Jacqueline Rose read the critical tradition's anxiety about Gertrude as a symptom of the same fantasy (Adelman 1992) (Rose 1985).

Inwardness, history and new historicism

Since the Romantics, Hamlet has been read as the first fully modern individual, defined by an inner life that 'passeth show'. Catherine Belsey argued that the play stands at the moment when the modern subject was being formed, while Katharine Eisaman Maus showed that ideas of inwardness were already current in the period, often linked to religious and legal anxieties about hidden truth (Belsey 1985) (Maus 1995).

New historicist and historicist critics have tried to place the play in its own world: the religious changes of the Reformation, the uncertainties of the succession, the institutions of the theatre. Greenblatt's account of Purgatory is one example; Margreta de Grazia's Hamlet without Hamlet argues that the play is concerned above all with land, inheritance and dispossession, and that the focus on Hamlet's mind is a modern invention (Greenblatt 2001) (de Grazia 2007).

Key passages

Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not seems.

Hamlet · Hamlet 1.2

Hamlet's reply to his mother sets out the theme of seeming and being: he will not accept that grief can be merely a show.

The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right.

Hamlet · Hamlet 1.5

Hamlet's reaction to the Ghost's command. He sees revenge not as a personal act but as the repair of a disordered world, a burden he resents.

The play’s the thing Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.

Hamlet · Hamlet 2.2

The end of the 'rogue and peasant slave' soliloquy: Hamlet turns from self-reproach to a plan, using theatre to test the Ghost.

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Hamlet · Hamlet 3.1

The opening of the play's most famous soliloquy, a meditation on whether to endure life's sufferings or to end them, and on what fear of death does to action.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

Hamlet · Hamlet 3.1

Conscience here means both moral scruple and reflective consciousness. The line has been central to discussions of Hamlet's delay.

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

Claudius · Hamlet 3.3

Claudius admits that his prayer is empty, just after Hamlet has spared him for fear that the prayer would save his soul.

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, But in battalions.

Claudius · Hamlet 4.5

Claudius's response to Ophelia's madness, as disasters accumulate after the death of Polonius.

Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest,

Hamlet · Hamlet 5.1

Hamlet recognises the skull of the jester he knew as a child: the play's most direct confrontation with physical death.

There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.

Hamlet · Hamlet 5.2

Hamlet's acceptance of providence before the duel, echoing Matthew 10:29. It marks his changed state of mind in Act V.

The rest is silence.

Hamlet · Hamlet 5.2

Hamlet's last words. The most eloquent character in Shakespeare ends in silence, leaving Horatio to tell his story.

Questions for study

What does the first scene establish before Hamlet appears, and how does the end of the play return to it?
Think of the questions, the watchers, the Ghost, and the story of Fortinbras's father.
Compare Hamlet's first two soliloquies (1.2 and 2.2). What has changed between them?
Consider the object of his anger and the role of the Ghost's revelation.
Is Hamlet's madness feigned, real, or both?
Compare his behaviour with Polonius, Ophelia and his mother with his scenes with Horatio, and compare him with Ophelia in 4.5.
Why does Hamlet delay? Assess at least two of the explanations critics have offered.
Bradley's melancholy, Coleridge's excess of thought, the need for proof, the conventions of revenge tragedy, Freud's Oedipal reading.
What does the Ghost's account of the afterlife tell us about the religious world of the play?
Look at the language of purging in 1.5 and Hamlet's fear in 2.2 that the spirit may be a devil.
How does the play within the play work, and on whom?
Consider the dumb show, the Player Queen's vows, and Hamlet's choice to make the murderer the king's nephew.
How is Gertrude presented? Did she know about the murder?
Look closely at the closet scene, at 4.1, at her account of Ophelia's death, and at her death in 5.2.
What is Ophelia's role in the play, and how might a feminist reading change our view of her?
Consider how her father, brother and Hamlet speak to her, and the songs and flowers of 4.5.
How do Laertes and Fortinbras serve as foils to Hamlet?
Each has a dead father. How does each respond, and what does each gain or lose?
How has Hamlet changed by Act V, and is the change a resolution of the play's problems?
Look at the graveyard, his account of the sea voyage, and the lines on providence and readiness.