Main Characters

Hamlet — the Prince of Denmark; son of the late King Hamlet and the nephew of the present King Claudius

Claudius — the King of Denmark; Hamlet's uncle who murdered Hamlet's father to obtain the throne

Gertrude — the Queen of Denmark and Hamlet's mother; after the death of her husband (Hamlet's father), Gertrude married her brother-in-law, Claudius

Polonius — the Lord Chamberlain and father to Laertes and Ophelia

Horatio — Hamlet's friend from Wittenberg

Ophelia — Polonius's daughter

Laertes — Polonius's son

Fortinbras — the Prince of Norway; his father was killed by Hamlet's father, and he intends to attack Denmark to avenge his father's death

The Ghost — Hamlet's recently murdered father

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — former friends of Hamlet from Denmark

Osric, Voltemand, and Cornelius — courtiers

Marcellus and Barnardo — the officers of the watch who report seeing the Ghost

Francisco — a soldier

Reynaldo — Polonius's servant

Introduction

Hamlet. Who hasn't heard of Hamlet? He is the young Danish prince who — as actor Laurence Olivier once said — “can't make up his mind.” Hamlet is no doubt the most famous play ever written in the English language. Shakespeare penned it during the first part of the seventeenth century at the close of Queen Elizabeth's reign, and it was probably first performed in July 1602.

Hamlet is the tragic story of a Danish prince whose uncle murders his father and marries his mother. There are several sources for the story of the play: The German Hystorie of Hamblet; an English translation of a French prose work (François de Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques), and an ancient history of Denmark written by Saxo Grammaticus in the thirteenth century.

What Shakespeare did with the various sources available to him is no doubt the genesis to write Hamlet. But it may have been something else: the death of his eleven-year-old son Hamnet, who died in 1596, several years before the play was written. Perhaps Shakespeare's heart sickness at the loss of his only son is echoed in Hamlet's grief for his father.

The Play

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark begins with Hamlet in a quandary. He is depressed by the death of his father, the ghost of whom now haunts Elsinore, ranting that his brother, Claudius, murdered him. After Hamlet's father's death, Claudius married Queen Gertrude, Hamlet's mother, and assumed the throne of Denmark. Fortinbras of Norway has threatened to invade Denmark.

Hamlet's father's ghost demands that his son take revenge for his murder. To do this Hamlet feigns madness. In this maddened state, he scorns the affections of Ophelia, whom he loves.

Polonius grows concerned over Hamlet's growing insanity and discusses his concern with the king and queen. Meanwhile, Hamlet tries to come to terms with the idea that his uncle may have murdered his father. In an effort to “catch the conscience of the king,” Hamlet hires a traveling troupe of actors to act out a play, the core of which is an assassination similar to the murder of his father. Claudius' reaction to the murder scene convinces Hamlet that his father's ghost told him the truth. Still, Hamlet, tormented by the idea of committing murder, can't make up his mind to slay his uncle.

Hamlet starts to torment his mother, Gertrude, by insisting she is sleeping with her husband's killer. Polonius, who hides behind a tapestry in the queen's chamber to eavesdrop, panics and cries for help. Hamlet stabs him, thinking it is his Uncle Claudius.

Claudius sends Hamlet to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two of Hamlet's childhood friends. He gets Hamlet to carry a letter to the king of England in which Claudius asks the king to kill Hamlet (the bearer of the letter). Hamlet turns the tables on his friends and they are put to death instead.

Driven to madness herself by Hamlet's condition and the death of her father, Polonius, Ophelia drowns herself. Her brother, Laertes, returns from his studies and vows his vengeance upon Hamlet for what the prince has done to his family. Claudius plots with Laertes to kill Hamlet. At Ophelia's funeral Laertes and Hamlet confront one another and Laertes challenges Hamlet to a duel.

Claudius tells Laertes to select a sharp blade instead of a dull one for the duel and to poison the tip so that a wound will kill the prince. Claudius also decides to keep some poisoned wine for Hamlet to drink. Then everything goes wrong.

