Hamlet

Based on Wikipedia: Hamlet

A prince pretends to be insane so he can murder his uncle. That's the elevator pitch for the most influential play ever written in English—a four-hour meditation on revenge, mortality, and the paralysis of overthinking that has captivated audiences for over four centuries.

William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet sometime between 1599 and 1601, during the final years of Queen Elizabeth I's reign. It's his longest play, clocking in at around 4,000 lines, and it contains some of the most quoted phrases in the English language. "To be or not to be." "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark." "Alas, poor Yorick." These lines have so thoroughly penetrated Western culture that many people recognize them without ever having read or seen the play.

But what makes Hamlet remarkable isn't just its quotability. It's the complexity of its central character—a young man who knows exactly what he should do but cannot bring himself to do it.

The Story Begins with a Ghost

Denmark is on edge. The old king has just died, and his brother Claudius has wasted no time seizing the throne and marrying the widowed queen, Gertrude. This hasty marriage scandalizes the court, but no one dares say anything openly. Meanwhile, the neighboring kingdom of Norway is making threatening noises about invasion, led by young Prince Fortinbras, whose father the old Danish king had killed in battle years earlier.

On the cold ramparts of Elsinore Castle, two sentries have seen something that chills them more than the winter wind: a ghost that looks exactly like the dead king, walking the battlements in full armor. They bring along Horatio, a scholar and close friend of Prince Hamlet, to witness it for himself. When the ghost appears, they all agree—this is no trick of the light. They must tell the prince.

Hamlet, when we first meet him, is already in deep mourning. Unlike everyone else at court, who seems to have moved on with suspicious ease, he cannot shake his grief. His mother's remarriage particularly torments him. "Within a month," he broods, before the shoes she wore to his father's funeral were even worn out, she had married his uncle.

When Horatio tells him about the ghost, Hamlet resolves to see it himself.

A Father's Command from Beyond the Grave

That night, the ghost appears to Hamlet alone and reveals a terrible secret. He wasn't killed by a serpent bite, as the official story claims. His own brother Claudius murdered him by pouring poison into his ear while he slept in the garden. The ghost demands revenge.

This puts Hamlet in an impossible position. On one hand, his father has explicitly commanded him to kill Claudius. On the other hand, he has only the word of a ghost—and in Shakespeare's time, ghosts were theologically complicated. They might be genuine spirits of the dead, or they might be demons in disguise, tempting the living to damnation through murder.

Hamlet's solution is to buy time. He tells Horatio and the guards that he plans to "put an antic disposition on"—to act as if he's gone mad. This gives him cover to investigate while keeping everyone guessing about his true intentions.

The Madness Question

Is Hamlet actually mad, or is he faking? This question has occupied scholars for centuries, and Shakespeare seems to deliberately leave it ambiguous. Hamlet himself insists he's only pretending, but his behavior throughout the play grows increasingly erratic in ways that feel genuine.

Consider his treatment of Ophelia. She's the daughter of Polonius, a windy old courtier who serves as Claudius's chief advisor. Hamlet and Ophelia have been romantically involved—the play hints at love letters and gifts exchanged between them. But after Hamlet decides to feign madness, he bursts into her room half-dressed, stares at her face without speaking, then leaves with a sigh "so piteous and profound." Later, when she tries to return his letters, he denies ever giving her anything, then launches into a brutal speech about female dishonesty, culminating in the famous line: "Get thee to a nunnery."

The cruelty of this scene feels like more than acting. Something real is breaking in Hamlet.

The Play Within the Play

Hamlet devises a clever test. A troupe of traveling actors arrives at Elsinore, and he commissions them to perform a play called The Murder of Gonzago, which depicts a murder eerily similar to what the ghost described—a man poisoning a king by pouring venom in his ear, then marrying the queen.

"The play's the thing," Hamlet muses, "wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

The plan works. As the actors reach the murder scene, Claudius leaps from his seat and flees the room. For Hamlet, this is proof. The ghost told the truth. His uncle really is a murderer.

And yet—Hamlet still doesn't act.

The Fatal Delay

This is the great mystery at the heart of the play. Hamlet has both motive and proof. He has opportunities. Shortly after the play-within-the-play, he finds Claudius alone, kneeling in prayer. He draws his sword—then stops.

