HAMLET

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

OVERVIEW 2

CHAPTER SUMMARIES AND ANALYSES 4

Acts I and II 4
Acts III and IV 10
Act V 18

CHARACTER ANALYSIS 22

Hamlet 22
Claudius 22
Gertrude 23
The Ghost 23
Horatio 23
Laertes 23
Ophelia 24
Polonius 24

THEMES 25

SYMBOLS AND MOTIFS 28

IMPORTANT QUOTES 30

ESSAY TOPICS 38

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OVERVIEW
First performed in 1609, Hamlet is one of the best-known and most influential
works of the playwright William Shakespeare (1564-1616). This summary refers to
the 2001 Pelican edition of the play.

Plot Summary

On a dark night, sentinels see a ghost stalking the battlements of Elsinore Castle,
the royal seat of Denmark. It is the dead king, who has returned to tell his son
Hamlet to avenge him. He was murdered by his brother, Claudius, who then
married his wife, Gertrude, and claimed the throne. The young prince, already deep
in mourning and disgusted by his mother’s speedy remarriage to his uncle, takes
this visitation to heart. Swearing his friend Horatio to secrecy, he decides that, in
order to find a way to kill Claudius, he will pretend to be mad.

Meanwhile, the king’s councilor, the pompous Polonius, and his son Laertes are
trying to persuade his daughter Ophelia not to trust Hamlet’s declarations of
affection. They fear that Hamlet’s love is fleeting, and that Ophelia will lose her
honor to him. Ophelia listens to their warnings and agrees to stop spending so
much time with Hamlet.

When Hamlet turns up pretending to be mad, the court goes into a frenzy to find
out what’s wrong with him. Claudius and Gertrude summon his schoolfriends
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on him and send Ophelia to confront him.
When Hamlet is alone, he is deeply depressed; he contemplates suicide and
struggles with his doubt about whether the ghost was really his father or a devilish
apparition. He becomes paranoid and mistrustful, pushing Ophelia away and
seeing double-dealing everywhere.

Nevertheless, he and Horatio devise a plan to test Claudius’s guilt. They hire a
company of actors to perform a play that resembles the story of the king’s murder,
hoping to reveal Claudius’s guilty conscience. Indeed, Claudius is overwhelmed at
the performance, and runs away. Hamlet then confronts his mother with the story
of the murder and again sees the ghost of his father, though the ghost is not visible
to Gertrude. Polonius is in the room at the time, eavesdropping, and Hamlet,
believing him to be Claudius, stabs him to death through the tapestry he is hiding
behind.

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Claudius arranges to send Hamlet away to England, under the guise of damage
control. He arranges for the King of England to kill Hamlet as a diplomatic favor.
Hamlet discovers the orders, however, and alters them so that they condemn,
instead, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who are accompanying him to England. The
ship is attacked by pirates, and in the confusion Hamlet escapes and returns to
Denmark.

Claudius recruits Laertes, who wants to avenge the death of his father, to kill
Hamlet through a duel with poisoned swords, with poisoned wine as a backup
plan. Meanwhile, Ophelia driven mad over her father’s death and Hamlet’s cruelty,
is found drowned. Hamlet learns of her death only at her funeral, where he and
Laertes fight over who loved her better. Laertes agrees to go through with
Claudius’s plot.

Claudius tells Hamlet that he’s laid a heavy wager on him in a civilized swordfight
against Laertes, and despite Horatio’s warnings, Hamlet agrees to the fight. During
the duel, Gertrude accidentally drinks poisoned wine meant for Hamlet and dies;
Hamlet and Laertes are both wounded with the poisoned blade. Laertes confesses
the whole plan and begs for Hamlet’s forgiveness. Hamlet kills Claudius and dies in
Horatio’s arms.

Horatio is the only one left when Fortinbras, the King of Norway, arrives at court
from a military victory. He swears to tell the story of how the Danish royal family
met its end.

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CHAPTER SUMMARIES AND ANALYSES

Acts I and II

Act I, Scene 1

The play begins with a group of sentinels keeping watch on the walls of Elsinore
Castle, the royal seat of the King of Denmark. The sentinels are ill at ease. For the
past several nights, they have seen a ghost stalking the battlements. They ask
Horatio, a young scholar and friend of Prince Hamlet, to come and wait for the
ghost with them. He is skeptical, but his tune changes when a ghost indeed does
appear. It looks just like the late King, Prince Hamlet’s father, wearing full armor.
Horatio commands it to speak, but it disappears.

Shaken, Horatio and the sentinels discuss why this apparition might have shown up
now. Horatio speculates that the ghost’s appearance may have something to do
with an upcoming war with Norway. The late king defeated and killed King
Fortinbras of Norway and conquered some of his lands. Fortinbras’s son, also
called Fortinbras, is now plotting to attack Denmark and reclaim his territory.

Horatio is worried. The apparition of the king and recent astrological omens remind
him of the events that legendarily surrounded the death of Julius Caesar. The
ghost appears again, and again, it refuses to answer when Horatio and the
sentinels call to him. A rooster crows, heralding the approach of dawn, and the
ghost vanishes once more.

Horatio and the sentinels agree to tell Prince Hamlet about the apparition. He, they
believe, may be able to persuade the ghost to speak.

Act I, Scene 2

The new King of Denmark, Claudius, is holding court. He is the brother of the dead
king and has married the king’s widow, Gertrude. He sends messengers to
Fortinbras’s uncle, hoping to prevent Fortinbras from enacting his plans. He also
grants the request of the young courtier Laertes, son of his councilor Polonius, to
return to France, where he has been living.

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Hamlet arrives, deeply unhappy and dressed in black to show that he is in

mourning. Claudius and Gertrude chide him for clinging to his grief for his father.
Claudius argues that everyone must come to terms with the deaths of their fathers,
as such deaths are part of the natural order of things. Hamlet is unmoved. He
emphasizes that, while many grieve falsely, his grief is true, and his mourning garb
matches his inner self. Claudius tells Hamlet that he does not wish him to return to
his university studies in Wittenberg, but to stay in Denmark. Hamlet assents but not
happily.

Claudius and Gertrude leave, and Hamlet gives a despairing speech, mourning his
father and expressing his disgust at his mother’s speedy remarriage to Claudius.
He is interrupted when Horatio and the sentinels arrive and tell him about the
ghost. He eagerly agrees to try to speak to the ghost that night.

Act I, Scene 3

Laertes and Ophelia, the son and daughter of the royal councilor Polonius, are
saying an affectionate goodbye before Laertes departs for France. Laertes warns
his sister not to put too much stock in Hamlet’s affection for her. Hamlet’s youthful
love, he says, is like a spring violet—beautiful but fleeting. Further, as a prince,
Hamlet may not freely choose whom he marries.

Ophelia, Laertes implies, has a lot to lose: If she sleeps with Hamlet, she’ll forfeit
her honor and her position in society, and she may not get what she hopes for in
return. Ophelia doesn’t take her brother too seriously, and teases him, telling him
he’d better not be a hypocrite about sexual morality while he’s away.

Polonius arrives to give his son some parting words. Purporting to hurry him away,
he holds him back with a comical flood of advice, most of it about moderation: Hold
on to your true friends, but don’t waste time and money on false ones; dress
elegantly, but not ostentatiously; don’t get into fights, but if you do, fight well. He
ends with one deceptively simple piece of advice: “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” (1.3.75-79).

Laertes at last escapes from the conversation, and Polonius starts to question
Ophelia. He echoes Laertes’s doubts about Hamlet’s affection. Ophelia, more
serious now, protests. She says that Hamlet has made real professions of love to

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her. Polonius warns her not to be taken in by mere vows: Words are cheap. He
instructs her to spend less time with Hamlet, and Ophelia says she’ll obey.

Act I, Scene 4

Hamlet, Horatio, and the sentinels are again on the battlements. The clock has just
struck midnight. Beneath them, trumpets and cannons sound; Hamlet explains that
this is the noise of Claudius’s customary midnight partying. Hamlet doesn’t approve
of his uncle’s carousing, feeling it gives Denmark a reputation for drunkenness that
overrides the nation’s strengths. He says that it is often the case that a single
inborn weakness in a person’s character can—through no fault of their own—slowly
corrupt all of the good in them.

