Title: Hamlet Author: William Shakespeare Creation Date: c. 1600 Location: England
Summary
Prince Hamlet of Denmark learns from his father's ghost that his uncle Claudius murdered the king and married Hamlet's mother Gertrude to seize the throne. Hamlet vows revenge but cannot bring himself to act, instead staging a play to confirm Claudius's guilt, feigning madness, accidentally killing the counsellor Polonius, and driving Polonius's daughter Ophelia to genuine madness and death. The play spirals toward its catastrophic finale: a poisoned sword, a poisoned cup, and the deaths of Gertrude, Laertes, Claudius, and Hamlet himself. The Norwegian prince Fortinbras arrives to inherit the wreckage.
Why This Book Matters
Hamlet is the work in which European literature makes the modern self-conscious mind dramatically central. Earlier literature had introspection and soliloquy, but Hamlet thinks about acting, thinks about thinking, and performs the performance of thinking with unprecedented intensity. His soliloquies — "To be or not to be," "O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I" — helped establish the literary tradition of interiority, the idea that a character's inner life can be as dramatically compelling as external events. Shakespeare's influence on the English language and on world literature is so pervasive as to be almost invisible, and Hamlet is the concentrated expression of his genius. Choosing a single Shakespeare play is necessarily reductive, but Hamlet's centrality to Western consciousness — Harold Bloom's "invention of the human" — makes it the unavoidable selection.
Historical Context
Shakespeare wrote Hamlet at the turn of the 17th century, during the final years of Elizabeth I's reign — a period of political anxiety about succession, religious uncertainty, and expanding global horizons. The Elizabethan theatre was a new commercial art form reaching audiences across social classes. The play draws on older sources (a lost play called the Ur-Hamlet, Thomas Kyd's revenge tragedy tradition, Saxo Grammaticus's medieval Danish chronicle) but transforms them utterly. The Renaissance rediscovery of classical scepticism — Montaigne's Essays were being translated into English during this period — pervades Hamlet's philosophical questioning.
Literary Significance
Hamlet's formal innovations are so thoroughly absorbed into subsequent literature that they can be hard to see. The soliloquy as a vehicle for psychological exploration, the play-within-a-play as metatheatrical commentary, the protagonist who resists the conventions of his own genre (the revenge tragedy) — these were revolutionary. Shakespeare's language in Hamlet operates at a density and flexibility that expanded what English could do: neologisms, puns, syntactic inversions, and shifts between verse and prose that track psychological states. The play has generated more critical interpretation than any other literary work in English.
Research Notes
The choice of Hamlet over King Lear, Othello, or the collected works was deliberate. King Lear may be the greater tragedy, but Hamlet's influence on the concept of literary selfhood is unique and unmatched. A case could be made for including Shakespeare's collected works as a single entry, but this would be unwieldy and would obscure the specific argument for why one work matters. The Arden Third Series provides excellent textual apparatus. The play is short enough to read in an evening.
The Reading
The Ghost
The ghost appeared on the battlements of Elsinore at midnight, armed cap-a-pie in the same armour the old King of Denmark had worn when he defeated the elder Fortinbras of Norway on the ice, walking with the same martial bearing, stopping when Horatio called to it and then departing without speech as the cock crew. The guards — Bernardo and Marcellus, practical soldiers unaccustomed to the supernatural — had seen it twice already and were frightened enough to fetch a scholar, because scholars were supposed to know the proper forms of address for the dead. Horatio came, and Horatio was frightened too, though he was a student of philosophy and did not believe in ghosts until he saw one. It appeared. It would not speak. The cock crew again, and it started like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons, and faded on the crowing. They agreed: Prince Hamlet must be told.
The court at Elsinore was celebrating. King Claudius — the old king's brother, who had married the old king's widow Gertrude with what everyone privately acknowledged was indecent haste, barely two months after the funeral — sat on the throne dispensing political business with the smooth, polished competence of a man who has been rehearsing for this role his entire life. He managed the Norwegian threat, dispatching ambassadors to old Norway to restrain young Fortinbras. He managed Laertes, granting him permission to return to France with benevolent authority. He managed Hamlet, publicly calling him son, urging him to cast off his mourning, to accept that fathers die and sons must live, that protracted grief is impious, womanish, a fault to heaven. The speech was reasonable and paternal and entirely false, and Hamlet knew it was false but could not say why, because he did not yet know the truth.
