Hamlet

Summary

Hamlet opens on the battlements of Elsinore, where sentries and the scholar Horatio see the ghost of the late King Hamlet of Denmark. Prince Hamlet, called home from university at Wittenberg for his father's funeral, is grieving and disgusted that his mother Gertrude has married his uncle Claudius, now king, within two months. The Ghost tells Hamlet that Claudius murdered him by pouring poison into his ear as he slept, and commands revenge, though Hamlet must leave his mother to heaven. Hamlet swears to remember, then decides to put on an antic disposition, feigning madness. The court's counselor Polonius, who has forbidden his daughter Ophelia to receive Hamlet's love, believes the prince is mad for her; Claudius sets Hamlet's school friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on him. Hamlet, doubting whether the Ghost may be a devil, has visiting players perform a play reenacting the murder; Claudius rises in alarm, and Hamlet is certain. He then comes upon Claudius at prayer and spares him, lest he die in a state of grace; alone, Claudius admits his words fly up while his thoughts remain below. In his mother's chamber Hamlet stabs Polonius, who is hiding behind a tapestry, and rebukes Gertrude until the Ghost appears again. Claudius sends Hamlet to England with sealed orders for his death. Ophelia, her father dead and her lover gone, loses her reason, sings fragments of songs and hands out flowers, and is later drowned. Her brother Laertes returns from France demanding vengeance, and Claudius plots with him a fencing match with an unblunted, poisoned rapier and a poisoned cup in reserve. Hamlet, having discovered the orders and sent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths instead, returns by way of a pirate ship. In the graveyard he contemplates the skull of the jester Yorick and grapples with Laertes in Ophelia's grave. Before the match he tells Horatio that there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow and that the readiness is all. In the duel Gertrude drinks the poisoned cup, Laertes and Hamlet are wounded with the poisoned blade, Laertes confesses, and Hamlet kills Claudius. Dying, Hamlet asks Horatio to tell his story and names Fortinbras of Norway, who arrives to claim the throne and give Hamlet a soldier's funeral.

Top Lessons

• Conscience and the command to act

  Hamlet must avenge a murder yet fears damning himself on a ghost's word. His delay is not mere weakness: he tests the Ghost, weighs the soul's fate, and thinks about what killing means. The play makes readers think about the moral weight of action.

• Repentance that will not let go

  Claudius wants forgiveness but will not give up his crown, his queen or his ambition. Shakespeare shows that true repentance requires surrender of the fruits of sin.

• Providence and readiness

  After his sea voyage Hamlet speaks of a divinity that shapes our ends and of special providence in the fall of a sparrow. His final calm comes from trust rather than from a finished plan.

• Fathers and children

  Hamlet, Laertes and Fortinbras are all sons of slain fathers, each answering differently. Polonius's counsel to Laertes and his use of Ophelia show the good and the harm a parent can do.

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Medical Lens

Hamlet is a central text for the history of melancholy: the black-clad scholar who has lost all his mirth, which Elizabethan readers would connect with treatises such as Timothy Bright's Treatise of Melancholie (1586). The play sets Hamlet's assumed madness, which he controls, beside Ophelia's real derangement after bereavement, and raises the moral and legal questions of suicide in the soliloquies and the gravediggers' debate over her burial. Poisons drive the plot from the hebenon poured in the king's ear to the envenomed rapier and the poisoned cup. Readings of Hamlet as a case of clinical depression are interpretive; the play itself frames his state in terms of grief, conscience and melancholy.

• Act 1, Scene 2

  Hamlet's first soliloquy wishes his flesh would melt and regrets the divine law against self-slaughter.

• Act 1, Scene 5

  The Ghost describes the juice of hebenon poured in his ear, curdling his blood and covering his body with a leprous crust.

• Act 2, Scene 2

  Hamlet describes the loss of mirth and pleasure in exercise, and Polonius diagnoses love-madness.

• Act 3, Scene 1

  The 'To be, or not to be' soliloquy weighs death, sleep and the dreams that may come after.

• Act 4, Scene 5

  Ophelia's madness after her father's death: songs, flowers and broken speech.

• Act 4, Scene 7 and Act 5, Scene 1

  Gertrude reports Ophelia's drowning; the gravediggers and the priest dispute whether she died by her own act and deserves Christian burial.

• Act 5, Scene 2

  The poisoned rapier and cup kill Gertrude, Laertes, Claudius and Hamlet.