He is interrupted by the appearance of the ghost. Terrified, he asks it questions:

Has it come from heaven or hell, and why has it come at all?

The ghost does not reply, but beckons to him. Horatio and the others urge Hamlet
not to follow it, fearing that it will lure him to his death, but Hamlet doesn’t listen:
“Why, what should be the fear? / I do not set my life at a pin’s fee, / And for my soul,
what can it do to that, / Being a thing immortal as itself?” (1.4.64-67). Feeling he has
nothing to live for and desperate to hear his dead father speak, Hamlet follows the
ghost.

Act I, Scene 5

The ghost tells Hamlet that he will soon have to return to the fires of Purgatory—a
place, he says, he could tell some fearful stories about, if he had the time. For now,
the message he wishes to deliver is simple: Hamlet must avenge his death.

The ghost explains that the story of his demise—that a serpent bit him while he
slept in the orchard—is not the truth. In fact, Claudius crept up on him and dripped
a gruesome, literally bloodcurdling poison into his ear. The ghost decries
Claudius’s treachery and Gertrude’s infidelity to his memory. Worse, because he
died without extreme unction (the final Christian rite of forgiveness), he must now
suffer in Purgatory until his unforgiven sins are burnt away.

At last, he departs, with the final words: “Remember me” (1.5.91).

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Horrified and vindicated in his hatred for Claudius and anger with Gertrude, Hamlet
swears he will indeed remember his father and notes an unpleasant truth: “That
one may smile, and smile, and be a villain” (1.5.108).

Horatio and the sentinels catch up with Hamlet and ask him what the ghost said.
Hamlet, full of fresh mistrust, refuses to tell them, and instead swears them to
secrecy; the ghost, unseen, echoes his son, repeatedly crying “Swear.” At last, the
bewildered men agree to swear on Hamlet’s sword that they will never repeat what
they’ve seen.

Hamlet thanks them, and tells Horatio a part of his plan: He will “put an antic
disposition on” (1.5.175), which is to say, he will pretend to be insane. He gives no
reasons, and Horatio does not ask why.

Act II, Scene 1

Polonius instructs his servant, Reynaldo, to go seek news of his son Laertes.
Polonius has some curious ideas about the best way to go about this: He instructs
his servant to pretend he vaguely knows Laertes and has heard he’s a bit of a
ruffian—but not too much of a ruffian. Polonius hopes that, if his servant drops
these hints, the strangers he speaks to will tell him the truth about any mischief
Laertes has been up to. Reynaldo is, understandably, confused by this plan, not
least because Polonius often loses the thread of his thought. In the end, he agrees
to carry it out and departs.

Ophelia enters, frightened and upset. She tells her father that Hamlet has just
appeared in her room, disheveled, distracted, and acting of unsound mind:

He took me by the wrist and held me hard […] He falls to such perusal of my
face / As he would draw it […] At last, a little shaking of mine arm / And thrice
his head thus waving up and down / He rais’d a sign so piteous and profound /
As it did seem to shatter all his bulk / And end his being” (2.1.86-95).

Polonius reads this strange behavior as evidence of a broken heart, and he regrets
that he told Ophelia to be chilly with Hamlet. Old people, he reflects, often read too
much into a situation, just as young people often leap before they look. Together,
Polonius and Ophelia go to Claudius to tell him of Hamlet’s behavior.

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Act II, Scene 2

Informed of Hamlet’s instability, Claudius and Gertrude have summoned two of his
childhood friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to see if they can figure out what
might have happened. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern agree to help, and they leave
to find Hamlet.

Polonius enters, bringing news of the ambassadors who went to Norway in hopes
of stopping Fortinbras’s attack—and an explanation for Hamlet’s mania. The
ambassador reports that Fortinbras’s uncle has successfully dissuaded Fortinbras
from attacking Denmark. Fortinbras instead intends to attack the Poles and sends a
letter asking Claudius for safe passage through Denmark. Claudius agrees to this.

This good news conveyed, Polonius steps forward to explain his theory of Hamlet’s
behavior. Beginning with a lengthy prologue about the virtues of brevity, he tells
Claudius and Gertrude what they already know: Hamlet is mad. After a bit more
circumlocution, he shows them a passionate love letter from Hamlet to Ophelia and
explains that he discouraged Ophelia from accepting Hamlet’s attentions, as
Hamlet was so much above her in social station. Wishing to investigate this theory
further, Claudius and Polonius hatch a plan to hide behind a tapestry at a time and
place where they know Hamlet and Ophelia will meet, so they can watch what
happens.

Hamlet enters, reading a book, and Polonius hurries Claudius and Gertrude away
so that he can speak with Hamlet. They have a strange, language-bending
conversation. Hamlet, feigning madness, makes rather sharp points (for instance,
saying that Polonius is a “fishmonger,” which can also mean “pimp”). Polonius
observes, in an aside, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t” (2.2.204).

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern enter, and Polonius departs. Hamlet greets them
warmly with bawdy puns, but he quickly smells some trickery and tells them that he
knows Gertrude and Claudius sent for them. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern admit
to having been summoned. Hamlet tells them of his melancholy; he has “lost all his
mirth” (2.2.266), and the world seems flat and empty to him. He half-confesses that
he isn’t mad, at least not in the way that he’s pretending.

Trying to cheer him up, Rosencrantz tells Hamlet that he and Guildenstern have
invited a company of actors to perform at the palace. Polonius reappears and

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confirms this report; Hamlet dials up his performance of madness again in

response, baiting Polonius with teasing references to daughters.

The actors arrive, and Hamlet greets them by asking them to perform a speech: the
story of the death of King Priam at the fall of Troy, and the grief of his widow
Hecuba. Polonius notes that the actor giving the speech is in tears by the end.
Hamlet then asks the actors to perform a play called “The Murder of Gonzago,” and
to insert a few lines that he himself will write. The actors agree, and everyone but
Hamlet leaves.

Alone, Hamlet speaks of his disgust at his own inaction. It seems to him monstrous
that, while an actor can bring himself to tears speaking of a fictional person, he
cannot express his own true grief—or move himself to take revenge on Claudius.
“Am I a coward?” he asks. (2.2.510).

From these musings, he hatches a plan: He will use theater’s emotional power to
prove Claudius’s treachery. The actors will perform a play that resembles the story
the ghost told him of the murder. If Claudius seems to react, Hamlet will have proof
that the ghost’s story is true.

Hamlet says that he needs this proof because he fears that the ghost might have
been not his father’s spirit but some devil sent to trick him. He concludes: “The
play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king” (2.2.543-544).

Acts I-II Analysis

The first acts establish the questions and anxieties at the heart of the play including
inaction, doubt, belief, and performance.

The court of Denmark is full of double dealing—the opposite of Polonius’s advice

“to thine own self be true.” Dark truths are hidden under smiles and courtly
manners, and real feeling is restrained for the sake of propriety. The appearance of
the ghost, which might at first seem to blow the lid off of all of these concealments,
only creates more doubt for Hamlet. While he believes that Claudius is a villain and
says he longs to avenge himself, a kernel of uncertainty—whether the ghost could
have been not a spirit, but a devil—paralyzes him. Then again, as Hamlet himself
notes, perhaps it isn’t uncertainty but cowardice that prevents him from taking
action.

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He expresses his feelings through his language. Like many of Shakespeare’s

madmen and fools, Hamlet speaks the truth but in a sidelong, oblique way. He
deploys puns and double meanings. Hamlet’s speech to Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern evocatively expresses his state of mind and demonstrates both the
powers and the limitations of language. He undercuts his moving descriptions of
the beauties of the world and the glories of humanity with his own inability to
connect to others. To him, the world, to him, is “a sterile promontory” (2.2.253-254).
This image of sterility suggests that Hamlet feels numb and is unable to connect his
internal feelings to the external world.

