Summary: Hamlet

The GIST

Hamlet by William Shakespeare is very probably the most famous play in the world, and its hero the most studied character in all of drama. Written around 1600, at roughly the midpoint of Shakespeare's career, it is his longest play, close to four thousand lines and almost twice the length of Macbeth, and the first of his great tragedies. Its full title is The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, and the outline could not be simpler: a ghost tells a prince that his father was murdered by the man now wearing the crown, and asks him to take revenge.

What Shakespeare made of that outline changed the theater. He took a popular kind of entertainment, the bloody revenge play, and turned its action inward, onto the mind of a man who cannot stop thinking. The scholar Stephen Greenblatt has said it is as if the play were "giving birth to a whole new kind of literary subjectivity." The brooding young man in black with a skull in his hand has walked out of the playhouse and into the common imagination, where he stands beside Oedipus, Faust and Don Quixote. Every generation's leading actors measure themselves against the part, and every generation of readers finds itself in it. The critic William Hazlitt put it in a phrase: it is we who are Hamlet.

The Story

A ghost on the battlements

The play opens at midnight on the walls of Elsinore, the royal castle of Denmark, with a nervous question: "Who's there?" The sentries have reason to be jumpy. For several nights a silent figure has walked the battlements, and it looks exactly like the old king, King Hamlet, who has only lately died. Tonight they have brought along Horatio, a scholar and the prince's friend from university, to see for himself. The ghost appears again. Horatio is shaken, and they agree that the prince has to be told.

Denmark is uneasy in other ways. There is an old quarrel with neighboring Norway, and young Fortinbras of Norway is said to be raising an army. Inside the castle, the crown has passed to the dead king's brother, Claudius, and Claudius has married his brother's widow, Queen Gertrude, with startling speed.

The prince in black

At court the next day, everyone is celebrating except one person. Prince Hamlet, lately a student at the University of Wittenberg, is still dressed in mourning and still grieving, and Claudius scolds him for it in front of the court. Left alone, Hamlet pours out what he really feels. His father is barely in the ground, his mother has gone straight to his uncle's bed, and the whole world looks spoiled to him: "How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world!" He wishes his own flesh would simply melt away, and that God had not forbidden suicide. Then Horatio arrives with news of the ghost, and Hamlet resolves to keep watch himself.

Elsewhere in the castle we meet another family. Polonius, the king's chief counselor, is seeing off his son Laertes, who is returning to France, with a string of fatherly advice that ends: "This above all: to thine own self be true." Polonius also has a daughter, Ophelia, and Hamlet has been courting her. Her brother warns her not to take the prince's attentions too seriously. Her father goes further and orders her to refuse them altogether.

That night the ghost comes to Hamlet and speaks to him alone. It says it is his father's spirit. It says he did not die naturally: Claudius murdered him to take his crown and his queen. And it demands revenge. Hamlet swears to deliver it. Then he makes Horatio and the guards swear to keep silent, and warns them that he may begin to behave very strangely. He intends to put on a show of madness. As one of the watchers has said, "something is rotten in the state of Denmark."

Doubt, disguise and spies

Here the play parts company with every revenge story before it. Hamlet does not rush off to kill the king. He is not sure he should. Was that truly his father, or a devil in his father's shape sent to tempt him into damnation? Is Claudius really guilty? Is revenge even right? Two months pass, and Hamlet does nothing except play the madman and watch.

His act throws the court into confusion. He bursts into Ophelia's room and behaves so wildly that she runs to her father, and Polonius decides at once that the prince has been driven mad by love. Claudius is not so sure, and he begins an investigation of his own. He sends for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two of Hamlet's old school friends, and sets them to find out what is wrong with him. Hamlet sees through them quickly. Polonius arranges for Ophelia to meet Hamlet while he and the king hide and listen, and the meeting goes cruelly: Hamlet turns on her, denies he ever loved her, and leaves her shattered. Claudius comes away convinced that whatever is troubling his nephew, it is not love.

Elsinore has become a place where everyone is acting a part and everyone is being watched. In the middle of it Hamlet stands alone and asks the most famous question in literature: "To be, or not to be, that is the question." He is weighing whether life, with all its insults and injustices, is worth enduring. What stops a person from ending it, he reasons, is fear of what comes after, death being "The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn No traveller returns." And so thinking itself becomes the obstacle to doing: "Thus conscience does make cowards of us all."

