literary analysis essay for hamlet

Introduction to Hamlet

Hamlet is one of the best plays of all time written by William Shakespeare . According to literary scholars, there has never been such a play by his predecessors and successors alike. It is known as The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The play was published roughly between 1599 and 1602 and staged during the same period. Hamlet has proved a Mona Lisa of literature, evoking multiple interpretations and mesmerizing generations across the globe. It was also the time when ghosts were often part of the plays and literature. He depicted a simple, tragic saga of the Prince Hamlet and his struggle to avenge his father, King Hamlet. He tries to trap his uncle, Claudius, into a confession without any success. It leads to the deaths of not only the hero but also of the villain , along with various other characters.

Summary of Hamlet

The play opens with three soldiers standing on the guard of the castle of Elsinore. Along with Prince Hamlet’s best friend, Horatio, the soldiers encounter a ghost. Horatio and soldiers believe it is King Hamlet’s ghost. When Hamlet listens to Horatio’s encounter, he joins him to confirm the truth. After the proof and visitation from the ghost, Hamlet is convinced that his uncle, Claudius murdered his father. He realizes that Claudius hastily married his mother and occupied the throne. The ghost request Hamlet to avenge his death. Hamlet has a thoughtful and over-philosophical nature. Hence, he decides not to take immediate revenge.

Hamlet pretends to be insane and suffers from acute depression at the same time. Here, his melancholiness is termed as depression in modern terms. Horatio and the guards are aware that Hamlet has “put an antic disposition on”.

Queen Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, also worries about him. She checks on him with the help of Claudius and Polonius, the court attendant. Meanwhile, his university friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, arrive at the palace. Claudius and Gertrude ask their help to get the truth out of him. However, they find him very quizzical and mentally challenging. Also, Hamlet realizes that his mother and step-father sent them as a spy as well.

Ophelia, daughter of Polonius, and Hamlet shared an intimate relationship. Polonius is Claudius’ court advisor. Both Claudius and Polonius use Ophelia to spy on Hamlet. However, she fails to understand him and tells her father about Hamlet’s behavior. Hamlet also realizes that she has been trying to spy on him. He later insults her for returning love letters, and rejects her advances, leaving Ophelia in a state of distress. Polonius assumes that Hamlet’s lost his mind after breaking up with Ophelia. It is in this scene the famous ‘to be or not to be’ is spoken.

One day, a group of theatre actors visits Elsinore. Hamlet gets an idea of exposing his father’s murderer during the play. He asks the troupe to perform ‘The Murder of Gonzago’. The play is similar to King Hamlet’s murder. Hamlet wasn’t sure if he should believe in his father’s ghost. Hence. Hamlet believes that the play will reveal if Claudius was the murderer.

When the play starts and the moment of assassination arrives. In the play, the king dies as the poison is poured in the ear by the enemy. Panicked Claudius leaves the stage immediately. This incident helps Hamlet to conclude that Claudius was the murderer. Hamlet also listens while Claudius confesses to killing his own brother. Even though Hamlet has an opportunity to kill Claudius, he hesitates. Hamlet wonders if Claudius will go to heaven if he receives forgiveness at the last minute.

Polonius is eavesdropping the conversation between Gertrude and Hamlet. While Hamlet is insulting Gertrude as she asks him the reason for his madness, Polonius, who is hidden behind the curtain, moves believing that Hamlet will attack his mother. Hamlet thinks it’s Claudius and stabs him through the curtain. Sadly, Polonius dies on the spot. The ghost of Hamlet’s father reappears to him one more time, chastising Hamlet to avenge his death quickly and not to be cruel to his mother. After Polonius’ death, Claudius plans to send Hamlet to England and have him killed.

Laertes, Polonius’ son, arrives from France. He blames Claudius for his father’s death and takes a mob to attack him at the palace. However, Claudius cunningly turns Laertes against Hamlet. Saddened by her father’s death Ophelia, goes mad commits suicide by drowning in the river. After Ophelia’s suicide, Laertes’s determination to kill Hamlet to avenge father’s and sister’s death gets stronger.

