Why is Hamlet the most famous English artwork of the past millennium? Is it a sexist text? Why does Hamlet speak in prose? Why must he die? Does Hamlet depict revenge, or justice? How did the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, transform into a story about a son dealing with the death of a father? Did Shakespeare know Aristotle’s theory of tragedy? How did our literary icon, Shakespeare, see his literary icons, Homer and Virgil? Why is there so much comedy in Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy? Why is love a force of evil in the play? Did Shakespeare believe there’s a divinity that shapes our ends? How did he define virtue? What did he think about psychology? politics? philosophy? What was Shakespeare’s image of himself as an author? What can he, arguably the greatest writer of all time, teach us about our own writing? What was his theory of literature? Why do people like Hamlet ? How do the Hamlet haters of today compare to those of yesteryears? Is it dangerous for our children to read a play that’s all about suicide?
These are some of the questions asked in this book, a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet stemming from my time teaching the play every semester in my Why Shakespeare? course at Harvard University. During this time, I saw a series of bright young minds from wildly diverse backgrounds find their footing in Hamlet, and it taught me a lot about how Shakespeare’s tragedy works, and why it remains with us in the modern world. Beyond ghosts, revenge, and tragedy, Hamlet is a play about being in college, being in love, gender, misogyny, friendship, theater, philosophy, theology, injustice, loss, comedy, depression, death, self-doubt, mental illness, white privilege, overbearing parents, existential angst, international politics, the classics, the afterlife, and the meaning of it all.
These essays grow from the central paradox of the play: it helps us understand the world we live in, yet we don't really understand the text itself very well. For all the attention given to Hamlet , there’s no consensus on the big questions—how it works, why it grips people so fiercely, what it’s about. These essays pose first-order questions about what happens in Hamlet and why, mobilizing answers for reflections on life, making the essays both highly textual and highly theoretical.
Each semester that I taught the play, I would write a new essay about Hamlet . They were meant to be models for students, the sort of essay that undergrads read and write – more rigorous than the puff pieces in the popular press, but riskier than the scholarship in most academic journals. While I later added scholarly outerwear, these pieces all began just like the essays I was assigning to students – as short close readings with a reader and a text and a desire to determine meaning when faced with a puzzling question or problem.
The turn from text to context in recent scholarly books about Hamlet is quizzical since we still don’t have a strong sense of, to quote the title of John Dover Wilson’s 1935 book, What Happens in Hamlet. Is the ghost real? Is Hamlet mad, or just faking? Why does he delay? These are the kinds of questions students love to ask, but they haven’t been – can’t be – answered by reading the play in the context of its sources (recently addressed in Laurie Johnson’s The Tain of Hamlet [2013]), its multiple texts (analyzed by Paul Menzer in The Hamlets [2008] and Zachary Lesser in Hamlet after Q1 [2015]), the Protestant reformation (the focus of Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory [2001] and John E. Curran, Jr.’s Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency [2006]), Renaissance humanism (see Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness [2017]), Elizabethan political theory (see Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet [2007]), the play’s reception history (see David Bevington, Murder Most Foul: Hamlet through the Ages [2011]), its appropriation by modern philosophers (covered in Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster’s The Hamlet Doctrine [2013] and Andrew Cutrofello’s All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity [2014]), or its recent global travels (addressed, for example, in Margaret Latvian’s Hamlet’s Arab Journey [2011] and Dominic Dromgoole’s Hamlet Globe to Globe [2017]).
Considering the context and afterlives of Hamlet is a worthy pursuit. I certainly consulted the above books for my essays, yet the confidence that comes from introducing context obscures the sharp panic we feel when confronting Shakespeare’s text itself. Even as the excellent recent book from Sonya Freeman Loftis, Allison Kellar, and Lisa Ulevich announces Hamlet has entered “an age of textual exhaustion,” there’s an odd tendency to avoid the text of Hamlet —to grasp for something more firm—when writing about it. There is a need to return to the text in a more immediate way to understand how Hamlet operates as a literary work, and how it can help us understand the world in which we live.
That latter goal, yes, clings nostalgically to the notion that literature can help us understand life. Questions about life send us to literature in search of answers. Those of us who love literature learn to ask and answer questions about it as we become professional literary scholars. But often our answers to the questions scholars ask of literature do not connect back up with the questions about life that sent us to literature in the first place—which are often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Those first-order questions are diluted and avoided in the minutia of much scholarship, left unanswered. Thus, my goal was to pose questions about Hamlet with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover and to answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar.
In doing so, these essays challenge the conventional relationship between literature and theory. They pursue a kind of criticism where literature is not merely the recipient of philosophical ideas in the service of exegesis. Instead, the creative risks of literature provide exemplars to be theorized outward to help us understand on-going issues in life today. Beyond an occasion for the demonstration of existing theory, literature is a source for the creation of new theory.
Chapter One How Hamlet Works
Whether you love or hate Hamlet , you can acknowledge its massive popularity. So how does Hamlet work? How does it create audience enjoyment? Why is it so appealing, and to whom? Of all the available options, why Hamlet ? This chapter entertains three possible explanations for why the play is so popular in the modern world: the literary answer (as the English language’s best artwork about death—one of the very few universal human experiences in a modern world increasingly marked by cultural differences— Hamlet is timeless); the theatrical answer (with its mixture of tragedy and comedy, the role of Hamlet requires the best actor of each age, and the play’s popularity derives from the celebrity of its stars); and the philosophical answer (the play invites, encourages, facilitates, and sustains philosophical introspection and conversation from people who do not usually do such things, who find themselves doing those things with Hamlet , who sometimes feel embarrassed about doing those things, but who ultimately find the experience of having done them rewarding).