Hamlet’s faculty with language is at once virtuosic and cynical: He is all too well
aware that words, like people, often conceal rather than reveal true meaning. He
wields language expertly but is frustrated that he does not back up his words with
action: “That I, the son of a dear father murder’d, / Prompted to my revenge by
heaven and hell, / Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words, / And fall a-
cursing, like a very drab, / A scullion!” (2.2.418-422). This frustration inspires his
plan to use the actors to gain further proof of Claudius’s guilt while continuing to
pretend to be mentally unwell. As the play continues, however, the line between
Hamlet’s performance and his true self becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish.

Acts III and IV

Act III, Scene 1

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern report back to Claudius and Gertrude, describing

Hamlet’s strange behavior; Polonius confirms their report. Claudius has sent for
Hamlet, intending to hide with Polonius and watch as Hamlet meets with Ophelia.
Everyone else leaves, and Polonius instructs Ophelia to pretend to read a prayer
book. He notes that it is sadly common for people to use prayers and devotions
deceptively, covering up the evil inside them. In an aside, Claudius says that he
knows this truth all too well: He is eaten up by his guilt. As Hamlet appears,
Polonius and Claudius hide.

Hamlet enters thinking aloud: He is considering suicide: “To be, or not to be—that
is the question” (3.1.56). Is it braver, he wonders, to struggle against life’s troubles,
or to fight them by refusing to live? The sleep of death would end his pain, but,
then, that’s not altogether sure: “In that sleep of death what dreams may come /
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil / Must give us pause” (3.1.66-68). If the
afterlife was not so uncertain, Hamlet wonders, no one would go through the

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agonies of life. It is the fear of the unknown that makes it difficult to act: “Thus
conscience does make cowards of us all, / And thus the native hue of resolution / Is
sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” (3.1.83-85).

Ophelia appears and tries to greet Hamlet warmly, returning the affections that she
had withdrawn. Hamlet bitterly denies that there was ever any real love between
them. He cries, “Get thee to a nunnery” (3.1.121), and declares that marriage is a
sham that should be ended. He storms away.

Ophelia, distraught, mourns Hamlet, believing him to have lost his mind. Claudius
and Polonius come out of hiding; Claudius doubts that Hamlet is truly mad. He
vows to send Hamlet away to England, where he hopes whatever is bothering
Hamlet will be settled. Polonius agrees with this plan, but he suggests that they
send Gertrude to Hamlet alone before they carry it out, as a final test.

Act III, Scene 2

Hamlet enters with some of the actors, instructing them on their performance. He
hates melodramatic overacting; he insists that the purpose of theater is to “hold […]
the mirror up to nature” (3.2.21-22).

Horatio appears, and Hamlet greets him with praise, calling him the most just and
reasonable person he knows. He refuses Horatio’s polite disavowals, pointing out
that he can’t be giving false flattery because Horatio has nothing to give him. He
confides in Horatio and tells him his plan for the play, asking him to watch Claudius
and see how he reacts. Horatio agrees.

Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern arrive to

watch the play. Gertrude invites Hamlet to sit by her, but Hamlet rejects her
company in favor of Ophelia’s. He discomfits Ophelia with pointed sexual jokes and
references to Gertrude’s speedy remarriage.

The play begins with a silent pantomime: A king and queen lovingly lie down in an
orchard. The king falls asleep, the queen departs, and another man enters; he
takes the king’s crown, kisses it, and pours poison in the king’s ear. The queen
finds the king dead and is horrified. The other man consoles her, then woos her
and wins her over.

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This scene makes Ophelia confused and uncomfortable. Hamlet responds only
with more lewd jokes. The play proper begins, with the player queen avowing to
the player king that to take a second husband if her first died would be to kill her
first husband twice, and she’d never do it. The player king doubts this.

Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, and Ophelia discuss the play; Hamlet notes everyone’s
growing discomfort. When the murderer poisons the king, Claudius gets up and
flees, as Hamlet predicted he would. Horatio and Hamlet excitedly discuss this.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern bring Hamlet a report of Claudius’s agitation and tell
him Gertrude wants to speak with him. Hamlet refuses to give them straight
answers, playing more word games and accusing them of trickery and treachery.
Polonius enters and asks Hamlet to come see Gertrude; Hamlet taunts him, but
agrees at last. He ends the scene speaking of his murderous rage but vowing not
to injure his mother.

Act III, Scene 3

Claudius, knowing that Hamlet is onto him, asks Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to
take Hamlet away to England, claiming that this is for the good of Denmark.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern agree, speaking of the importance of the body
politic over any one person’s life.

Polonius enters, saying that he’ll complete his plan of hiding himself behind a
tapestry to eavesdrop on Hamlet’s conversation with Gertrude. Claudius thanks
him and sends him away.

Alone, a shaken Claudius reflects on his guilt. Horrified by his own crime, he feels
himself unable to pray for forgiveness because he is still benefiting from his
brother’s murder. On earth, forgiveness can be bought, but heavenly justice
doesn’t work that way. Claudius, trapped and agonized, calls out to the angels for
help and is kneeling to pray when Hamlet enters.

Hamlet sees Claudius kneeling and thinks that now would be an easy time to kill
him. He dissuades himself, saying that it wouldn’t be a full revenge if he killed
Claudius while he was praying; Hamlet’s father wasn’t given the chance to pray or
repent before his death. Hamlet vows to wait and kill Claudius when Claudius is
embroiled in gambling, drinking, or sex. He creeps away.

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Claudius rises, saying that the words of his prayer alone won’t be received in
heaven. His thoughts have to align with his words, or his prayer is meaningless.

Act III, Scene 4

Polonius speaks briefly with Gertrude, then hides behind a tapestry in her room.
Hamlet enters, and Gertrude tries to scold him for his behavior. Hamlet responds
with rage and disgust, calling her “your husband’s brother’s wife” (3.4.16). Gertrude
becomes frightened that Hamlet will hurt her, and Polonius cries for help. Hamlet
stabs Polonius through the tapestry, killing him.

Hamlet is appalled by what he’s done, but not so much as to be diverted from his
purpose: He tells Gertrude that Claudius killed the king. He forces Gertrude to look
at portraits of the king and of Claudius, comparing them point by point: The king,
he says, was almost godlike, where Claudius is in comparison “like a mildewed ear
/ Blasting his wholesome brother” (3.4.64-65). In a disgusted diatribe, Hamlet
wonders what could possibly have moved his mother to marry Claudius. Gertrude
begs him to stop; his words, she says, show her “my very soul, / And there I see
such black and grainèd spots / As will leave there their tinct” (3.4.89-91). But Hamlet
won’t relent, and he torments Gertrude by describing her marriage bed with
Claudius.

The ghost suddenly enters, wearing nightclothes instead of armor. He reminds

Hamlet that his job isn’t to torment his mother, but to kill Claudius. At the ghost’s
command, Hamlet turns to his mother—but she cannot see the ghost, and thinks
this is more evidence of Hamlet’s madness.

Hamlet assures his mother that he is sane, tells her to repent her sins, instructs her
not to sleep with Claudius again, and gives an equivocal semi-apology for his
behavior: “Forgive me this my virtue. / For in the fatness of these pursy times /
Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg” (3.4.152-154). He also swears her to secrecy
about his feigned madness.

Hamlet closes the act by vowing that, while he must go to England with
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he will turn this plot of Claudius’s against him. He
drags the body of Polonius away with him.

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Act IV, Scene 1

Gertrude immediately tells Claudius much of what has just happened: She reports
that Hamlet has gone mad and killed Polonius, and that he is now dragging the
body around the house, weeping over it. Claudius summons Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern to find Hamlet, planning to send him away and cover up the murder.

Act IV, Scene 2

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern find Hamlet, ask him where he’s put Polonius’s
body, and tell him he must go to Claudius. Hamlet refuses to tell them anything at
first, calling them “sponges” who will soak up his words and deliver them to
Claudius. At last, Hamlet agrees to go with them.

Act IV, Scene 3

Claudius muses that, though Hamlet is dangerous to him, he must treat him
carefully: Hamlet is popular with the public, “who like not in their judgment, but
their eyes” (4.3.4).

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern enter, bringing Hamlet with them; he still refuses to
say where he’s left Polonius’s body, but grimly jokes that Polonius is “at supper” (in
other words, a feast for worms) or in heaven, or maybe hell, in which case Claudius
may go find him himself.