What Hamlet knew was that his mother had remarried with a speed that seemed to him obscene — within a month, before the salt of her tears had dried — and that the world in which such speed was possible was a world whose moral foundation had rotted. Alone, his cry is of disgust at the flesh itself: O that this too too solid flesh would melt. He does not yet know about the murder. He knows only that his mother has betrayed his father's memory and that his uncle sits where his father sat and that everything — the court, the ceremony, the festive cannon — feels like a performance designed to normalise the intolerable. He is already nauseous before the ghost gives him a reason.
The ghost led him away from the others onto the platform above the sea, and there told him. I am thy father's spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night and for the day confined to fast in fires till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purged away. The serpent that did sting thy father's life now wears his crown. Your uncle Claudius, while I slept in my garden in the afternoon — it was my custom always, Hamlet knew this, the garden, the afternoon, the old man sleeping — poured the juice of cursed hebenon in the porches of my ears. The leprous distilment coursed through the natural gates and alleys of the body, curdling the blood, crusting the smooth body with vile and loathsome bark. Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled — no last rites, no confession, no communion. If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not. Avenge me. But leave your mother to heaven and to the thorns that in her bosom lodge to prick and sting her.
Hamlet swore to remember, and went back to his companions, and made them swear silence on his sword. The ghost's voice came from under the stage: swear. They moved; the voice followed: swear. An old mole, Hamlet called it, this worthy pioneer, this fellow in the cellarage. He was already converting his terror into irony, his grief into performance, his shattering revelation into the material of wit. The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right.
The Antic Disposition
He decided to put on an antic disposition — to feign madness. He went to Ophelia's chamber with his doublet unbraced, his stockings fouled and ungartered, his shirt unlaced, and took her by the wrist and held her hard and stared at her face without speaking, searching it, as though reading something written there that answered a question he had not yet formulated. Then he let her go, walked out with his eyes still on her face over his shoulder, and disappeared. She told her father Polonius — the lord chamberlain, a man of vast self-importance, tireless platitudes, and genuine political skill — and Polonius told the king. The court's diagnosis was immediate and convenient: Hamlet was mad for love of Ophelia. It suited Claudius, who did not want to look further. It suited Polonius, who saw a chance to display his analytical powers. It suited everyone except Hamlet and Ophelia, who were being used by the world's machinery without being consulted.
Claudius brought in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet's university friends, to spy on him. Hamlet saw through the gambit immediately: "You were sent for, and there is a kind of confession in your looks which your modesties have not craft enough to colour."
A company of players arrived at Elsinore, and Hamlet seized on them. He asked the lead actor to deliver a speech about the fall of Troy — Priam slaughtered by Pyrrhus, Hecuba running through the burning streets with a clout upon her head, howling her grief. The actor wept. Real tears for a fictional queen, and Hamlet was shamed: what would this player do had he the motive and the cue for passion that I have? He would drown the stage with tears. But Hamlet has done nothing. Am I a coward? Who calls me villain? The self-interrogation is savage, and it produces no answer — only a plan: the players will perform a play replicating his father's murder, and Hamlet will watch Claudius's face. The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.
To Be or Not to Be
Polonius arranged a test: he placed Ophelia in Hamlet's path while he and Claudius hid behind a curtain. Hamlet came. Whether he knew he was being watched is one of the permanent ambiguities. To be or not to be — that is the question. Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles. The question is not primarily about suicide. It is about endurance — whether to act or to bear it, whether consciousness itself is a burden. The dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns — that is what makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of. Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, and the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.
He turned on Ophelia with a cruelty that remains difficult to forgive and impossible to dismiss: get thee to a nunnery. Are you honest? Are you fair? I did love you once. I loved you not. Where is your father? The barrage of contradictions was either genuine madness, performed madness, or a desperate attempt to drive her away for her own protection. Claudius, behind the arras, was not persuaded of the love-madness theory. Hamlet's words, he said, were not like madness. There was something dangerous here.
The play — The Mousetrap, Hamlet called it — was performed. The dumb-show enacted the murder. Claudius sat through it. Then the spoken version reached the poisoning scene and Claudius rose from his chair and called for lights and left. Hamlet was ecstatic: he sang, he joked, he was certain. But certainty did not produce action. He found Claudius alone in a room, kneeling at prayer, and drew his sword. And then he thought: if I kill him now, while he is praying, his soul goes to heaven, and my father's soul is burning in purgatory, sent there with all his sins upon his head. He sheathed his sword. Claudius, alone afterward, confessed that he could not actually pray — My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go. The prayer was empty, the soul unprotected, and the perfect moment for revenge was thrown away by a man who could not stop reasoning about consequences.