Chapter Two “It Started Like a Guilty Thing”: The Beginning of Hamlet and the Beginning of Modern Politics
King Hamlet is a tyrant and King Claudius a traitor but, because Shakespeare asked us to experience the events in Hamlet from the perspective of the young Prince Hamlet, we are much more inclined to detect and detest King Claudius’s political failings than King Hamlet’s. If so, then Shakespeare’s play Hamlet , so often seen as the birth of modern psychology, might also tell us a little bit about the beginnings of modern politics as well.
Chapter Three Horatio as Author: Storytelling and Stoic Tragedy
This chapter addresses Horatio’s emotionlessness in light of his role as a narrator, using this discussion to think about Shakespeare’s motives for writing tragedy in the wake of his son’s death. By rationalizing pain and suffering as tragedy, both Horatio and Shakespeare were able to avoid the self-destruction entailed in Hamlet’s emotional response to life’s hardships and injustices. Thus, the stoic Horatio, rather than the passionate Hamlet who repeatedly interrupts ‘The Mousetrap’, is the best authorial avatar for a Shakespeare who strategically wrote himself and his own voice out of his works. This argument then expands into a theory of ‘authorial catharsis’ and the suggestion that we can conceive of Shakespeare as a ‘poet of reason’ in contrast to a ‘poet of emotion’.
Chapter Four “To thine own self be true”: What Shakespeare Says about Sending Our Children Off to College
What does “To thine own self be true” actually mean? Be yourself? Don’t change who you are? Follow your own convictions? Don’t lie to yourself? This chapter argues that, if we understand meaning as intent, then “To thine own self be true” means, paradoxically, that “the self” does not exist. Or, more accurately, Shakespeare’s Hamlet implies that “the self” exists only as a rhetorical, philosophical, and psychological construct that we use to make sense of our experiences and actions in the world, not as anything real. If this is so, then this passage may offer us a way of thinking about Shakespeare as not just a playwright but also a moral philosopher, one who did his ethics in drama.
Chapter Five In Defense of Polonius
Your wife dies. You raise two children by yourself. You build a great career to provide for your family. You send your son off to college in another country, though you know he’s not ready. Now the prince wants to marry your daughter—that’s not easy to navigate. Then—get this—while you’re trying to save the queen’s life, the prince murders you. Your death destroys your kids. They die tragically. And what do you get for your efforts? Centuries of Shakespeare scholars dumping on you. If we see Polonius not through the eyes of his enemy, Prince Hamlet—the point of view Shakespeare’s play asks audiences to adopt—but in analogy to the common challenges of twenty-first-century parenting, Polonius is a single father struggling with work-life balance who sadly choses his career over his daughter’s well-being.
Chapter Six Sigma Alpha Elsinore: The Culture of Drunkenness in Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Claudius likes to party—a bit too much. He frequently binge drinks, is arguably an alcoholic, but not an aberration. Hamlet says Denmark is internationally known for heavy drinking. That’s what Shakespeare would have heard in the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth, English writers feared Denmark had taught their nation its drinking habits. Synthesizing criticism on alcoholism as an individual problem in Shakespeare’s texts and times with scholarship on national drinking habits in the early-modern age, this essay asks what the tragedy of alcoholism looks like when located not on the level of the individual, but on the level of a culture, as Shakespeare depicted in Hamlet. One window into these early-modern cultures of drunkenness is sociological studies of American college fraternities, especially the social-learning theories that explain how one person—one culture—teaches another its habits. For Claudius’s alcoholism is both culturally learned and culturally significant. And, as in fraternities, alcoholism in Hamlet is bound up with wealth, privilege, toxic masculinity, and tragedy. Thus, alcohol imagistically reappears in the vial of “cursed hebona,” Ophelia’s liquid death, and the poisoned cup in the final scene—moments that stand out in recent performances and adaptations with alcoholic Claudiuses and Gertrudes.
Chapter Seven Tragic Foundationalism
This chapter puts the modern philosopher Alain Badiou’s theory of foundationalism into dialogue with the early-modern playwright William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . Doing so allows us to identify a new candidate for Hamlet’s traditionally hard-to-define hamartia – i.e., his “tragic mistake” – but it also allows us to consider the possibility of foundationalism as hamartia. Tragic foundationalism is the notion that fidelity to a single and substantive truth at the expense of an openness to evidence, reason, and change is an acute mistake which can lead to miscalculations of fact and virtue that create conflict and can end up in catastrophic destruction and the downfall of otherwise strong and noble people.
Chapter Eight “As a stranger give it welcome”: Shakespeare’s Advice for First-Year College Students
Encountering a new idea can be like meeting a strange person for the first time. Similarly, we dismiss new ideas before we get to know them. There is an answer to the problem of the human antipathy to strangeness in a somewhat strange place: a single line usually overlooked in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . If the ghost is “wondrous strange,” Hamlet says, invoking the ancient ethics of hospitality, “Therefore as a stranger give it welcome.” In this word, strange, and the social conventions attached to it, is both the instinctual, animalistic fear and aggression toward what is new and different (the problem) and a cultivated, humane response in hospitality and curiosity (the solution). Intellectual xenia is the answer to intellectual xenophobia.
Chapter Nine Parallels in Hamlet
Hamlet is more parallely than other texts. Fortinbras, Hamlet, and Laertes have their fathers murdered, then seek revenge. Brothers King Hamlet and King Claudius mirror brothers Old Norway and Old Fortinbras. Hamlet and Ophelia both lose their fathers, go mad, but there’s a method in their madness, and become suicidal. King Hamlet and Polonius are both domineering fathers. Hamlet and Polonius are both scholars, actors, verbose, pedantic, detectives using indirection, spying upon others, “by indirections find directions out." King Hamlet and King Claudius are both kings who are killed. Claudius using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet mirrors Polonius using Reynaldo to spy on Laertes. Reynaldo and Hamlet both pretend to be something other than what they are in order to spy on and detect foes. Young Fortinbras and Prince Hamlet both have their forward momentum “arrest[ed].” Pyrrhus and Hamlet are son seeking revenge but paused a “neutral to his will.” The main plot of Hamlet reappears in the play-within-the-play. The Act I duel between King Hamlet and Old Fortinbras echoes in the Act V duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Claudius and Hamlet are both king killers. Sheesh—why are there so many dang parallels in Hamlet ? Is there some detectable reason why the story of Hamlet would call for the literary device of parallelism?