Claudius tells Hamlet that, for his own safety, they will send him abroad
immediately. Hamlet leaves, and Claudius, in an aside, describes how he will have
Hamlet assassinated in England.

Act IV, Scene 4

Fortinbras and his army have arrived in Denmark. Per their arrangement with
Claudius, they will not attack the Danes and will be granted free passage through
the country to fight the Poles.

Hamlet, on his way to the ship that will take him to England, runs into a Norwegian
captain, who tells him their plans. He says that the piece of land they’re fighting for
is worth very little, yet the Poles are already preparing to battle for it. Hamlet

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marvels that so much effort and violence will go into reclaiming this spot of ground,
all for the sake of Fortinbras’s and Norway’s honor.

While Rosencrantz and Guildenstern go on ahead, Hamlet stays to muse on valor.

Without some sense of personal pride and reason, he says, a human’s life isn’t
worth anything more than a beast’s. He castigates himself for showing so little
resolve in his revenge, when 20,000 men may die to reclaim a worthless patch of
land. He resolves to let their example drive him: “O, from this time forth / My
thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth!” (4.4.65-66)

Act IV, Scene 5

Gertrude, Horatio, and a gentleman are discussing Ophelia, who has been
behaving strangely in the wake of her father’s death. The guilt-riddled and
increasingly paranoid Gertrude does not want to speak to Ophelia, but Horatio
suggests it might be a good idea politically. Ophelia might stir up doubt and anger
if she is left unchecked.

When Ophelia appears, she is obviously unwell: She wanders around singing about
love and death, and recounting old folktales. After she drifts away, Claudius reflects
that sorrows travel in packs, and he recounts the tragedies that have befallen
Denmark.

A messenger announces that an enraged Laertes has returned from France and
that the people in the street are calling for him to be made king, against all
tradition. Laertes himself arrives shortly thereafter; believing Claudius to have killed
Polonius, he swears that he will take bloody revenge. Claudius, seeing a potential
use for Laertes’s rage, explains that he didn’t kill Polonius—Hamlet did.

Ophelia reappears and distributes symbolic flowers to the assembled crowd: pansy
for thoughts, rosemary for remembrance, rue for regret. Laertes is distraught: “O
heavens, is’t possible a young maid’s wits / Should be as mortal as an old man’s
life?” (4.5.159-160).

Taking advantage of the moment, Claudius makes Laertes his ally, vowing to help
him take proper revenge.

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Act IV, Scene 6

Some sailors deliver a letter from Hamlet to Horatio. Hamlet’s ship, the letter
reports, was attacked by pirates, who are now holding Hamlet hostage. Hamlet
asks Horatio to deliver another letter informing Claudius of these events, and adds
that he has news about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he can only tell Horatio
in person. He signs his letter, “He that thou knowest thine” (4.6.30). Horatio,
alarmed, goes to do as Hamlet asks him.

Act IV, Scene 7

Claudius is conspiring with Laertes when a messenger delivers Hamlet’s news.

Claudius is upset to hear that Hamlet is returning, but Laertes is ready to fight.
Claudius flatters Laertes, telling him all of the good things he has heard about him.
In particular, he tells the story of a renowned French knight called Lamort, who, he
says, praised Laertes so lavishly that Hamlet became jealous. Abruptly, Claudius
asks Laertes if he truly loved Polonius. Claudius explains that it is not that he
doesn’t think Laertes loved his father, but that he knows love alters over time, and
that words aren’t always matched with deeds. Laertes protests that he would slit
Hamlet’s throat even if he saw him in a church.

Satisfied, Claudius lays out his plot: When Hamlet returns, they’ll spread rumors of
Laertes’s brilliance as a fighter and goad Hamlet into agreeing to duel with him.
Laertes will fight with a poisoned sword, so he’ll only need to nick Hamlet to kill
him. As a backup, Claudius will keep a poisoned goblet of wine on hand, so they
can toast Hamlet to his death.

Gertrude arrives with terrible news: Ophelia has fallen into a brook and drowned.
Laertes tries to bury his grief in rage but can’t stop himself from weeping, and he
departs to prepare his revenge against Hamlet. Claudius insinuates to Gertrude
that he’s been trying to calm Laertes down; they follow him.

Acts III-IV Analysis

The momentous developments of Act III set the rapid motion of Act IV in gear. Act
III begins with Hamlet’s famous “To be, or not to be” speech, which gives voice to
the human dilemma at the play’s center. Hamlet says he sees suicide as a
reasonable answer to the inevitable suffering of life, except there’s no guarantee
that what’s beyond the grave is any better, and indeed, it may be much worse. This

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debate demonstrates the depth of Hamlet’s paralysis. In questions of the afterlife,

he might seem to be in rather a privileged position, having met a ghost who tells
him outright that Purgatory, and thus, presumably, Heaven and Hell, certainly exist.
But the evidence of the senses and the supernatural together cannot resolve this
dilemma past question.

Questions of reality and falsehood are particularly pronounced in these acts. The
play-within-a-play highlights how fiction can work on people. The audience is called
to reflect on what kind of a job the actors of Hamlet are doing when Hamlet
excoriates bad actors. His famous idea that theater should hold “the mirror up to
nature” takes some unpacking (3.2.21-22). The image does not suggest that theater
is a mirror, presenting an exact (if reversed) picture of what’s in front of it; rather,
theater holds up the mirror. What “nature” might see in that mirror depends on how
it perceives, and how it understands what it sees.

Hamlet spends so much time questioning whether anyone can know what is real
that he ends up forsaking Ophelia. He wants love and intimacy but fears that
intimacy merely covers falseness. He loves Ophelia but speaks harshly to her, and
even in his cruelty speaks with double meaning: a “nunnery” could be either a
convent or a brothel. Ophelia’s unbalanced behavior, unlike Hamlet’s, is genuine;
in fact, she is one of the play’s most genuine characters. Only when Hamlet learns
of her death will he appreciate the depth of his love for her.

Hamlet’s frustration with his own indecisiveness continues in Acts III and IV. He
compares himself to Fortinbras, who is willing to give his life for an insignificant
piece of land, and laments his own inability to act decisively to avenge his father.
Instead, he rages at his mother and humiliates her, inadvertently stabbing Polonius
in the process, and sets up the events that will lead to his own death and the
turnover of Denmark to the son of the elder Fortinbras—thus undoing his father’s
victory.

Overwhelmed by grief after her father is killed by the beloved who spurned her,
Ophelia is driven to death. Shakespeare leaves this death offstage; we are not
asked to suspend our disbelief in watching a living person pretending to drown,
but hear of her end through Gertrude’s report. The report is itself potentially
unreliable. It’s hard to understand how Gertrude could have the full story, including
the detail of Ophelia floating and singing until her sodden clothes pull her under.
The person who watched Ophelia drowning is also someone who could have
helped. Why didn’t they? The precise beauty of Gertrude’s language here hangs

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yet another screen over the truth while also solidifying Ophelia’s status as a tragic
innocent.

Act V

Act V, Scene 1

Two gravediggers debate giving Ophelia a Christian burial which is traditionally

denied to deaths by suicide. They agree that, while the coroner has declared
Ophelia’s death an accident, he would not have done so if she hadn’t been a
gentlewoman.

They are singing and making jokes about their profession—a gravedigger is a
better builder than a mason, they say, because what a gravedigger builds lasts until
Doomsday—when Hamlet and Horatio arrive. Neither is yet aware of Ophelia’s
death.

Hamlet is both amused and appalled by the gravediggers’ humor. When they start
to unearth old skulls, Hamlet himself begins to make morbid jokes, speculating on
the skulls’ past lives. He gets into a punning battle of wits with one of the
gravediggers, who claims to have been working at his profession since the day that
the late king overthrew Fortinbras—coincidentally, the same day that young Hamlet
was born. The gravedigger, not knowing who is speaking to, says Hamlet was sent
away to England because he was mad.

At last, the gravedigger unearths the skull of someone Hamlet knew: the jester
Yorick. Hamlet addresses the skull, at first horrified to the point of sickness, then
blackly joking that everyone, king and jester alike, will come to this same fate in the
end.