Hamlet survives the pirate attack and returns home to Denmark. Upon his return, Claudius and Laertes devise to murder Hamlet. After Ophelia’s funeral, Claudius wagers a duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Laertes poisons the tip of his blade and Claudius poisons the wine. Unfortunately, Gertrude drinks that glass of wine and dies. During the duel, Laertes and Hamlet are fatally wounded. Laertes confesses that the idea of poisoning his to death. Hamlet kills Claudius and exchanges forgiveness with Laertes before taking his last breath.

As Hamlet lies dying, the Norwegian prince, Fortinbras, comes with his army. He’s the son of King Hamlet’s rival. In the end, Fortinbras orders a worthy burial for Hamlet and assumes the throne.

Major Themes in Hamlet

Hamlet has been the most discussed play written by Shakespeare. It has a few heightened controversies and interpretations as well. The play is also a mystery for a few literary critics. Hamlet’s themes offer theoretical perspectives and a variety of meanings. Some of the major themes from the play are discussed below .

Political Conspiracies: If you read the play carefully, Hamlet is a political drama . Prince Hamlet is a victim of conspiracies by his uncle, Claudius. Claudius kills King Hamlet, Hamlet’s father to win the throne and marries Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother. Knowing that Hamlet will eventually avenge his father’s death, Claudius conspires with Lord Polonius to spy on Hamlet. Polonius’ daughter, Ophelia, is used by her father to report Hamlet’s behavior. Hamlet and Ophelia were in love with each other until Hamlet banishes her from his life. The play ends when conspiracies reach their pinnacles, with the deaths of Hamlet, Laertes, Gertrude, and the main antagonist , King Claudius.
Religious Theme : Hamlet is also a religious drama. There are a couple of essential incidents that show theological interpretations. The first one is the marriage of Claudius with Gertrude. According to Christian theology, it is forbidden to marry a brother’s wife. The second is the case of suicide. Hamlet is depressed and suicidal since his father’s death. However, he controls his impulses because of his faith in Christianity. Also, after the play, The Murder of Gonzago, Hamlet hears Claudius’ confession in his prayers. The confession stops Hamlet from murdering Claudius at that moment because, as a praying man, Claudius will go to heaven.
Familial Relationships: Familial relationships is another theme of the play, Hamlet, which runs parallel to political and religious themes. Hamlet is the son of King Hamlet, nephew of Claudius and son of Gertrude, the Queen. Though Claudius is Hamlet’s uncle, after murdering his brother, he marries Gertrude to take over the throne. Ophelia’s brother, Laertes, also the son of Polonius, grieves the loss of his family. He decides to avenge their deaths by killing Hamlet.
Revenge Play: Hamlet is also a revenge play. The entire plot of Hamlet is about exacting revenge from Claudius for killing his father. Polonius’ son, Laertes is also motivated to avenge his father’s and sister’s Ophelia’s death. The arrival of Fortinbras is also part of revenge. It is revealed that Claudius once attacked his country during his father’s rule.
Madness: Hamlet either was mad, or he was not. While Hamlet puts on a charade the has lost his mind, after watching his father’s ghost, Hamlet’s personality is changed. He remains mad throughout the play to take revenge on his uncle, Claudius for killing his father. Ophelia also displays the characteristics of madness. Her low esteem, heartbreak, and hopeless drive her to commit suicide.
Procrastination or Inaction: Hamlet’s delay in taking action makes another thematic strand of the play. While procrastination gives some benefit to the rest of the characters in the play, the delay causes unnecessary deaths of Polonius, Ophelia, Gertrude, and Laertes. However, it is important to note that Hamlet delayed justice to his dead father because he was seeking for the truth. He didn’t want to kill Claudius without proof. Procrastination also points to Hamlet’s positive traits – intelligence, self-discipline, and control.