Chapter Ten Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Why Hamlet Has Two Childhood Friends, Not Just One
Why have two of Hamlet’s childhood friends rather than just one? Do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have individuated personalities? First of all, by increasing the number of friends who visit Hamlet, Shakespeare creates an atmosphere of being outnumbered, of multiple enemies encroaching upon Hamlet, of Hamlet feeling that the world is against him. Second, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not interchangeable, as commonly thought. Shakespeare gave each an individuated personality. Guildenstern is friendlier with Hamlet, and their friendship collapses, while Rosencrantz is more distant and devious—a frenemy.
Chapter Eleven Shakespeare on the Classics, Shakespeare as a Classic: A Reading of Aeneas’s Tale to Dido
Of all the stories Shakespeare might have chosen, why have Hamlet ask the players to recite Aeneas’ tale to Dido of Pyrrhus’s slaughter of Priam? In this story, which comes not from Homer’s Iliad but from Virgil’s Aeneid and had already been adapted for the Elizabethan stage in Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Dido, Pyrrhus – more commonly known as Neoptolemus, the son of the famous Greek warrior Achilles – savagely slays Priam, the king of the Trojans and the father of Paris, who killed Pyrrhus’s father, Achilles, who killed Paris’s brother, Hector, who killed Achilles’s comrade, Patroclus. Clearly, the theme of revenge at work in this story would have appealed to Shakespeare as he was writing what would become the greatest revenge tragedy of all time. Moreover, Aeneas’s tale to Dido supplied Shakespeare with all of the connections he sought to make at this crucial point in his play and his career – connections between himself and Marlowe, between the start of Hamlet and the end, between Prince Hamlet and King Claudius, between epic poetry and tragic drama, and between the classical literature Shakespeare was still reading hundreds of years later and his own potential as a classic who might (and would) be read hundreds of years into the future.
Chapter Twelve How Theater Works, according to Hamlet
According to Hamlet, people who are guilty of a crime will, when seeing that crime represented on stage, “proclaim [their] malefactions”—but that simply isn’t how theater works. Guilty people sit though shows that depict their crimes all the time without being prompted to public confession. Why did Shakespeare—a remarkably observant student of theater—write this demonstrably false theory of drama into his protagonist? And why did Shakespeare then write the plot of the play to affirm that obviously inaccurate vision of theater? For Claudius is indeed stirred to confession by the play-within-the-play. Perhaps Hamlet’s theory of people proclaiming malefactions upon seeing their crimes represented onstage is not as outlandish as it first appears. Perhaps four centuries of obsession with Hamlet is the English-speaking world proclaiming its malefactions upon seeing them represented dramatically.
Chapter Thirteen “To be, or not to be”: Shakespeare Against Philosophy
This chapter hazards a new reading of the most famous passage in Western literature: “To be, or not to be” from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . With this line, Hamlet poses his personal struggle, a question of life and death, as a metaphysical problem, as a question of existence and nothingness. However, “To be, or not to be” is not what it seems to be. It seems to be a representation of tragic angst, yet a consideration of the context of the speech reveals that “To be, or not to be” is actually a satire of philosophy and Shakespeare’s representation of the theatricality of everyday life. In this chapter, a close reading of the context and meaning of this passage leads into an attempt to formulate a Shakespearean image of philosophy.
Chapter Fourteen Contagious Suicide in and Around Hamlet
As in society today, suicide is contagious in Hamlet , at least in the example of Ophelia, the only death by suicide in the play, because she only becomes suicidal after hearing Hamlet talk about his own suicidal thoughts in “To be, or not to be.” Just as there are media guidelines for reporting on suicide, there are better and worse ways of handling Hamlet . Careful suicide coverage can change public misperceptions and reduce suicide contagion. Is the same true for careful literary criticism and classroom discussion of suicide texts? How can teachers and literary critics reduce suicide contagion and increase help-seeking behavior?
Chapter Fifteen Is Hamlet a Sexist Text? Overt Misogyny vs. Unconscious Bias
Students and fans of Shakespeare’s Hamlet persistently ask a question scholars and critics of the play have not yet definitively answered: is it a sexist text? The author of this text has been described as everything from a male chauvinist pig to a trailblazing proto-feminist, but recent work on the science behind discrimination and prejudice offers a new, better vocabulary in the notion of unconscious bias. More pervasive and slippery than explicit bigotry, unconscious bias involves the subtle, often unintentional words and actions which indicate the presence of biases we may not be aware of, ones we may even fight against. The Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet exhibited an unconscious bias against women, I argue, even as he sought to critique the mistreatment of women in a patriarchal society. The evidence for this unconscious bias is not to be found in the misogynistic statements made by the characters in the play. It exists, instead, in the demonstrable preference Shakespeare showed for men over women when deciding where to deploy his literary talents. Thus, Shakespeare's Hamlet is a powerful literary example – one which speaks to, say, the modern corporation – showing that deliberate efforts for egalitarianism do not insulate one from the effects of structural inequalities that both stem from and create unconscious bias.