His reflections are interrupted by the arrival of Ophelia’s burial party. Still unsure
who is being buried, Hamlet and Horatio listen as Laertes bitterly argues with the
priest about whether Ophelia’s death was a suicide. In his grief, Laertes leaps into
Ophelia’s open grave to embrace her; Hamlet follows, and the two grapple over
Ophelia’s body. Horatio at last separates them; Hamlet raves, claiming his love for
Ophelia was greater than Laertes’s could ever be. At last, he flees, and Horatio
follows him.

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Act V, Scene 2

A shaken Hamlet tells Horatio the whole story of his adventure on the seas. He
recounts opening the commission that Claudius has sent with Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern and discovering that Claudius has asked the King of England to kill
Hamlet as a diplomatic favor. Hamlet rewrote the commission to request instead
the execution of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and he sealed it with his father’s
ring. The next day, the pirates attacked. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are thus on
their way to their deaths even now. Hamlet denies feeling any guilt over this.

Osric, a courtier, arrives; in an aside, Hamlet tells Horatio that Osric is a wealthy
braggart. In florid and self-contradictory language, Osric delivers a challenge:
Claudius, he says, has laid a heavy wager on Hamlet in a swordfight between him
and Laertes. Though Horatio tries to dissuade him, and in spite of his own
foreboding, Hamlet agrees to the fight.

Hamlet and Laertes meet to duel in front of Claudius and Gertrude. Hamlet begins
by apologizing to Laertes, blaming his madness for the harm he has caused.
Laertes seems to accept the apology but cannot fully consider his honor satisfied.
They choose their swords, and Laertes is careful to take the poisoned blade.

Hamlet and Laertes begin their combat in the semblance of a civil, formalized
game; Osric acts as referee. After Hamlet scores the first hit, Claudius tries to tempt
Hamlet to drink from a poisoned glass of wine, but Hamlet puts him off. Hamlet
scores another hit on Laertes, and Gertrude, in celebration, unknowingly drinks a
toast to him with the poisoned wine. Claudius notices but cannot bring himself to
say anything.

Hamlet is winning, and Laertes loses his temper. The fight loses its veneer of
civilization and becomes deadly. As Hamlet and Laertes grapple, they accidentally
exchange swords, and both are badly wounded by the poisoned blade.

Gertrude cries out. She feels the poison taking effect and understands it is the wine
that has poisoned her. A guilt-stricken Laertes confesses: Both he and Hamlet will
shortly die of the sword’s poison, and Claudius has masterminded it all. Hamlet
turns and stabs Claudius with the same blade, and when Claudius doesn’t die
immediately, Hamlet forces the poisoned wine down his throat. Laertes reaches
out to exchange forgiveness with Hamlet, and then he dies as well.

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Hamlet, dying, asks Horatio to tell his tale. Horatio offers Hamlet the last of the
poisoned cup. Before Hamlet can drink, Osric appears, with news that Fortinbras
has arrived in triumph after defeating the Poles. Hamlet, with his dying breath,
passes the throne of Denmark to Fortinbras. His final words are, “the rest is
silence” (5.2.341).

Fortinbras and an ambassador from England enter, amazed and horrified by the
carnage. Horatio is the only person left who knows what happened: He tells
Fortinbras that he will tell him the truth.

Act V Analysis

Two images dominate this last act of the play: the skull and the poisoned blade.

In the famous graveyard scene, Hamlet, whose short life has been so choked with
death, gazes into the empty eye sockets of his family’s old court jester, Yorick.
Everything that made Yorick himself, Hamlet finds, has been stripped away. All
skulls look more or less alike, and this one could as easily be Alexander the Great
as a jester. This sameness is at least one possible response to Hamlet’s questions:
The grim physical reality of death is one of the world’s only certainties, and it
comes to king and peasant alike.

The final swordfight between Laertes and Hamlet crystallizes the whole mood of
the play and the “rotten in the state of Denmark.” The atmosphere is of murderous
cruelty beneath a thin veneer of civilization. The swordfight is framed as a
mannerly, aristocratic game, with rules and points, but one of the regulation-issue
swords is secretly poisoned. Even the goblet of celebratory wine is lethal.
Claudius’s poisoned weapons are concrete images of all of Hamlet’s fears. The
deceit of their plain exteriors is like the deceit of words, of love, of people, of
Denmark itself.

But the very deceit of the swords and the wine lead to a final eruption of truth. Over
the course of this battle, the combatants and almost everyone in the room meet
with the incontrovertible reality of death. Hamlet’s final words, “the rest is silence”
(5.2.341), show that he has come to a point beyond all his anxieties about truth and
falsehood. He passes into the undiscovered country, encountering a silence that is
both the great answer to his questions and a tremendous question in itself—to be
or not to be.

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Horatio, the last Dane standing, greets Fortinbras and cedes the kingdom to him.
His final act in the play is to vow to tell truthfully the whole story of the fall of
Denmark. This truth telling is shown in the last resort to be a complicated thing.
Horatio asks that the bodies of the royal family be put on a “stage”—where, of
course, they already are, as a watching audience would know. The moment recalls
Hamlet’s earlier theorizing about the role of theater. His own story—its
complexities, its darkness, its irresolvable riddles—indeed holds the mirror up to
nature, and fiction tells a greater truth.

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CHARACTER ANALYSIS
Hamlet

The young Prince of Denmark first appears dressed all in black, and as he says, his
appearance truthfully reflects his inner life. Known popularly as the “melancholy
Dane,” Hamlet is mourning not only for his dead father but for the falseness of the
world. His suspicions are not unfounded. Even beyond the genuine treachery of his
uncle, Hamlet is surrounded by well-meaning but double-crossing friends in the
court of Denmark. He is painfully aware of the untruth that may lie under even the
most honest-seeming language, and his own virtuosic manipulation of words
reveals his terror of the shifting ground of meaning.

Hamlet’s doubts are his downfall. His uncertainty paralyzes him and hurts those
who love him. He can’t carry out the revenge against Claudius that he says he
longs for, and his cruelty to Ophelia—founded on his anxieties about her
faithfulness to him—is instrumental in driving her to true madness.

One of the most famous characters in English literature, Hamlet embodies some of
the great human dilemmas: whether truth can ever be known, and how, in the
absence of certainty, people should live their lives.

Claudius

Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius, murders his own brother in order to claim the throne and
marry his brother’s widow, Gertrude. Although Hamlet presents his murderous
uncle as a loathsome villain through and through, Claudius is not so far gone as to
be without guilt. He is himself in agony, tormented by guilt yet incapable of truly
repenting for what he’s done.

Like another of Shakespeare’s tragic characters, Macbeth, Claudius does not

believe he can pray; like Macbeth, he finds himself wading into more and more
violence in order to preserve his own security. He makes several attempts to
engineer Hamlet’s death, and while he at last succeeds, he and everyone around
him are also killed by the plot.

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Gertrude

Hamlet’s mother and the Queen of Denmark, Gertrude’s choice to marry her
brother-in-law after her husband’s death is a driving factor in the play’s plot. Her
feelings and motives remain veiled. We know that she feels guilty for her speedy
remarriage, initially suspecting that this is the cause of Hamlet’s madness, but she
allies herself firmly with Claudius until the end. Her accidental death by poisoning,
which Claudius could have prevented, reveals the depth of his treachery.

Hamlet’s intense fascination with Gertrude’s remarriage—and his vivid disgust with
her sexual life—has been a subject of much study. Gertrude, like Ophelia, is
trapped by the male-dominated society around her; her sexuality is powerful and
dangerous to herself and others.

The Ghost

Hamlet’s father appears as a ghost at the beginning of the play, and returns at
intervals throughout. Most often dressed in his armor, the ghost brings tales of the
horrors of Purgatory and exhorts Hamlet to take revenge on Claudius, his
murderer.

The ghost is only sometimes visible to others. While he first appears to sentinels on
the battlements of Elsinore Castle, he later is visible only to Hamlet, raising genuine
questions about Hamlet’s sanity. The ghost and his references to Purgatorial fires is
often discussed as evidence that Shakespeare might have had (at the least)
Catholic sympathies because Protestant theology denied the existence of ghosts.