The play within the play

Then chance hands him a tool. A company of traveling actors arrives at the castle, players Hamlet knows and admires. He asks them to perform The Murder of Gonzago, a play in which a man is killed in just the way the ghost described, and he adds some lines of his own. He calls the scheme his mousetrap. If Claudius is guilty, he will give himself away. The play, Hamlet says, is the thing in which he means "to catch the conscience of the King."

The court assembles. Hamlet and Horatio watch the king's face. As the murder is acted out, Claudius rises, calls for lights and rushes from the room. For Hamlet, it is proof.

The prayer and the tapestry

What follows is the tightest stretch of the play. On his way to his mother's room, Hamlet comes upon Claudius alone and on his knees, trying to pray. The king's guilt is real, and it torments him, yet he cannot bring himself to give up what the crime won him, so he cannot truly repent. Hamlet draws his sword behind him. This is the moment. And he stops. A man killed at prayer, he reasons, goes to heaven, and that would be no revenge at all. He puts the sword away and waits for a worse hour.

In the queen's chamber, mother and son finally have it out. Polonius has hidden behind a wall hanging to listen. Hamlet is so fierce that Gertrude cries out, the old man calls for help from his hiding place, and Hamlet, without knowing who is there, drives his sword through the cloth. It is the one thing he does without thinking in the whole play, and it cannot be undone. While he is raging at his mother, the ghost appears once more, to rebuke him for his delay and to tell him to be gentler with her. Gertrude sees and hears nothing. To her, her son is talking to the empty air.

The net closes

From this point the consequences come quickly, and here a summary should stop. Claudius now knows that his nephew is dangerous to him, and he arranges to send Hamlet to England in the company of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, carrying a sealed letter whose contents Hamlet is not meant to learn. Ophelia, rejected by the prince and overwhelmed by what has befallen her family, begins to lose her mind. Laertes comes storming home from France demanding satisfaction, and Claudius, a skilled manager of other men's anger, finds a use for him. Fortinbras marches his army across Danish soil. And Hamlet, who spent three acts unable to act, will come home changed, to a graveyard, a skull and a fencing match. How it ends is one of the most celebrated final scenes ever written, and it is better seen than told.

What It's Really About

Thought against action. The old question about the play is why Hamlet delays. One strong answer is that he does not know enough to act. The critic Harry Levin described his predicament as two problems at once: what to believe, and what to do. Hamlet is caught between two ideas of himself, the heroic son whose duty is blood revenge and the man of conscience who fears that revenge is a sin. In Shakespeare's source, the old Scandinavian tale of Amleth, there was no ghost and no doubt: the prince knew who was guilty, killed him and took the throne. Shakespeare added the uncertainty, and with it the whole play.

Appearance and reality. One critic has called this a play in the interrogative mood, ringing with questions from its first line. Nobody at Elsinore is what he seems. The king is a murderer who smiles, friends are informers, and madness is a costume that may or may not have become real. Readers still argue about how much of Hamlet's madness is acted.

Death. From the ghost onward, the play is fascinated by mortality: what dying means, what follows it, and what it makes of kings and clowns alike. A teenage reviewer was struck by how seriously the characters take the idea that the state of a soul at the moment of death decides its fate, and by how that belief drives the plot.

A mind on stage. Before Hamlet, a soliloquy mostly explained the plot. Here it became thinking out loud, consciousness put into words. Matthew Arnold later described modern life as the moment when "the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced." Hamlet began that dialogue more than two centuries early.

People love the play for its hero, who is at once son, lover, scholar, prince and avenger, for a cast in which even the minor figures are vivid, and for language so quotable that much of it has passed into everyday speech. It has also never stopped being a show, with a ghost, a murder mystery, a play inside a play, a brawl and a duel. The text itself comes down to us in three early versions, printed in 1603, 1604 and 1623, each with lines the others lack, so that every production has to decide what its Hamlet is.

Who Should Read It

Anyone who wants to know where so much of our language and so many of our stories come from, and anyone who has ever been paralyzed by a decision. The Elizabethan English takes patience, and an edition with good notes helps a great deal; one young reader reports that the footnotes turned confusion into fun. If you can, see it performed as well. It rewards students meeting it for the first time and readers returning after twenty years, because the play seems to change as you do.