Chapter Sixteen Style and Purpose in Acting and Writing
Purpose and style are connected in academic writing. To answer the question of style ( How should we write academic papers? ) we must first answer the question of purpose ( Why do we write academic papers? ). We can answer these questions, I suggest, by turning to an unexpected style guide that’s more than 400 years old: the famous passage on “the purpose of playing” in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . In both acting and writing, a high style often accompanies an expressive purpose attempting to impress an elite audience yet actually alienating intellectual people, while a low style and mimetic purpose effectively engage an intellectual audience.
Chapter Seventeen 13 Ways of Looking at a Ghost
Why doesn’t Gertrude see the Ghost of King Hamlet in Act III, even though Horatio, Bernardo, Francisco, Marcellus, and Prince Hamlet all saw it in Act I? It’s a bit embarrassing that Shakespeare scholars don’t have a widely agreed-upon consensus that explains this really basic question that puzzles a lot of people who read or see Hamlet .
Chapter Eighteen The Tragedy of Love in Hamlet
The word “love” appears 84 times in Shakespeare’s Hamlet . “Father” only appears 73 times, “play” 60, “think” 55, “mother” 46, “mad” 44, “soul” 40, “God" 39, “death” 38, “life” 34, “nothing” 28, “son” 26, “honor” 21, “spirit” 19, “kill” 18, “revenge” 14, and “action” 12. Love isn’t the first theme that comes to mind when we think of Hamlet , but is surprisingly prominent. But love is tragic in Hamlet . The bloody catastrophe at the end of that play is principally driven not by hatred or a longing for revenge, but by love.
Chapter Nineteen Ophelia’s Songs: Moral Agency, Manipulation, and the Metaphor of Music in Hamlet
This chapter reads Ophelia’s songs in Act IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the context of the meaning of music established elsewhere in the play. While the songs are usually seen as a marker of Ophelia’s madness (as a result of the death of her father) or freedom (from the constraints of patriarchy), they come – when read in light of the metaphor of music as manipulation – to symbolize her role as a pawn in Hamlet’s efforts to deceive his family. Thus, music was Shakespeare’s platform for connecting Ophelia’s story to one of the central questions in Hamlet : Do we have control over our own actions (like the musician), or are we controlled by others (like the instrument)?
Chapter Twenty A Quantitative Study of Prose and Verse in Hamlet
Why does Hamlet have so much prose? Did Shakespeare deliberately shift from verse to prose to signal something to his audiences? How would actors have handled the shifts from verse to prose? Would audiences have detected shifts from verse to prose? Is there an overarching principle that governs Shakespeare’s decision to use prose—a coherent principle that says, “If X, then use prose?”
Chapter Twenty-One The Fortunes of Fate in Hamlet : Divine Providence and Social Determinism
In Hamlet , fate is attacked from both sides: “fortune” presents a world of random happenstance, “will” a theory of efficacious human action. On this backdrop, this essay considers—irrespective of what the characters say and believe—what the structure and imagery Shakespeare wrote into Hamlet say about the possibility that some version of fate is at work in the play. I contend the world of Hamlet is governed by neither fate nor fortune, nor even the Christianized version of fate called “providence.” Yet there is a modern, secular, disenchanted form of fate at work in Hamlet—what is sometimes called “social determinism”—which calls into question the freedom of the individual will. As such, Shakespeare’s Hamlet both commented on the transformation of pagan fate into Christian providence that happened in the centuries leading up to the play, and anticipated the further transformation of fate from a theological to a sociological idea, which occurred in the centuries following Hamlet .
Chapter Twenty-Two The Working Class in Hamlet
There’s a lot for working-class folks to hate about Hamlet —not just because it’s old, dusty, difficult to understand, crammed down our throats in school, and filled with frills, tights, and those weird lace neck thingies that are just socially awkward to think about. Peak Renaissance weirdness. Claustrophobicly cloistered inside the castle of Elsinore, quaintly angsty over royal family problems, Hamlet feels like the literary epitome of elitism. “Lawless resolutes” is how the Wittenberg scholar Horatio describes the soldiers who join Fortinbras’s army in exchange “for food.” The Prince Hamlet who has never worked a day in his life denigrates Polonius as a “fishmonger”: quite the insult for a royal advisor to be called a working man. And King Claudius complains of the simplicity of "the distracted multitude.” But, in Hamlet , Shakespeare juxtaposed the nobles’ denigrations of the working class as readily available metaphors for all-things-awful with the rather valuable behavior of working-class characters themselves. When allowed to represent themselves, the working class in Hamlet are characterized as makers of things—of material goods and services like ships, graves, and plays, but also of ethical and political virtues like security, education, justice, and democracy. Meanwhile, Elsinore has a bad case of affluenza, the make-believe disease invented by an American lawyer who argued that his client's social privilege was so great that it created an obliviousness to law. While social elites rot society through the twin corrosives of political corruption and scholarly detachment, the working class keeps the machine running. They build the ships, plays, and graves society needs to function, and monitor the nuts-and-bolts of the ideals—like education and justice—that we aspire to uphold.
Chapter Twenty-Three The Honor Code at Harvard and in Hamlet
Students at Harvard College are asked, when they first join the school and several times during their years there, to affirm their awareness of and commitment to the school’s honor code. But instead of “the foundation of our community” that it is at Harvard, honor is tragic in Hamlet —a source of anxiety, blunder, and catastrophe. As this chapter shows, looking at Hamlet from our place at Harvard can bring us to see what a tangled knot honor can be, and we can start to theorize the difference between heroic and tragic honor.