Horatio

Horatio is a loyal friend to Hamlet, the only person Hamlet can bring himself to
trust. Stalwart and rational, he is the lone Dane left standing at the end of the play.
His final resolution to tell the story of the of plots and counterplots that have
brought Denmark to its knees suggests that it is possible to tell the truth.

Laertes

Ophelia’s brother’s fiery temper stands in contrast with Hamlet’s indecision. When
Hamlet kills his father Polonius, Laertes returns home from France to take his
revenge, and he falls into Claudius’s manipulative clutches. Where Hamlet is

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paralyzed by doubt, Laertes demonstrates the insufficiency of action without

thought.

Ophelia

Young, sweet tempered, and perhaps too trusting, Ophelia is Laertes’s sister,
Polonius’ daughter, and Hamlet’s sometime beloved. Her brother and father are
intensely protective of her, to the point of being controlling. Concerned for her
honor, they discourage her from accepting Hamlet’s attentions.

Ophelia, who begins the play as a lively, innocent young woman, is quickly
disillusioned by Hamlet’s decline and his cruelty toward her. His accusations of
inconstancy and faithlessness are unfounded: Ophelia’s withdrawal from him is
driven by social fear and daughterly obedience, not by a lack of love.

When she is at last driven to madness by her father’s murder, Ophelia becomes a
truth speaker, singing of betrayal and death. Her eventual death by drowning sets
in motion the final tragedies of the play.

Polonius

Polonius, father of Laertes and Ophelia, is a councilor to Claudius. Long-winded

and pompous, he often provides comic relief, but despite his foolishness, Polonius
is not always wrong. He correctly predicts that Hamlet’s proclaimed love for
Ophelia may be rather fragile, though not for the reasons he imagines. After
Hamlet stabs Polonius through the tapestry he is eavesdropping behind, Ophelia is
driven mad with grief.

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THEMES
Death and the Unknown

Hamlet grapples with the inevitability and the mystery of death. Death’s complex
interweaving of what is certain and what can’t be known is at the heart of the play’s
concerns. In his most famous soliloquy, Hamlet lays the point out neatly: If it
weren’t for the chance of suffering in the afterlife, people would choose to end
suffering in this life—to end it all and rest.

The afterlife, of course, rises up and walks in the form of Hamlet’s dead father. The
ghost suggests that there is indeed an afterlife, and not necessarily a restful one;
his stories of Purgatorial flames are anything but peaceful. Hamlet’s agonizing
doubt over this apparition’s veracity plays back into his general difficulty. Though
he knows what he saw, he can’t be sure that he interpreted it correctly.

Hamlet is perpetually troubled by the ambiguities and untruths around him, but he
takes a grotesque and conflicted pleasure in images of decay. He envisions his
father’s tomb opening like jaws to belch his corpse out and Polonius’s body being
devoured by worms, and he spends some quality time chatting with the stinking
skull of the exhumed Yorick. He does not, however, view the tragic corpse of
Ophelia at so philosophical a distance.

Language and Lies

When, early in Hamlet’s performance of madness, Polonius asks him what he’s
reading in the book he carries, Hamlet replies, “Words, words, words!” (2.2.200).
This truthful yet evasive reply sets the scene for the play’s interest in the trickiness
of language.

In Hamlet, puns and wordplay take on a sometimes sinister significance. Hamlet is

disturbed by how easy it is to say one thing and mean another, even in the most
innocent context. His banter with the gravediggers shows that even a word as
simple as “my” is not so straightforward as it might seem. The gravedigger’s claim
that the grave he’s digging is his own, as he’s the one digging it, is not false, but it
also isn’t a fully truthful answer to Hamlet’s question.

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Equivocation—the use of ambiguous language or half-truths to conceal a deeper

truth—was a hot topic when Hamlet was written, a time of deep divisions between
religious and political factions in England. A priest named Henry Garnet became
famous at the time for arguing that it could sometimes be just for a persecuted
Catholic to tell a half-truth in order to save a life (“The Trial of Henry Garnet, 1606.”
The British Library, The British Library, 23 Sept. 2015, https://www.bl.uk/collection-
items/the-trial-of-henry-garnet-1606). Hamlet tells lies throughout the play—
ostensibly to uncover the truth of his father’s murder—but it isn’t clear that his
actions are the right ones. Of course, Hamlet isn’t the only one who lies. Claudius is
a liar, too, and he knows it. Even in his prayers, he admits that his words do not
match his thoughts. He is honest only in admitting to himself he cannot or will not
relinquish his gains in exchange for forgiveness.

Much of Hamlet’s performance of madness centers on his ability to express his

sense of truth through falsehood. When he identifies Polonius as a “fishmonger”—a
word that could also mean “pimp”—he is speaking from an honest (if unfair) anxiety
about Ophelia’s chastity. Part of Hamlet’s difficulty is in his sense that, in language,
there is forever a gap between what is meant and what can be said. Even in the
honest Horatio’s concluding speeches, when he says he will tell the truth about
what has happened, we are reminded that he is telling that truth on a stage. In the
deceptive, quicksilver nature of language, perhaps one cannot speak without
performing and departing in some way from the truth.

Faithfulness and Chastity

Hamlet’s preoccupation with truth and falsity finds a good part of its expression in
sexual anxiety. There’s hardly a man in the play who doesn’t have a nervous
fascination with the purity (or, more often, the impurity) of the women around him.
Hamlet, in particular, seems obsessed with the perceived fickleness, faithlessness,
and lust of both Ophelia and his mother.

Ophelia must also weather overbearing concern about her sex life from both
Laertes and Polonius. She does playfully resist, warning Laertes against sexual
hypocrisy: “Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, / Show me the steep and
thorny way to heaven / Whiles, like a puffed and reckless libertine, / Himself the
primrose path of dalliance treads / And recks not his own rede” (1.3.47-51). In the
end, Ophelia bows to societal pressure and agrees to distance herself from
Hamlet; to lose her virginity to him would leave him unscathed and her with few

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options. Hamlet’s eventual outbursts against Ophelia play on exactly this anxiety.
He accuses her of being inherently false, like all women.

Renaissance-era fears about womanhood were quite different from contemporary

ones, though similarly sexist. Women were imagined to be the more lustful of the
sexes, and their sexuality had to be restrained to maintain societal order. These
deep-rooted cultural fears are evident in Hamlet’s simultaneous fascination and
disgust with his mother’s sexuality. Gertrude herself is not altogether at ease with
her choice to marry her brother-in-law, calling her marriage to Claudius “o’erhasty”
(2.2.1145). Hamlet is not just bothered by the incestuous undertones of her choice;
he is disturbed, though fascinated, by the idea of Gertrude as a sexual at all. His
detailed imagination of her lovemaking with Claudius—“Nay, but to live / In the rank
sweat of an enseamed bed, / Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love /
Over the nasty sty! (3.4.92-95)—suggests a deep anxiety about her sexuality.

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SYMBOLS AND MOTIFS

Yorick’s Skull

Yorick’s skull is perhaps the most famous symbol in Hamlet. The skull represents
the certainty of death, the inevitable fate to which king and jester alike will come.
Yorick, in death, is indistinguishable from Alexander the Great: As Hamlet
observes, death makes everyone much the same. Yorick’s skull has a notably nasty
physicality: Hamlet remarks that it smells terrible (5.1.176). Hamlet’s doubts and
fears about the afterlife meet, in Yorick’s skull, one unequivocal truth—and it isn’t
pleasant.

Actors and the Theater

Actors and the theater are a frequent image in Hamlet. They appear, of course, in
the play-within-a-play, but they also play an important role in the final moments of
the play, when Horatio asks that the bodies of Hamlet and his family be placed on
a stage where everyone can see them. Hamlet also fears that everyone around him
is an actor. The gap between people’s inner truth and outer performance is a
source of constant anxiety to him. Symbolically, the play’s actors represent that
unbridgeable gap between inner and outer. The frequent presence of actors also
recalls us to the circumstances of the play itself. The symbolic stage reminds us
that we’re watching the action on a quite literal stage, which itself symbolizes the
world.