His reasoning is characteristically overthought. If he kills Claudius while he's praying, Claudius's soul might go to heaven. That's not revenge enough. Hamlet wants his uncle to die "about some act that has no relish of salvation in it"—drunk, in a rage, or in bed with his brother's wife. Only then would killing him send his soul to hell.

There's dark irony here that Hamlet doesn't know. Claudius, alone onstage, has just been trying to pray and failing. "My words fly up, my thoughts remain below," he admits. "Words without thoughts never to heaven go." If Hamlet had struck, he would have killed a man whose prayers weren't reaching God anyway.

Instead, Hamlet sheathes his sword and goes to confront his mother.

Blood in the Queen's Chamber

The meeting with Gertrude goes badly. Hamlet, furious about her marriage, speaks so violently that she cries out for help. Behind a tapestry, someone else cries out too—Polonius, who has been hiding there to spy on the conversation.

Hamlet, thinking it must be Claudius, stabs through the curtain. But when he pulls aside the fabric, he finds not the king but the old counselor, now bleeding to death on the floor.

This is the play's turning point. Up until now, Hamlet has been paralyzed by indecision, hurting people with words but not with steel. Now he has killed an innocent man—the father of the woman he may have loved. The death sets in motion an avalanche of consequences.

Ophelia, already fragile from Hamlet's rejection, snaps completely at the news of her father's death. She wanders the castle singing strange songs and handing out flowers with symbolic meanings. Her brother Laertes, who has been away in France, rushes home demanding vengeance. And Claudius, now thoroughly alarmed, decides Hamlet must die.

Exile and Return

Claudius sends Hamlet to England, accompanied by his old school friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They carry a sealed letter to the English king requesting that Hamlet be executed upon arrival.

But Hamlet is cannier than Claudius realizes. On the ship, he discovers the letter and rewrites it, substituting his own name with those of his former friends. When pirates attack the vessel, Hamlet negotiates his way to freedom, leaving Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to sail on to their deaths.

He returns to Denmark to find Ophelia dead. She has drowned—whether by suicide or by accident caused by her madness, the play leaves deliberately unclear. In one of Shakespeare's most famous scenes, Hamlet stumbles upon gravediggers preparing her burial plot. They unearth a skull, and Hamlet recognizes it: Yorick, the court jester who used to carry him on his back as a child.

"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio—a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy."

Holding the skull, Hamlet contemplates mortality with a directness the play hasn't seen before. Alexander the Great, he muses, ended up as dust. That dust might have been used to stop up a beer barrel. In the end, we're all just bones and dirt.

The Final Catastrophe

Claudius has hatched a backup plan with Laertes: a fencing match, supposedly to settle their differences honorably. Laertes will use a poisoned blade, and if that fails, Claudius will offer Hamlet a cup of poisoned wine.

Everything goes wrong. Hamlet wins the first two hits. Queen Gertrude, proud of her son, picks up the poisoned wine cup to toast him. Claudius tries to stop her but can't without revealing the plot. She drinks. In the next exchange, Laertes wounds Hamlet with the poisoned sword. They scuffle, the swords get switched, and Hamlet wounds Laertes with the same blade.

Gertrude collapses, crying out that she's been poisoned. Laertes, dying, confesses everything. In a burst of the decisive action he's been incapable of all play long, Hamlet stabs Claudius with the poisoned sword and forces him to drink from the poisoned cup.

Within minutes, the stage is covered with bodies: the king, the queen, Laertes, and finally Hamlet himself, who dies in Horatio's arms with the words "the rest is silence."

Enter Fortinbras

As if on cue, young Fortinbras of Norway arrives with his army. He's been marching through Danish territory on his way to fight in Poland, but he finds the entire Danish royal family dead. With no heir to contest him, he claims the throne for himself.

This ending is bleaker than it first appears. Remember that Fortinbras is the son of the Norwegian king whom Hamlet's father killed. The whole play has been shaped by the consequences of that old violence—the ghost's demand for revenge, Claudius's usurpation, Denmark's fear of invasion. And now, after all the bloodshed, Norway gets Denmark anyway. Four acts of agonized deliberation, and the kingdom ends up in the hands of a foreigner who just happened to be passing through.