Chapter Twenty-Four The Meaning of Death in Shakespeare’s Hamlet
By connecting the ways characters live their lives in Hamlet to the ways they die – on-stage or off, poisoned or stabbed, etc. – Shakespeare symbolized hamartia in catastrophe. In advancing this argument, this chapter develops two supporting ideas. First, the dissemination of tragic necessity: Shakespeare distributed the Aristotelian notion of tragic necessity – a causal relationship between a character’s hamartia (fault or error) and the catastrophe at the end of the play – from the protagonist to the other characters, such that, in Hamlet , those who are guilty must die, and those who die are guilty. Second, the spectacularity of death: there exists in Hamlet a positive correlation between the severity of a character’s hamartia (error or flaw) and the “spectacularity” of his or her death – that is, the extent to which it is presented as a visible and visceral spectacle on-stage.
Chapter Twenty-Five Tragic Excess in Hamlet
In Hamlet , Shakespeare paralleled the situations of Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras (the father of each is killed, and each then seeks revenge) to promote the virtue of moderation: Hamlet moves too slowly, Laertes too swiftly – and they both die at the end of the play – but Fortinbras represents a golden mean which marries the slowness of Hamlet with the swiftness of Laertes. As argued in this essay, Shakespeare endorsed the virtue of balance by allowing Fortinbras to be one of the very few survivors of the play. In other words, excess is tragic in Hamlet .
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So, what is Hamlet about? We have a concise one-sentence summary for you:
Hamlet is a story about a young prince who faces an inner dilemma whether to revenge for his father’s murder or not.
Want to learn more? Consider the Hamlet summary prepared by our writers. It’s accurate, concise, and easy to comprehend. We’ve also explored the play’s message and themes in the analysis below.
📝 hamlet: synopsis.
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, studies in Germany. Suddenly, his father dies. As Hamlet comes home to his dad’s funeral, he discovers that his mother marries his uncle Claudius, who now takes the throne. Frustrated about his mother’s betrayal and uncle’s new status, Hamlet gets lost in his thoughts.
The tension becomes even stronger when Prince sees the Ghost of his father. The spirit claims that Claudius is the murderer and commands Hamlet to revenge. Prince is confused. His inner hesitation leads to impulsive actions that result in tragic consequences.
If this Hamlet overview too short for you, proceed to the plot summary below.
Act 1: scene 1.
The action opens at Elsinore Castle in Denmark during the night. The guards notice the Ghost of the recently dead King. Being unsure of what they have witnessed, they bring Horatio, a learned scholar and friend of Prince. Horatio admits the presence of the Ghost and decides to share this mystery with Hamlet.
Upon receiving news about his father’s death, the Prince of Denmark immediately returns from his university in Wittenberg, Germany, to attend the funeral. Then, Hamlet’s plot includes an unexpected twist. Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, marries Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius. Prince is disgusted by her decision to fall for another man right after her husband’s demise. What is more, Claudius becomes the new King of Denmark, which makes Hamlet even more frustrated.
Meanwhile, the King’s advisor, Polonius, prepares his son, Laertes, for school in Paris. His sister, Ophelia, comes to say goodbye to him. Polonius and Laertes suspect that she has romantic feelings towards Hamlet. They warn her to stay away from Prince. She promises to her father and brother not to interact with Hamlet.
The night comes, and the Ghost of the dead King appears in front of Hamlet, Horatio, and Marcellus. Everyone is shocked, yet Prince decides to follow the spirit, who seems to seek his company. His friends disagree, and that’s when Marcellus says, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”
And so, Hamlet follows the Ghost. The spirit claims that Claudius is his murderer as he poisoned him to take the throne. He orders Hamlet to avenge him, and Prince quickly promises to do so. Later, he informs Horatio and Marcellus about his intentions. Also, he warns them that he is going to pretend mad until he gets revenge.
Hamlet starts developing his plan of revenge. To confuse everyone around, he starts acting in a very erratic and alarming way. Polonius is confident that Hamlet is mad because Ophelia rejected him according to her father’s wish. He instructs his servant, Reynaldo, to spy on Laertes in Paris when Ophelia comes and describes her latest encounter with Prince.
Gertrude is concerned about her son’s mental state. She asks Hamlet’s school friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to discover the cause of his strange behavior. Besides, Claudius is also worried, especially after Polonius’s suspicions. The advisor plots the plan to spy upon Hamlet. Yet, Prince sees through all his spies and mocks them.
Hamlet also develops his plan. A troop arrives at the castle to show a performance. Hamlet asks the actors to change their play, The Murder of Gonzago , a bit and add a scene that would depict his father’s death. Hamlet believes that Claudius’s reaction will reveal his guilt.
Polonius and Claudius engage Ophelia in their evil plan. They ask the lady to meet Hamlet to return his presents and talk. During their meeting, Hamlet acts inadequately. He accuses innocent Ophelia of being two-faced and claims that he had never loved her. The lady is confused and frustrated, while Claudius and Polonius are overwhelmed.
Now, the King is uncertain of the real cause of Hamlet’s madness. Claudius becomes paranoid as he thinks that Prince knows the actual circumstances of his father’s death. He decides to send Hamlet to England. However, Polonius offers the King to make Prince reveal his inner thoughts to Gertrude, with the advisor eavesdropping. Claudius agrees.
The troop performs the play, The Murder of Gonzago, which Hamlet directed. He asks Horatio to watch the King’s and Queen’s reactions to the story. He wants to guilt his mother and show his uncle’s true colors. Claudius’s response to the scene when the King is poisoned was suspicious, as noted by Horatio. It makes Hamlet sure Claudius is the real murderer.
Now Claudius knows that Hamlet learned his secret. Unsure what to do, he asks Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to go to England with Prince. Then, he tries to pray, though he’s uncertain how. Meanwhile, Hamlet wants revenge on his uncle as soon as possible yet sees Claudius praying and hesitates. The man might go to heaven if he is killed right after the prayer. So, Prince decides to wait.
The next episode of Hamlet’s plot summary takes place in Gertrude’s bedroom. The mother and the son have an intense conversation while Polonius is spying upon them behind the tapestry. Hamlet hears a noise. Enlarged, he stabs the tapestry and, consequently kills Polonius.