Plants and Flowers

The natural world is often meticulously catalogued in Hamlet. Both Ophelia and
Gertrude offer up long lists of flowers, and Polonius compares Hamlet’s fragile love
not simply to a generic blossom, but to a spring violet. Flowers stand in for many
emotional states: Ophelia, in her recitation of flower symbolism, puns on “rue” (both
a plant name and a word for regret) and “pansies” for “thought” (which is to say,
pensées, in French). Flowers are also a place where sex and death meet, as
Gertrude obliquely points out when she describes “long purples,” which shepherds
call by a rude name, but maidens call “dead men’s fingers.”

In linking sex, death, and emotion, the flowers and plants of Hamlet are, in some
ways, a counterpart to Yorick’s skull. Though they are associated with death—they

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adorn both Ophelia’s songs and her corpse—they also offer consolation. As
Claudius and Gertrude point out (however self-servingly) at the beginning of the
play, death is natural and inevitable (Gertrude says, “Thou know'st 'tis common. All
that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity” (1.2.274-275). The tragedy
of the deaths of Ophelia, Laertes, and Hamlet may be that they are cut down
before the prime of their lives, flowers that die before they can fully bloom.

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IMPORTANT QUOTES
1. “Who’s there?” (Act I, Scene 1, Line 1)

As is frequently the case with Shakespeare, the first line addresses one of
the play’s central themes: Questions of identity and selfhood will become
critically important to the story. In particular, Hamlet will address the difficulty
of establishing who one “really” is.

2. “Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems.’” (Act I, Scene 2, Line 76)

In one of Hamlet’s first lines, he lays out an important tension between what
is real and what only appears to be real. By insisting that his outward shows
of mourning truly reflect his inner grief—with an implied criticism of his
mother’s speedy recovery from her husband’s death—Hamlet observes that
it’s very easy to pretend to feel something you don’t.

3. “From this time / Be something scanter of your maiden presence [...] For Lord
Hamlet, / Believe so much in him that he is young, / And with a larger tether
may he walk / Than may be given you. In few, Ophelia, / Do not believe his
vows, for they are brokers” (Act I, Scene 3, Lines 119-26)

By discouraging Ophelia from taking Hamlet’s professions of love too

seriously, Polonius lays out a number of the play’s dilemmas, and
foreshadows later tragedy. Words, Polonius says, are not worth much, and
women, in particular, must beware the cajoling words of men. Hamlet is
much freer than Ophelia; he can do what he likes, while her safety and well-
being in society depend on a public perception of sexual purity. Polonius’s
warning is both stern and truthful.

4. “Tell / Why thy canonized bones, hearsèd in death, / Have burst their
cerements, why the sepulchre / Wherein we saw thee quietly interred / Hath
op’d his ponderous and marble jaws / To cast thee up again.” (Act I, Scene 4,
Lines 46-51)

Originally performed on a mostly bare stage, Shakespeare’s plays

depended on words to create atmosphere and setting. The image of the

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tomb opening like jaws to spit up the king’s corpse gives us a vivid grasp of
Hamlet’s horror.

5. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in
your philosophy.” (Act I, Scene 5, Lines 169-70)

This famous line, delivered just after Hamlet’s first encounter with his father’s
ghost, is often misinterpreted. Hamlet is not putting down Horatio’s life
philosophy in particular but speaking of academic philosophizing generally.
Hamlet has had a confrontation with something both real and inexplicable,
and his entire understanding of the world has been shaken.

6. “My lord, as I was sewing in my closet, / Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all
unbraced, / No hat upon his head, his stockings fouled, / Ungartered, and
down-gyvèd to his ankle, / Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other, /
And with a look so piteous in purport / As if he had been loosèd out of hell /
To speak of horrors—he comes before me.” (Act II, Scene 1, Lines 76-83)

Ophelia’s first description of Hamlet in his feigned madness focuses on his

clothing. The image recalls Hamlet’s description of mourning clothing hiding
false grief; here, Hamlet’s performance of madness is only outward show.
Ophelia’s description also recalls the ghost: Hamlet has indeed seen some
infernal horrors.

7. “I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, foregone all

custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that
this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory; this most
excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this
majestical roof fretted with golden fire—why, it appeareth nothing to me but a
foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What piece of work is a man, how
noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express
and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god:
the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this
quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—nor woman neither, though by
your smiling you seem to say so.” (Act II, Scene 2, Lines 265-80)

In this famous speech, Hamlet describes his melancholy with suitably

paradoxical language. He eulogizes the glories of the world and of
humanity, only to undercut these words with his inability to feel those

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beauties he describes. This distance between Hamlet’s capacity to perceive

and his capacity to feel is another instance of disconnect between the
outward and the inward. Though Renaissance England did not have a
modern concept of mental illness, Hamlet gives a moving description of
what could now be understood as depression.

8. “To be, or not to be—that is the question: / Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to
suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune / Or to take arms against
a sea of troubles / And by opposing end them.” (Act III, Scene 1, Lines 56-60)

In this, perhaps the most famous of all soliloquies, Hamlet considers suicide.
The only thing that prevents people from killing themselves, he suggests, is
the fear that whatever might come after death would be even worse than
the agonies of life. This vision of human pain, and the fundamental human
dilemma, encapsulates the play’s questions about doubt, suffering, action,
and thought.

9. “O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown! / The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s,
eye, tongue, sword, / Th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state, / The glass of
fashion and the mold of form, / Th’ observed of all observers, quite, quite
down! / ...O, woe is me / T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see.” (Act
III, Scene 1, Lines 150-61)

Ophelia’s mournful eulogy for Hamlet’s sanity frames him both as a beloved
paragon and as a figure on whom much depends. Hamlet is not merely
himself; he is the hope of Denmark. Ophelia’s phrase “th’ observed of all
observers” is also a sharp reading: Hamlet is indeed carefully observed, and
an observer to his core. Ophelia’s own observation here is marred: She
doesn’t know that Hamlet is putting on a performance.

10. “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special
observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so
overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and
now, was and is, to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her
feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form
and pressure.” (Act III, Scene 1, Lines 17-24)

Hamlet’s exhortations to the actors, coming as they do in the middle of a

play, serve both comic and serious purposes. In counseling the actors not to

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make a big melodramatic fuss, and the comedians not to take liberties with
the script, Hamlet reminds the audience that they are present in the theater.
Actors invite the audience to consider how an inherently falsifying art may
represent truth.

11. “Very like a whale.” (Act III, Scene 2, Line 375)

Polonius, in agreeing with Hamlet’s capricious description of a cloud—first it

is like a camel, then like a weasel, then like a whale—plays into Hamlet’s
hands. Hamlet is appalled by the untrustworthiness of the people around
him, and the untrustworthiness of language. Here, having decried
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s “playing” him like a pipe, he plays Polonius
in turn.

12. “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. / Words without thoughts never
to heaven go.” (Act III, Scene 3, Lines 97-98)

In the final words of this scene, Claudius, who has been agonizing over his
inability to repent of his brother’s murder while retaining the benefits he
gained from it, despairs over his attempted prayers. Claudius, too, is caught
up in the distance between what is inside him and how he acts. While he
feels deep guilt, he cannot bring himself to take the action that would allow
him to atone.

13. “Let the bloat king tempt you again to bed, / Pinch wanton on your cheek, call
you his mouse, / And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses, / Or paddling in your
neck with his damned fingers, / Make you to ravel all this matter out” (Act III,
Scene 4, Lines 181-86)

Here, Hamlet describes Claudius making love to his mother with a queasy
vividness. Hamlet’s agony over human treachery is connected to his anxiety
about female sexuality. His treatment of his mother and Ophelia
demonstrates a deep fear that his desires for love and intimacy might be
founded on falsehoods.

14. “The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a
thing [...] of nothing.” (Act IV, Scene 2, Lines 24-27)

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Refusing to tell Rosencrantz and Guildenstern where he’s left Polonius’s

body, Hamlet brings his slippery word play to new heights. The “body” and
the “king” here could refer not only to Polonius and Claudius, but the body of
the dead king and his spirit. Calling the king “a thing [...] of nothing,” Hamlet
may be referring to lines from Psalm 144 in the Bible: “Man is like a thing of
naught: His time passeth away like a shadow.”

