 The story begins on a castle in Denmark, where the guards see the dead king’s ghost who

is Hamlet's father. Then, they bring Hamlet to the ghost the next night.
 The Ghost tells Hamlet that he was murdered by Hamlet's uncle, Claudius, who is now
the king because he married Hamlet's mother, Gertrude. The Ghost says that Claudius
poured poison in King Hamlet's ear while the old king was sleeping.
 Hamlet is already distressed by his father's death and the hasty remarriage and he vows
revenge. To cover his intentions, he feigns madness.
 Polonius, a councilor to the court, whose daughter Ophelia is all but betrothed to
Hamlet, believes that his madness is caused by love. Spied on by Polonius and the king,
Hamlet encounters Ophelia and violently rejects her.
 Hamlet meets a group of actors and tells them to do a recreation of the killing of his
father. In the middle of the play Hamlet's uncle, Claudius, goes crazy and it's proven that
the new king is guilty of murder.
 Later, Hamlet visits his mother. He reviles her for her hasty marriage. Polonius, is behind
the curtain. Hamlet thinks it is Claudius and stabs the curtain and kills Polonius. The
king sends Hamlet to England, planning to have him murdered.
 Laertes, Polonius' son, demands revenge for his father's death. His sister, Ophelia,
maddened by grief, has drowned. Hamlet returns and confronts Laertes at her funeral.
The king, meanwhile, has plotted with Laertes to kill Hamlet in a fencing match in which
Laertes will have a poisoned sword.
 During the duel, Laertes scratches Hamlet with the poison sword. Hamlet picks up the
poison sword and stabs Laertes. The queen gets thirsty and drinks the poison wine that
Hamlet was going to drink. Hamlet gets up and stabs the new king. The only one who
survived was Horatio, Hamlet's best friend. Then, Young Fortinbras of Norway arrives
and lays claim to the throne of Denmark.
 Revenge tragedies were all the rage in Elizabethan England. In the early to mid-1590s, the taste
dictated that the bloodier the better. Near the turn of the century, however, audiences were less
bloodthirsty than before and thus dramatists began to tone down the brutality a bit.
 Hamlet was written during the first part of the seventeenth century (probably in 1600 or 1601),
it was probably first performed in July 1602. It was first published in printed form in 1603 and
appeared in an enlarged edition in 1604. Shakespeare borrowed for his plays ideas and stories
from earlier literary works. He could have taken the story of Hamlet from several possible
sources, including a twelfth-century Latin history of Denmark compiled by Saxo Grammaticus
and a prose work by the French writer François de Belleforest, entitled Histoires Tragiques.
 The raw material that Shakespeare appropriated in writing Hamlet is the story of a Danish
prince whose uncle murders the prince’s father, marries his mother, and claims the throne. The
prince pretends to be feeble-minded to throw his uncle off guard, then manages to kill his
uncle in revenge. Shakespeare changed the emphasis of this story entirely, making his Hamlet a
philosophically minded prince who delays taking action because his knowledge of his uncle’s
crime is so uncertain. Shakespeare went far beyond making uncertainty a personal quirk of
Hamlet’s, introducing a number of important ambiguities into the play that even the audience
cannot resolve with certainty. For instance, whether Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, shares in
Claudius’s guilt; whether Hamlet continues to love Ophelia even as he spurns her, in Act III;
whether Ophelia’s death is suicide or accident; whether the ghost offers reliable knowledge, or
seeks to deceive and tempt Hamlet; and, perhaps most importantly, whether Hamlet would be
morally justified in taking revenge on his uncle. Shakespeare makes it clear that the stakes
riding on some of these questions are enormous—the actions of these characters bring disaster
upon an entire kingdom. At the play’s end it is not even clear whether justice has been
achieved.
CHARACTER LIST

Hamlet
 The protagonist character. He is the Prince of Denmark. Son of Queen
Gertrude and the late King Hamlet, and the nephew of the present
king, Claudius. Hamlet is melancholy and cynical, full of hatred for his
uncle’s scheming and disgust for his mother’s sexuality. A reflective
and thoughtful young man who has studied at the University of
Wittenberg. Hamlet is often indecisive and hesitant, but at other times
prone to rash and impulsive acts.
Claudius
 The play’s antagonist. He is the King of Denmark and Hamlet’s uncle.
Claudius is a calculating, ambitious politician, driven by his sexual
appetites and his lust for power, but he occasionally shows signs of guilt
and human feeling—his love for Gertrude, for instance, seems sincere.
Gertrude
 The Queen of Denmark, Hamlet’s mother, recently married to
Claudius. Gertrude loves Hamlet deeply, but she is a shallow,
weak woman who seeks affection and status more urgently than
moral rectitude or truth.