Gertrude is in shock, yet Hamlet doesn’t understand what happened. He sees the Ghost, who reminds him about the revenge. So, Hamlet begs his mother to stop sinning, promises that he’s sane, and leaves with the corpse.
Claudius learns about Polonius’s demise from Gertrude. Afraid of Hamlet’s enlarged behavior, Claudius fears for his own life. He arranges everything to send Hamlet to England. Meanwhile, Gertrude acts as if her son has gone mad, according to his plan (or her understanding of the situation).
According to Claudius’ order, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ask Hamlet to give them Polonius’s body. Prince mocks them some more, yet his childhood friends don’t understand his riddles and jokes. After the punchline where Hamlet mocks the King, he runs off.
Now Claudius questions Hamlet regarding the corpse, and Prince jokes again and again. Finally, he reveals the body’s location while Claudius sends him to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Left alone, the King writes a secret letter where orders to kill Hamlet as soon as he arrives.
On his way to England, Hamlet sees Fortinbras, nephew of the King of Norway. He leads his fleet to Poland (it should’ve been Denmark, but his uncle forbade this attack), trying to honor his father. It reminds Hamlet of his promise to the Ghost and gives him the confidence to go back to avenge his father.
Meanwhile, Ophelia finds out that her father, Polonius is dead. Being desperate about her loss, she goes mad and starts handing out symbolic flowers to everyone. Besides, Laertes returns, and Claudius explains the situation to him. Now, Laertes wants to avenge his father.
Horatio receives the letter from Hamlet where he states that he was taken as a prisoner by some pirates. In other words, he is on his way to Denmark. Horatio sends the letter to the King and Queen and rushes to see Hamlet.
Upon receiving the letter, Claudius and Laertes plot how to kill Hamlet to get rid of all the problems he causes. The King comes up with the idea: he will arrange the duel between the young men. Laertes will sharpen and secretly poison his sword, so even the tiniest nick would kill Hamlet immediately. Moreover, they will poison a glass of wine and offer it to Prince if Laertes fails to wound him.
Suddenly, Gertrude arrives with bad news: Ophelia committed suicide, having drowned in a brook.
Hamlet visits the graveyard, accompanied by Horatio. Prince notices Yorick’s skull and ponders upon a matter of life and death. That’s when Ophelia’s funeral starts, and Hamlet learns about her death. Laertes jumps into her grave, declaring his love, and Prince reveals himself right after. The men argue, with Laertes blaming Hamlet for the deaths of his close relatives. Prince challenges him for a duel, and so it will be.
Hamlet explains to Horatio why he came back. In short, he saw Claudius’ letter and forged it. Now it states that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern should be murdered instead of him. So, they die in England in the meantime. The whole situation makes Hamlet confident in his decision to kill Claudius.
Meanwhile, Osric, a courtier, comes to discuss the details of the upcoming duel. Hamlet mocks him, but they agree on the terms.
The duel between Hamlet and Laertes starts. Gertrude accidentally (or not?) takes a sip of the poisoned wine that Claudius prepared for Prince. At that moment, Laertes wounds Hamlet. They grapple, and, as a result, Hamlet stabs Laertes with his own sword. Gertrude dies due to the poisoned wine. Laertes reveals to Hamlet Claudius’s evil plan. Furious, Hamlet stabs his uncle with the poisoned blade, killing him. Laertes asks for forgiveness and also dies.
Seeing that Hamlet is dying, Horatio wants to drink the poisoned wine. Yet, Prince asks him to stay alive for him and tell his story. In the last seconds of his life, he declares Fortinbras (who has just arrived from Poland) the next ruler of Denmark. Then, Hamlet dies.
Written more than four centuries ago, Hamlet remains one of the most widely-known William Shakespeare’s works. Partially, such popularity is due to its intriguing plot. Yet, most importantly, the author explores layered topics and themes by creating an unconventional hero.
Hamlet’s plot structure is quite simple. There are five acts, each of which has several scenes. Such an organization helps the readers follow the flow of events in the play and catch every detail.
Hamlet includes all five elements of the basic plot structure:
In the play, William Shakspeare makes a vivid confrontation between Hamlet and Claudius. Prince is introduced to the readers as the man of doubts . He is indecisive, incapable of making serious decisions, and lost in his thoughts. Claudius, in contrast, is a man of action. The King has a clear vision of his actions and is completely capable of controlling his emotions. The more Claudius knows, the easier for him to make a decision and steer his knowledge in the right course. However, the more Prince knows, the more lost in his thoughts and confused he becomes.
Throughout the story, the readers notice more and more evidence that supports Hamlet’s indecisiveness. One of the examples is his famous soliloquy, “ To be or not to be .” Prince is not sure whether he is ready to die or continue living. He admits that death is inescapable, just like life. Hamlet hopes that passing will end all his sufferings but fears what comes after it. The dilemma in Hamlet’s head leads him to a harrowing conclusion: he regrets that he even was born. He realizes that people are unaware of what death foreshadows. Hamlet’s inner suffering progresses. As a result, he becomes impulsive and commits reckless actions.
Another significant conflict in Hamlet is gender roles in society. Ophelia and Gertrude are two central women in the play. But do they have any power? They are presented as two pawns in the hands of men, who use women for their benefit. Firstly, Claudius marries Gertrude to take the throne. Then, Polonius and Claudius plan an “occasional” meeting of Hamlet and Ophelia to spy upon Prince. After that, they use Gertrude to make Hamlet reveal the truth about his mental state and problems. Although both Ophelia and Gertrude are concerned about Prince, they should carry out the orders of men without expressing their feelings towards him.