Laertes thrusts first at Hamlet hoping for a quick kill, but misses. As the duel goes on, Gertrude drinks unknowingly from the poisoned wine. Then, in the heat of the fray, Laertes wounds Hamlet. In a twist of fate, he loses the poisoned rapier to Hamlet. Gertrude collapses from the poison she has consumed. Laertes reveals the plot against Hamlet before he dies, telling him he has “not a half-hour's life” in him. Hamlet stabs Claudius with the poisoned foil, then forces him to drink from the poisoned wine that killed his mother.

Hamlet now collapses and dies in Horatio's arms as Fortinbras enters the castle. Fortinbras is left to rule, as the entire Danish royal family is dead. He tells his men to give Hamlet and the rest proper funerals.

Commentary

Hamlet is one of the most complex and compelling characters of English literature. His actions and thoughts have been analyzed over and over and it is this seemingly bottomless well of possibilities that accounts for Hamlet's enduring appeal.

Hamlet is concerned with the profound truths of human nature and our place in the universe. Things to consider include Shakespeare's questioning of the whole revenge play genre, and the nature of revenge itself and how it affects us. Hamlet's struggle over whether or not to murder Claudius, echoed by the Fortinbras and Laertes subplots, acts as a base from which Shakespeare explores the relationship between thought and action. He ponders this thought: Yes, it is human instinct to want revenge when wronged, but is it right to act on that instinct?

Hamlet is not a man of action deliberately, but a scholar, a man of thought and consideration and learning, and many critics feel the imbalance between his active and passive natures is a tragic flaw that makes his wretched fate inevitable.

Hamlet is a kind of modern Everyman, and his dilemmas echo those that we all face in some form. We can come to any number of reasonable conclusions about Hamlet, but arriving at a definitive one is very difficult.

Other important themes explored in Hamlet include the line between sanity and madness, the nature of political power, the connection between the well-being of the state and the moral condition of its leaders, and the moral questions of living a good life and committing suicide. Hamlet's ghostly father is in agony in purgatory, having died unconfessed and with his sins still heavy on his shoulders. But Shakespeare's Anglican audience would not believe in purgatory if they were orthodox Protestants! Hamlet considers killing himself, but he fears God's wrath in the afterlife. Ophelia, clearly an innocent, in a fit of madness does kill herself, but will she still suffer in the afterlife because of it? Other themes are the relationship between sons and fathers (Hamlet and the Ghost, Laertes and Polonius, Fortinbras and the dead king of Norway), the nature of the family, the inevitability of death, and, against that inevitability, the question of what gives life meaning.

Hamlet's love of learning and reason is pulverized by a growing nihilism, as every truth that is supposed to comfort him (religion, society, philosophy, love) either fails him or proves false. Just how insane Hamlet was and how much he faked it is one of the most hotly contested critical controversies surrounding the play. The likely answer is that he decided to feign madness as a strategic way of covering his deep distress at what the ghost reveals to him without putting himself in danger. Yet there is little doubt that his mind is so troubled, confused, and desperate that his pretense assumes the intensity of real madness for a while as he deals with the enormity of what happened.

Famous Lines

“For this relief much thanks: 't is bitter cold, And I am sick at heart” (Act I, Scene I).

“A little more than kin, and less than kind” (Act I, Scene II).

“All that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity” (Act I, Scene II).

“But I have that within which passeth show; These but the trappings and the suits of woe” (Act I, Scene II). “He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again” (Act I, Scene II).

“Give thy thoughts no tongue” (Act I, Scene III).

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man” (Act I, Scene III).

“But to my mind, though I am native here And to the manner born, it is a custom More honoured in the breach than the observance” (Act I, Scene IV).

“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (Act I, Scene IV).

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Act I, Scene V).

“Brevity is the soul of wit” (Act II, Scene II).

“Doubt thou the stars are fire; Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love” (Act II, Scene II).

“Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't” (Act II, Scene II).

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” (Act II, Scene II).

“A dream itself is but a shadow” (Act II, Scene II).

“What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!” (Act II, Scene II).

“The devil hath power To assume a pleasing shape” (Act II, Scene II).

“To be, or not to be: that is the question.” (Act III, Scene I).

“Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, go” (Act III, Scene I).

“Suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature” (Act III, Scene II).

“I must be cruel, only to be kind: Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind” (Act III, Scene IV).

“When sorrows come, they come not single spies, But in battalions” (Act IV, Scene V).

“The rest is silence” (Act V, Scene II).