Horatio
 Hamlet’s close friend, who studied with the prince at the
university in Wittenberg. Horatio is loyal and helpful to Hamlet
throughout the play. After Hamlet’s death, Horatio remains alive
to tell Hamlet’s story.

Polonius
 The Lord Chamberlain of Claudius’s court, a conniving old man.
Polonius is the father of Laertes and Ophelia. Hamlet
accidentally kills him.
Ophelia
 Polonius’s daughter, a beautiful young woman with whom
Hamlet has been in love. Ophelia is a sweet and innocent young
girl, who obeys her father and her brother. Dependent on men to
tell her how to behave, she gives in to Polonius’s schemes to spy
on Hamlet. Even in her lapse into madness and death, she
remains maidenly, singing songs about flowers and finally
drowning in the river amid the flower garlands she had gathered.
Laertes
 Polonius’s son and Ophelia’s brother, a young man who spends
much of the play in France. Passionate and quick to action,
Laertes is clearly a foil for the reflective Hamlet.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
 Two slightly bumbling courtiers, former friends of Hamlet from
Wittenberg, who are summoned by Claudius and Gertrude to
discover the cause of Hamlet’s strange behavior.
Fortinbras
 The young Prince of Norway, whose father the king (also named
Fortinbras) was killed by Hamlet’s father (also named Hamlet).
Now Fortinbras wishes to attack Denmark to avenge his father’s
honor, making him another foil for Prince Hamlet.

The Ghost
 The specter of Hamlet’s recently deceased father. The ghost, who
claims to have been murdered by Claudius, calls upon Hamlet to
avenge him. Hamlet speculates that the ghost might be a devil
sent to deceive him and tempt him into murder, and the
question of what the ghost is or where it comes from is never
definitively resolved.
Type of Work
 Play

Time and Place Written

 London, England, early seventeenth century
(probably 1600–1602)

Date of First Publication

 1603, in a pirated quarto edition titled The
Tragicall Historie of Hamlet; 1604 in a superior
quarto edition.
Setting (Time)
 The late medieval period, though the play’s
chronological setting is notoriously imprecise.

Setting (Place)
 Denmark

Tone
 Dark, ironic, melancholy, passionate,
contemplative, desperate, violent
Genre
Tragedy: a play in which characters must struggle with circumstances and
in which most meet death and despair.
Comedy: a play which maintains a thread of joy throughout and ends
happily for most of its characters.

 The most basic difference between a Shakespearean comedy and

tragedy is that comedies have generally happy endings where most
characters live, while tragedies have at best bittersweet endings and
protagonists who die.
 Comedies tend to focus more on situations than characters. This keeps
the audience from empathizing with the plight of the characters, which
can detract from the humor of the circumstances comedic protagonists
find themselves in.
 While tragedies share certain characteristics with comedies such as
sometimes focusing on young love and conflict between families, other
elements are more distinct. Tragedies are much more serious, focus on
characters over the plot to make the audience emotionally invested in
the protagonist's inevitable loss and emphasize characters' honesty or
lack thereof.
Climax
 When Hamlet stabs Polonius through the arras
in Act III, scene iv, he commits himself to
overtly violent action and brings himself into
unavoidable conflict with the king. Another
possible climax comes at the end of Act IV,
scene iv, when Hamlet resolves to commit
himself fully to violent revenge.
Revenge
 Hamlet’s fierce desire to avenge his father’s murder is what drives the play.
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the hero is the representation of society and
mankind, blinded by a lust for revenge which steers him down the path of
evil. Inevitably, this path leads not only to his own death but the death of
his family, the woman he loves, and ultimately the destruction of the
throne of Denmark.