Where Did This Story Come From?

The "prince who pretends to be mad to avenge his father" is one of the oldest story patterns in the world. Versions appear in ancient Rome, medieval Scandinavia, even Arabic literature. The specific tale Shakespeare adapted comes from a twelfth-century Danish chronicler named Saxo Grammaticus, who wrote a Latin history called Gesta Danorum—"Deeds of the Danes."

Saxo's hero is named Amleth (note how close that is to Hamlet). His father is murdered by his uncle. He pretends to be a fool to avoid suspicion, kills a spy hidden in his mother's bedroom, and eventually destroys his uncle. Many details match Shakespeare's version almost exactly.

The story passed through a French adaptation in 1570, which added some elements Shakespeare used—including the hero's melancholy, which isn't present in Saxo's more action-oriented original. Some scholars believe Shakespeare also drew on an earlier English play about Hamlet, now lost, sometimes called the Ur-Hamlet. This hypothetical play might have been written by Thomas Kyd, author of The Spanish Tragedy, another revenge drama popular in the 1580s. But since no copy survives, we can't know for certain.

Why Does Hamlet Hesitate?

Critics have been arguing about this for centuries. The Romantic poets thought Hamlet was too sensitive and intellectual for the brutal task of revenge—a portrait of the artist as a paralyzed young man. Freudian interpreters saw Oedipal conflict: Hamlet can't kill Claudius because Claudius did what Hamlet unconsciously wanted to do, murder his father and marry his mother.

Other readings focus on the religious and political complexities. In Shakespeare's time, revenge was theologically forbidden—vengeance belongs to God, not to individuals. A play that glorified killing would have troubled Elizabethan audiences. Hamlet's delay might represent the moral difficulty of taking the law into one's own hands.

Or perhaps the play is about something more universal: the gap between knowing what you should do and actually doing it. Hamlet thinks too much. He sees every side of every question. He's paralyzed by his own intelligence. In a famous soliloquy, he wonders whether "the native hue of resolution" gets "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." Thinking, he suggests, makes cowards of us all.

This reading has made Hamlet the patron saint of intellectuals and procrastinators everywhere.

Three Different Hamlets

One unusual feature of Hamlet is that three substantially different versions survive from Shakespeare's time. The First Quarto, published in 1603, is significantly shorter and simpler—some scholars think it's a reconstruction from memory by actors who performed in the play. The Second Quarto, from 1604, is nearly twice as long and includes famous passages missing from the first version. The First Folio, published in 1623 after Shakespeare's death, differs from both in various ways, cutting some lines and adding others.

Modern editions typically combine elements from all three texts, which means the Hamlet we read today is partly an editorial construction. No one knows exactly which version Shakespeare considered definitive—or whether he kept revising the play throughout his career.

A Personal Connection?

Shakespeare had a son named Hamnet, who died in 1596 at age eleven. The similarity of names has tempted scholars to find autobiographical meaning in the play. Most reject this connection—Hamlet derives from Scandinavian legend, and Hamnet was a common name in Elizabethan England. But the literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt has argued that the coincidence of losing a son named Hamnet and then writing a play about a son named Hamlet, consumed by grief for his dead father, can't be entirely accidental.

Shakespeare, of course, left no diary, no letters discussing his creative process, almost no direct evidence of his inner life. We have only the plays themselves. And Hamlet, more than any other, feels like the work of someone who understood grief, paralysis, and the terrible weight of having to act in an impossible situation.

The Endless Afterlife

No play has been adapted, quoted, parodied, and reimagined more often. Hamlet has been set in modern corporate boardrooms, nineteenth-century Russia, apartheid South Africa, and post-9/11 America. It has been performed by women in the title role, rewritten as The Lion King, and adapted into countless films—with actors from Laurence Olivier to Mel Gibson to Ethan Hawke to Benedict Cumberbatch donning the black doublet.

Every generation finds new resonance in it. The play seems to contain inexhaustible meanings, perhaps because its central questions—How do we act when we're not sure what's right? How do we live knowing we're going to die? How do we trust anyone in a world full of spies and betrayers?—never stop being relevant.

"The play's the thing," Hamlet says, and for over four hundred years, we've kept proving him right.