The Killing of Polonius
He went to his mother's chamber. Polonius had hidden behind the arras to eavesdrop. Hamlet confronted Gertrude with a violence that frightened her — she cried out, thinking he meant to murder her — and Polonius, behind the curtain, cried out too. Hamlet heard the noise and thrust his sword through the fabric, certain it was Claudius. He was wrong. He pulled the arras aside and found Polonius dead, and his only comment was: thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell. I took thee for thy better. No remorse. The ghost appeared again in the chamber, visible only to Hamlet, urging him not to forget his purpose, and Gertrude, who could see nothing, was more convinced than ever that her son was mad.
Claudius shipped Hamlet to England with sealed letters ordering his execution, carried by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — Hamlet's old university friends, now Claudius's instruments, men who had traded their friendship for royal favour. Hamlet found the letters, opened them, replaced his own name with theirs, and resealed the commission with his father's signet ring. They are not near my conscience, he tells Horatio later. They made love to this employment. Pirates attacked the ship; Hamlet alone was taken aboard the pirate vessel and returned to Denmark. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sailed on to England and to their deaths.
Ophelia had gone mad — genuinely, terribly mad, singing scraps of songs about death and deflowering, handing out flowers whose symbolism the court half-understood: there's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray, love, remember; and there is pansies, that's for thoughts. Her madness was everything Hamlet's feigned madness was not: artless, transparent, devastating. She drowned in a brook, climbing a willow tree that grew aslant, a branch breaking, her clothes spreading wide upon the water and bearing her up for a moment — like a creature native and indued unto that element — before the weight of them, water-heavy, pulled her down. Whether it was suicide or accident no one will say.
Laertes came home from France raging, broke down the doors of Elsinore with a mob behind him, and demanded to know who had killed his father. Claudius redirected the rage toward Hamlet with the smooth efficiency of a man who turns other people's passions into his own instruments. Together they arranged the fencing match: an unbated, poisoned rapier for Laertes, and a poisoned chalice as backup.
The Graveyard and the Duel
Hamlet returned to Denmark and came upon two clowns digging a grave, tossing up skulls with the professional indifference of men who handle the dead for a living. He picked up a skull. Whose was it? Yorick's — the king's jester, dead twenty-three years. Hamlet had known him. He had carried Hamlet on his back a thousand times. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? He traced the path from skull to dust to clay to bung-stopping in a beer barrel: Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust. Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away. The meditation is the calmest passage in a life defined by agitation — either wisdom or exhaustion, a mind that has thought about mortality so thoroughly that it no longer has the energy to be horrified.
The funeral procession arrived. Laertes leapt into the grave and demanded to be buried with his sister. Hamlet leapt in after him. They grappled among the bones. Nothing was resolved.
Before the fencing match, Hamlet spoke to Horatio with a new serenity: there's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will. And: the readiness is all. He sensed what was coming. He did not try to avoid it.
The court assembled. The cups were placed. They fenced. Hamlet won the first two hits. The queen, against Claudius's frantic warning, drank from the poisoned cup to toast her son's success. Laertes wounded Hamlet with the poisoned blade. In a scuffle the swords were exchanged. Hamlet wounded Laertes with the same poisoned blade. The queen fell. Laertes, dying, told the truth: the treachery is Claudius's, the rapier is envenomed, the drink is poisoned, we are both dead. Hamlet stabbed Claudius with the poisoned sword and forced the poisoned wine between his lips. Follow my mother. Claudius died. Laertes died, asking Hamlet for an exchange of forgiveness. Hamlet granted it.
Then Hamlet asked Horatio not to drink from the cup — Horatio had reached for it, ready to follow his friend — but to stay alive and tell the story. If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story. Horatio promised. Hamlet said: the rest is silence. And he died.
Fortinbras, prince of Norway, arrived with his army from a campaign in Poland and found the Danish court strewn with bodies. He claimed the throne — the election lights on me, he said, and no one argued — and ordered that Hamlet be carried to a stage and shown to the multitude, borne by four captains with military music and the rites of war. For he was likely, had he been put on, to have proved most royal. Cannons fired.
This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →
The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, 2006, ISBN 1904271324) is the recommended scholarly edition — pathbreaking in its treatment of the three early texts and widely regarded as the most comprehensive Hamlet currently available. The play is short enough to read in a single evening and benefits from being read in one sitting.
Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. The definitive scholarly edition — comprehensive introduction, full textual apparatus, and outstanding notes.
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