Hamlet

A ghost, a throne, and a prince who cannot make himself act.

Overview

Hamlet is Shakespeare’s tragedy of a Danish prince who comes home from study to find his father dead, his mother already married to his uncle, and a ghost on the castle walls claiming that the uncle murdered the king. The play is about what Hamlet does next, and keeps not doing, with that order.

It holds the most famous speech in English, but reading it is less about that one soliloquy than the pressure tightening around it. The court at Elsinore is watched, lied to, and turned into a stage. Hamlet pretends to be mad, or perhaps is, while spies report on everyone and the real danger stays out of sight.

The language is early modern English, quick and dense with wordplay, grief, and jokes that cut. An annotated edition makes a large difference. The story is widely known, yet the play keeps asking why Hamlet waits, and the answer shifts a little every time you read it.

Is This Book for You?

Yes, if...

You want the most quoted play in English in its full, original form.
You like drama built on inner pressure, doubt, and a hero who keeps arguing with himself.
You're reading for school, for the stage, or for the lines everyone half-remembers.

No, if...

You want a fast plot that drives straight from problem to solution.
You find early modern English, verse, and wordplay hard going without notes.
You want clean answers, because this play trades in uncertainty on purpose.

Summary

On the battlements of Elsinore, the night guards and the scholar Horatio see the ghost of the dead King Hamlet. The young prince, Hamlet, meets the spirit and learns that his father was murdered by his own brother Claudius, who poured poison into the sleeping king's ear and then took the crown and the queen. The ghost demands revenge. Hamlet swears to remember, and tells his friends he may put on an 'antic disposition,' a feigned madness to mask his plan.

Hamlet delays. To test the ghost's story, he brings a troupe of players to court and has them perform a play that reenacts a murder by poison in a garden. Claudius reacts in guilt, which Hamlet reads as proof. But when he finds the king alone and seemingly at prayer, he holds back, afraid a death in prayer would send the murderer's soul to heaven. In his mother's chamber he lashes out at a hidden figure behind a curtain, hoping it is the king, but kills the meddling counselor Polonius instead.

Claudius sends Hamlet to England carrying sealed orders for his death. Hamlet finds the order, rewrites it, and escapes back to Denmark while pirates dog the ship. Polonius's son Laertes returns demanding revenge for his father, and Ophelia, Polonius's daughter and the girl Hamlet once loved, goes mad with grief and drowns. Claudius and Laertes lay a last trap: a friendly fencing match rigged with a sharpened, poisoned blade and a backup cup of poisoned wine.

The duel is where it breaks. Gertrude drinks from the poisoned cup by mistake and dies. Laertes wounds Hamlet with the poisoned sword, then the blades are exchanged and Hamlet wounds Laertes in turn. As Laertes confesses the plot, Hamlet forces the rest of the poisoned wine on Claudius and stabs him. Laertes dies. Hamlet, dying, stops his friend Horatio from following him and asks him to live and tell the story. Fortinbras of Norway enters to take the throne, and Hamlet is carried off the stage.

Notable Quotables

“To be, or not to be, that is the question:”

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”

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