We hope that Hamlet’s summary and analysis prepared by our team helped you to understand the play on a deeper level. Don’t forget to share this webpage with your peers. And check the links below for further investigation of Hamlet .
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Characters in Hamlet:
Hamlet is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare. It is one of his most popular and well-known works. The play tells the story of Prince Hamlet, who is grieving the death of his father, King Hamlet. When Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius, becomes king, Hamlet is suspicious of him. This leads to a series of events that eventually lead to tragedy. The play is full of complex characters, each with their own motivations and agendas. Here is a closer look at some of the key Characters in Hamlet.
Hamlet: The titular character and protagonist of the play, Hamlet is the Prince of Denmark. He is grieving the death of his father and is suspicious of his uncle, who has married his mother and taken the throne. Hamlet is a complex character full of contradictions. He is capable of great intelligence and wit, but he is also prone to fits of madness. He is torn between his duty to revenge his father’s murder and his love for Ophelia. In the end, Hamlet’s indecision leads to tragedy.
Horatio: Hamlet’s best friend and confidante. Horatio is a level-headed and loyal friend who helps Hamlet in his quest to uncover the truth about his father’s death. He is a voice of reason for Hamlet, and he often tries to restrain him from acting rashly.
Polonius: The Lord Chamberlain of Claudius’s court. Polonius is a manipulative politician who is more concerned with advancing his own career than with doing what is right. He is a disloyal friend to Hamlet and is eventually killed by him.
Ophelia: Polonius’s daughter and Hamlet’s love interest. Ophelia is a kind and gentle young woman who is caught in the middle of the conflict between Hamlet and her father. She eventually goes mad and drowns herself.
Laertes: Polonius’s son and Ophelia’s brother. Laertes is a hot-headed young man who is easily manipulated by those in power. He is initially allied with Hamlet, but he later turns against him and fights him in a duel to the death.
Gertrude: Hamlet’s mother and the Queen of Denmark. Gertrude is a beautiful and vain woman who married Claudius soon after the death of her first husband, King Hamlet. She is unaware of Claudius’s role in her first husband’s murder, but she eventually realizes that he is responsible for it.
Claudius: The new King of Denmark and Hamlet’s uncle. Claudius is a ambitious politician who murdered his brother, King Hamlet, in order to take the throne. He later marries Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, which further fuels Hamlet’s suspicion of him. Claudius is a manipulative and devious character who will stop at nothing to maintain his power.
Hamlet’s inner struggle is illuminated by his doubt of the ghost’s instructions, his refusal to kill the king while praying (or attempted prayer), and his inability to kill Claudius a second time, all of which are symptoms of his emotional upheaval. Hamlet’s effort to get revenge is first apparent when he examines the words of the ghost. When Hamlet talks with the ghost, he begins to doubt its goals.
The ghost claims to be Hamlet’s father, who was murdered by Claudius. The ghost tells Hamlet to avenge his death, but Hamlet is hesitant. Hamlet does not want to kill Claudius while he is praying because he believes that would send him to heaven.
Hamlet also does not want to kill Claudius while he is sinning because he believes that would send him to hell. Hamlet’s inner struggle is evident when he says, “The spirit that I have seen/ May be the devil…And yet, within a month— / Let me not think on’t—Frailty, thy name is woman!— / A little month, or ere those shoes were old/ With which she followed my poor father’s body, / Like niobium to methought they glitter’d on her feet,” (Shakespeare 3.2.88-93). Hamlet is unsure of the ghost’s intentions and whether or not it is really his father.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ask Hamlet, “What made you do it?” His response redirects to his own motives. “Nothing good or bad,” he says, “but thinking makes it so.” He reveals to his fellow man that he is grappling with issues of thought and whether the task the ghost has unexpectedly bestowed upon him is moral and true or deceptive.
This is noted by Bloom in Hamlet’s perception that “The essential question about a dramatic mirror was like the one Hamlet found himself asking about the ghost: Is this ‘thing’ strange because its revealing a hidden truth—or because some power is trying to deceive me?” (Bloom 56).
The choices that Hamlet makes are a direct result of his contemplation and the actions that stem from these thoughts. Characters in Hamlet such as Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Polonius are used by Shakespeare to further enhance this idea of contemplation.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are two Characters in Hamlet that seem content with never questioning why or how, they simply do as they are told. From the moment they enter Elsinore their purpose is to figure out Hamlet’s madness, yet they never stop to think about why he may be mad. As noted by T.S. Eliot in his essay “Hamlet”, “With Rosencrantz and Guildenstern we are presented with two Characters in Hamlet who represent the thoughtless acceptance of things as they are.” (Eliot). Their lack of questioning allows them to be used as pawns in other Characters in Hamlet plans, such as Polonius’s scheme to find out the truth about Hamlet’s madness.
Polonius is another Characters in Hamlet who never questions his actions or words, he is content with being a yes-man and following orders. This is most evident when he agrees to help Claudius spy on Hamlet under the guise of motherly concern. He does not question whether or not it is morally wrong to eavesdrop on a grieving son, he simply does as he is told. This ultimately leads to his death, as Hamlet stabs him through the arras without knowing who it is. If Polonius had stopped to think about his actions, he may have realized that what he was doing was wrong and avoided his untimely death.
In conclusion, Characters in Hamlet such as Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Polonius represent the thoughtless acceptance of things as they are. Their lack of questioning allows them to be used as pawns in other Characters in Hamlet plans. This ultimately leads to their downfall, as they are unable to see the larger picture and make informed decisions. Hamlet on the other hand, represents the power of contemplation and thought. He is able to see the larger picture and make informed decisions based on his moral compass. Characters in Hamlet such as Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Polonius could learn a lot from Hamlet, and maybe then they would be able to avoid their untimely demise.