15. “A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your
only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves
for maggots.” (Act IV, Scene 3, Lines 19-22)

Describing worms feasting on Polonius’s dead body, Hamlet turns from

metaphysical speculation about the afterlife to cold, fleshy reality. This
discussion of the kingship of the worm gives the lie to Claudius’s lust for
power. The earthly reality of decay is one thing that Hamlet cannot doubt.

16. “How all occasions do inform against me / And spur my dull revenge! What is
a man, / If his chief good and market of his time / Be but to sleep and feed? A
beast, no more. / Sure he that made us with such large discourse, / Looking
before and after, gave us not / That capability and godlike reason / To fust in
us unused” (Act IV, Scene 4, Lines 33-39)

Hamlet’s response to the news that Fortinbras’s army will fight a bloody
battle over an almost worthless piece of land draws out his own shame and
guilt over his reluctance to take revenge. Where it might be possible to read
such a battle as fruitless and dehumanizing, Hamlet interprets it as just the
opposite. In his shame, Hamlet sees Fortinbras’s defense of his honor as
precisely what separates humans from animals.

17. “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember. And
there is pansies, that’s for thoughts [...] There’s fennel for you, and
columbines. There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me. We may call it herb
of grace o’ Sundays. You must wear your rue with a difference. There’s a
daisy. I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father
died.” (Act IV, Scene 5, Lines 170-80)

Ophelia’s catalogue of flowers bears some resemblance to Hamlet’s feigned

insanity, though Opelia isn’t pretending. Like Hamlet, Ophelia speaks in
puns and double meanings here: “Pansies” are for thought because of the

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French “pensées,” and “rue” is a synonym for regret. Ophelia, unlike Hamlet,
is able even in her madness to make material use of these puns, finding in
them some tragic means of consolation or communication.

18. “There is a willow grows askant the brook, / That shows his hoary leaves in
the glassy stream. / Therewith fantastic garlands did she make / Of
crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples, / That liberal shepherds give
a grosser name, / But our cold maids do dead-men’s-fingers call them. /
There on the pendent boughs her crownet weed / Clamb’ring to hang, an
envious sliver broke, / When down her weedy trophies and herself / Fell in
the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide, / And mermaidlike awhile they
bore her up, / Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds, / As one
incapable of her own distress, / Or like a creature native and indued / Unto
that element. But long it could not be / Till that her garments, heavy with their
drink, / Pulld the poor wretch from her melodious lay / To muddy death.” (Act
IV, Scene 7, Lines 164-81)

Gertrude’s lyrical description of Ophelia’s death beautifies a horror. Echoing

Ophelia’s own earlier catalogue of flowers, Gertrude’s report seems
matched to its subject. The vividness of Gertrude’s description, however,
forces a darker thought: If someone was there to hear Ophelia singing, that
person should have been able to save her.

19. “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most
excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times. And now
how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those
lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your
gambles, your songs, your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the
table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning? Quite chopfallen?
Now get you to my lady’s table, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this
favor she must come. Make her laugh at that.” (Act V, Scene 1, Lines 174-84)

Here, Hamlet addresses the exhumed skull of his old family jester, Yorick.
Between wryness and horror, Hamlet expresses his despairing fear of
ultimate meaninglessness and loss of identity. Every skull, he goes on to say,
looks pretty much alike.

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20. “I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers / Could not with all their quantity of
love / Make up my sum. What wilt thou do for her?” (Act V, Scene 1, Lines
259-61)

When Hamlet learns that Ophelia is dead, he is moved too late to an

unequivocal declaration of love. Even this clarity becomes muddied: Hamlet
seems to need to outdo Laertes’s love to quantify his own.

21. “There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to
come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The
readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is’t to leave
betimes?” (Act V, Scene 2, Lines 197-201)

In the wake of his escape from Claudius’s initial machinations, his encounter
with the skull of Yorick, and the shock of Ophelia’s death, Hamlet speaks
with grim resignation about death. God and fate, he says, will take him when
they want him. He sees no point in evading even Claudius’s obvious trap.

22. “If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away, / And when he’s not himself does
wrong Laertes, / Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it. / Who does it
then? His madness. If’t be so, / Hamlet is of the faction that is wronged; / His
madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy.” (Act V, Scene 2, Lines 212-17)

Hamlet’s apology to Laertes is at once sincere and self-serving. The

argument here builds on the gravediggers’ reading of Ophelia’s death:
Madness and accident remove responsibility. With Hamlet, it’s hard to tell
what has been true madness and what has been mere performance.

23. “The rest is silence.” (Act V, Scene 2, Line 341)

Hamlet’s final words record his passing out of the doubts he has struggled
against into the great unknown of death. Throughout the play, Hamlet has
been caught up in the problems of language: its falsity, its doubleness. His
final silence is both an answer to and an infinite expansion of his questions.

24. “Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels
sing thee to thy rest!” (Act V, Scene 2, Lines 342-43)

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Horatio’s farewell to Hamlet—another famous passage—is touching in its

simplicity. This eulogy, plain where Hamlet was subtle and hopeful where he
was despairing, points to the differences between Hamlet and Horatio. It
also provides a contrast with Horatio’s earlier assertion that “I am more an
antique Roman than a Dane” (5.2.338), as he encourages Hamlet to end his
suffering by drinking the poisoned wine. Suicide, as the gravediggers said,
was supposed to mean that neither flights of angels nor rest would be
prominent in one’s afterlife.

25. “Give order that these bodies / High on a stage be placèd to the view, / And
let me speak to th’ yet unknowing world / How these things came about. So
shall you hear / Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, / Of accidental
judgments, casual slaughters, / Of deaths put on by cunning and forced
cause, / And, in this upshot, purposes mistook / Fall’n on th’ inventors’ heads.
All this I can / Truly deliver.” (Act V, Scene 2, Lines 360-68)

Horatio’s offer to retell the story that led to the death of the entire Danish
royal family places the watching audience in a curious position. The bodies
are, of course, already “high on a stage,” and the audience has already
watched the story that Horatio says he is about to tell. These lines, which
purport to offer a final truthful summation, point back to the artifice of the
stage and to whether a play holds up a mirror to nature.

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ESSAY TOPICS
1. Hamlet is deeply concerned with questions of truth and falsehood. What role
does truthfulness play in the events of the story, and how is truthfulness
shown to be more complex than it might at first seem?

2. In the middle of Hamlet, we watch a play within a play, “The Mousetrap.” But
first, we hear Hamlet’s opinions on theater: The stage should hold up a mirror
to nature. What role does “The Mousetrap” play in Hamlet’s examination of
the nature of reality?

3. Hamlet’s lines, particularly when he is pretending to be mad, are riddled with

puns and wordplay. What does the play have to say about the slipperiness of
language?

4. In Ophelia’s last scene, she appears with bushels of flowers, and speaks of
their symbolism as she hands them out. Shortly thereafter, Gertrude makes a
similar catalogue of plants in describing Ophelia’s death. How does Hamlet
make symbolic use of nature and the natural?

5. Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy is one of the most famous in
literature—and for that reason, it can be difficult to read it with fresh eyes.
Reread the soliloquy carefully, and choose one of its images to examine in
depth. How does this image contribute to the speech’s larger meaning?

6. Reread the last scene of the play. Why do you think Hamlet’s last words are,
“the rest is silence”? What do those words reveal about his development as a
character?

7. The ghost at first appears to several people but will speak only to Hamlet. As
the play goes on, Hamlet seems to be the only person who can see him. How
does the ghost’s changing behavior affect your reading of Hamlet’s madness,
and what does “madness” mean in this play?

8. Shakespeare’s plays were originally performed on a mostly empty stage, but

modern productions make a wide range of choices about how to present
these stories. Design a set and costumes for a production of Hamlet. How

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might you communicate your understanding of the play through visual

elements?

9. Women, in Hamlet, are surrounded by questions and anxieties about their

sexual purity. How do Hamlet’s judgments of women drive the action of the
play? How do the female characters work with—or against—the cultural
ideals of womanhood around them?

10. Where can you see Hamlet’s influence in contemporary books or movies?
Give examples of how themes, ideas, or language from Hamlet has shaped
modern works.

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