MADNESS
 It is true that the appearance of the Ghost makes Hamlet and
others question reality (and their own sanity for believing the
Ghost exists), and Ophelia suffers from some form of madness
after her father's murder and Hamlet's apparent betrayal. The
majority of the madness, however, concerns Hamlet. It is clear
that part of Hamlet's plan involves putting on an "antic
disposition," some appearance of madness which will be
noticeable enough that they will look at him and their body
language will reveal that what he is doing is an act. Hamlet,
among other things, is an extended meditation on the nature of
acting and the relationship between acting and "genuine" life.
The mystery of dEATH
• After his father’s murder, Hamlet is obsessed with the idea of death, the
idea of death is closely tied to the themes of spirituality, truth, and that
death may bring the answers to Hamlet’s deepest questions. He
contemplates whether or not suicide is a moral action in a painful world.
Hamlet’s grief and misery is such that he frequently desire for death to end
his suffering, but he fears suffering in hell forever, because of the Christian
religion’s prohibition of suicide.

Procrastination
 Throughout the play, we notice that Hamlet procrastinate about avenging for his
father's death. Whenever he gains opportunity to kill Claudius, he does not act
instantly and seems to be lost in thoughts instead, but why? There are a number of
reasons for Hamlet's procrastination. First of all, Hamlet was not sure if the ghost of
his father was real or not. Secondly, his character's personality, which is that he
thought too much before he undertakes his action. Lastly, because he did not want
Claudius to repent his sins and wanted to make sure Claudius suffered after he died.
In brief, Hamlet knew he needed to perform his revenge, but his calm sense and
personality made him delay his actions.
 Shakespeare purposely makes Hamlet out to be a procrastinator for one very
important reason, if Hamlet would have quickly pursued this revenge, Gertrude,
Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Laertes, and of course Hamlet
himself would have survived and Shakespeare would not have achieved tragedy in
this play.
INCEST AND INCESTUOUS DESIRE
 The motif of incest runs throughout the play, in conversations
about Gertrude and Claudius. Incestuous desire can also be
found in the relationship of Laertes and Ophelia, as Laertes
sometimes speaks to his sister in suggestively sexual terms.
However, the strongest overtones of incestuous desire is found in
the relationship of Hamlet and Gertrude, in Hamlet’s fixation on
Gertrude’s sex life with Claudius and his preoccupation with her
in general.
Misogyny
 Hamlet becomes cynical about women in general, showing a
particular obsession with what he perceives to be a connection
between female sexuality and moral corruption. This motif of
hatred of women is an important inhibiting factor in Hamlet’s
relationships with Ophelia and Gertrude.
Ears and hearing
 Claudius, the clever politician, is the most obvious example of a
man who manipulates words to enhance his own power. The
sinister uses of words are represented by images of ears and
hearing, from Claudius’s murder of the king by pouring poison
into his ear to Hamlet’s claim to Horatio. The poison poured in
the king’s ear by Claudius is used by the ghost to symbolize
Claudius’s dishonesty on the health of Denmark.

YORICK’S SKULL AND THE GRAVEYARD

 Hamlet's constant brooding about death and humanity comes in
the infamous graveyard scene, where Hamlet holds up the
unearthed skull of Yorick, a court jester that Hamlet knew and
loved as a young boy. The skull itself is a physical reminder of the
finality of death.
THE GHOST
 Hamlet and the ghost talk and look alike at one point. Maybe the
ghost is just a product of Hamlet's imagination. Other characters
may see the ghost (the castle guards and Horatio, for example)
but Hamlet's the only one who has a dialogue with it.
FLOWERS
 When Ophelia loses her mind she starts handing out flowers to
everyone around her. Fennel symbolized strength and
praiseworthiness, columbine symbolized folly, daisies
symbolized innocence, and violets symbolized faithfulness and
modesty.
HAMLET´S COSTUME CHANGES
 Hamlet objects to the idea that any outward signs (dress,
behavior, etc.) can truly expresses what he's feeling on the inside
(which is rotten). After he decides to play the role of a madman,
he does a costume change.
"To be, or not to be: that is the question."
(Act III, Scene I)

 As one of Shakespeare's all-time famous quotes, Hamlet's words

have stood the test of time and are often quoted even today in
both academia and pop culture. In the beginning of his fourth,
and best known, soliloquy Hamlet muses about the conundrum
of suicide. He wonders if one route is "nobler" than the next. At
this point in the play, Hamlet has been unable to act upon his
motives for personal revenge, and this frustrates him. Which is
better, suffering as he has been or ending it all? The tone of
Hamlet's soliloquy is more meditative than angry, but he does
seriously consider suicide. He relates his personal struggle to the
struggles that all of mankind shares. Given that you don't know
what happens after you die, Hamlet realizes that death wouldn't
be the ideal escape he craves.