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I’m writing Literary Analysis on Hamlet in my class and I asked my teacher which thesis he liked better. He said he liked the second one better saying that the first one was too “flowery”. I personally like the first one a lot better, but he does have a point in the fact that it is an analysis so I shouldn’t be over the top. But I still wanted to get this subs opinion to see if I’m crazy or my thesis just isn’t that good. What do u think?
Thesis 1: Claudius’ vial of poison, infused with the recurring ingredients of corruption and greed, is the dawn of the inevitable and never ending cycle of decay and revenge.
Thesis 2: the corruption and greed that run rampant in the streets of Denmark, pave the way for the inevitable and never ending cycles of revenge and mental, emotional and moral decay.
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Like all of Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet makes strikingly original uses of borrowed material. The Scandinavian folk tale of Amleth, a prince called upon to avenge his father's murder by his uncle, was first given literary form by the Danish writer Saxo the Grammarian in his late 12th century Danish History and later adapted in French in François de Belleforest's Histoires tragiques (1570).
Hamlet is one of the best plays of all time written by William Shakespeare. According to literary scholars, there has never been such a play by his predecessors and successors alike. It is known as The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The play was published roughly between 1599 and 1602 and staged during the same period.
5. 1742. Hamlet himself wore a lot of masks in order not to show his real face. His mask of madness made a lot of people suffer. The biggest example is the suicide of Ophelia. And sometimes it is hard to differentiate whether the mask or the real nature of Hamlet. Or maybe that very mask became his real face.
The story of Hamlet is based on a Danish revenge story first recorded by Saxo Grammaticus in the 1100s. In these stories, a Danish prince fakes madness in order to take revenge on his uncle, who had killed the prince's father and married his mother. Many scholars believe that Shakespeare was not the first person to adapt this story—Thomas Kyd ...
Focused on: Reasons for Hamlet's procrastination and its consequences. Characters mentioned: Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, Ophelia, Polonius. Role of Women in Twelfth Night and Hamlet by Shakespeare. Genre: Research Paper. Words: 2527. Focused on: Women in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and Hamlet.
Here, then, is a very brief summary of the plot of Hamlet, perhaps Shakespeare's greatest tragedy. Act 1. The play begins on the battlements at Elsinore Castle in Denmark one night. The ghost of the former king, Hamlet, is seen, but refuses to speak to any of the soldiers on guard duty. At the royal court, Prince Hamlet (the dead king's son ...
The general theme of the play deals with a society that is, or has already gone to pieces. 1. Another theme of the play is that of revenge. Hamlet must avenge his father's death. Revenge is ...
Analysis. Last Updated September 5, 2023. Haunted both literally and figuratively by the death of his father, Prince Hamlet is preoccupied by the subject of death throughout the play. Indeed, life ...
One may smile, and smile, and be a villain' (1.5.109). Hamlet is determined to act without delay, and swears as much to his father. We know, however, that if this is all there is, this is going to ...
He is lost in the world, lost in his hesitations. He cannot draw a demarcation line between reality and his feigned insanity. Hamlet chooses "to be", but "to be" means to die. He claims that death is inevitable, but hesitates because it is unknown as well. The soliloquy expresses Hamlet's torment of mind. He is determined to kill the ...
Hamlet is a tragic play written by William Shakespeare somewhat in 1599. The exact date of publication is unknown, however, many believe that it was published between 1601 and 1603. The play is set in Denmark. Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, is Shakespeare's longest play and is well-thought-out as the most influential literary work of literature.
The great Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold used to maintain that "if all the plays ever written suddenly disappeared and only Hamlet miraculously survived, all the theaters in the world would be saved. They could all put on Hamlet and be successful." 1 Perhaps Meyerhold exaggerated because of his frustration—he was prevented from ever staging the tragedy by Soviet dictator Joseph ...
The thesis of this essay is that "Hamlet" is a masterful work of literature that explores timeless themes and employs effective literary techniques to convey its message. ... The Enduring Appeal of Hamlet: An In-Depth Analysis Essay. William Shakespeare's Hamlet is one of the most celebrated plays in literature, known for its complex characters ...
Essays on Hamlet. Written as the author taught Hamlet every semester for a decade, these lightning essays ask big conceptual questions about the play with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover, and answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. In doing so, Hamlet becomes a lens for life today, generating insights on everything from ...
A Literary Analysis of Hamlet's Plot and Tragic Hero — IPL.org. Modern Hamlet Translation, Scene By Scene — No Sweat Shakespeare. Share to Facebook; Share to Twitter; ... Students can find summaries, famous quotes, essay topics, prompts, samples, and all sorts of analyses (characters, themes , symbolism, etc.). Our literature guides will ...
In order to conduct a good literary analysis of the protagonist and the novel as a whole, and as a result, write an excellent essay, the author should take into account the following recommendations: Define the structure of your paper. As a rule, an essay consists of three main structural elements: introduction, main part, and conclusion;
Conclusion. In conclusion, Hamlet is a masterpiece of English literature that has been studied and analyzed extensively by scholars. The play's historical context, themes, and literary devices make it a complex and multi-layered work of art.The play's characters, particularly Hamlet, are complex and nuanced, and their struggles with revenge, madness, and power continue to resonate with ...
Hamlet: The titular character and protagonist of the play, Hamlet is the Prince of Denmark. He is grieving the death of his father and is suspicious of his uncle, who has married his mother and taken the throne. Hamlet is a complex character full of contradictions. He is capable of great intelligence and wit, but he is also prone to fits of ...
Essay for Hamlet. I'm writing Literary Analysis on Hamlet in my class and I asked my teacher which thesis he liked better. He said he liked the second one better saying that the first one was too "flowery". I personally like the first one a lot better, but he does have a point in the fact that it is an analysis so I shouldn't be over ...