Major Characters in Hamlet

Hamlet: Hamlet is the protagonist of the play. He is also remembered as a tragic hero . The entire storyline revolves around him. He goes through unsurmountable suffering due to the assassination of his father. He loses his right to be the only heir. Hamlet is an educated and contemplative young man. He wants to take revenge, but he controls his anger and delays the ghost requests. Hamlet decides not to kill Claudius without proof. Hamlet arranges an elaborate play that reveals the real murderer. Once he gets the evidence , he hesitates when he sees Claudius pray and confess. Hamlet feigns madness drives Ophelia to despair and suicide. Hamlet accidentally kills Polonius, while he was spying on Hamlet’s conversation with Gertrude. Later, Hamlet and Laertes fall into Claudius’ trap and agree for the duel match. However, during their last moments of life, Hamlet kills Claudius and meets his tragic end. Most importantly, before Hamlet dies, he saves his friend, Horatio, from killing himself and entrusts the kingdom to Fortinbras, Prince of Norway. Despite suffering from depression and driven to take revenge by the ghost, Hamlet displays bravery. He is a tragic hero who remains chivalrous and noble until his death.
Claudius: Claudius is the main antagonist of Hamlet. He murders his own brother, King Hamlet, and marries Gertrude – a marriage not allowed in Christian theology. Therefore, his image as a king does not fit in the predominant ethical framework. Since the death of King Hamlet, Claudius plots to kill Hamlet to remove him as an heir. After the elaborate play arranged by Hamlet, Claudius is found praying and confessing. He uses Polonius, Ophelia, Hamlet’s friends to spy on him. He unsuccessfully plots Hamlet’s execution. In the end, Claudius succeeds in arranging a duel between Laertes and Hamlet. After the fencing duel, when Laertest reveals the plot of poisoning, Hamlet kills him. Claudius is a perfect example of a corrupt individual, with little remorse for the crimes he commits.
Gertrude: She is Hamlet’s mother and the wife of King Hamlet. After King Hamlet’s murder, she marries Claudius, King Hamlet’s brother. She tries her best to cheer up Hamlet, worries about his well-being. She genuinely loves Ophelia and is heartbroken when she commits suicide. Sadly, she becomes a tool in the hands of Claudius as she tries to spy on Hamlet. As a mother and also a spy, she tries her best to figure out Hamlet’s problems. Though she is insulted by Hamlet, her son, she remains kind and benevolent. King Hamlet’s ghost describes her as a virtuous woman. She accidentally drinks poison-laced wine during the duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Though Hamlet’s death was inevitable, it’s worth mentioning that she took the drink intended for him and dies in place of her son. Having lost of her husband, King Hamlet, her death saves her the agony of watching Hamlet and Claudius die.
Polonius: He is the Lord Chamberlain and confidant of King Claudius. Polonius is the co-conspirator in King Hamlet’s death and plotting young Hamlet’s demise. He appears as one of the talking characters in the play. His daughter, Ophelia, loves Hamlet. He uses her to spy on Hamlet to know the exact cause of Hamlet’s madness. He eavesdrops Hamlet’s and Gertrude’s arguments while hiding behind the tapestry. He is killed by Hamlet as he is mistaken for Claudius. His son Laertes, later, fights a duel with Hamlet at the provocation of Claudius to avenge his death.
Ophelia: Ophelia is romantically attracted to Hamlet. She always yearns for attention. Sadly, as Hamlet mourns his father’s heart, he doesn’t accept her love. Secretly, Hamlet does love Ophelia, but he is consumed with the anger of his father’s death. Ophelia also becomes a tool in her father’s and Claudius’ hands. She spies on Hamlet and tells them about his behavior. Hamlet suspects her for spying. He rejects her advances and breaks her heart with insults, which includes asking her to join a brothel (nunnery was slang for brothel). After her father is accidentally killed by Hamlet, she commits suicide and is mourned by Hamlet though she does not receive proper Christian burial.
Horatio: Horatio is Hamlet’s close confidant and his best friend. He is also the main counselor whenever Hamlet is in some confusion. Before Hamlet’s Horatio witnesses the ghost’s haunting along with the guards. He is stopped by Hamlet from killing himself. Horatio, who is mostly an observer of the events, becomes an orator telling the tales of Hamlet to the public after the tragedy.
Laertes: Laertes, son of Polonius and brother of Ophelia, is a headstrong but analytical character . He warns his sister Ophelia to stay away from Hamlet. He returns to Denmark after hearing about his father’s death. After first, he falls into Claudius trap and decides to avenge his father’s death by killing Hamlet. However, during the duel, he instantly sees a plot and reveals everything to Hamlet. Sadly, Laertes and Hamlet are mortally wounded and it was too late to save themselves. Laertes is presented as a naïve character in the beginning. Before his death, he exchanges forgiveness with Hamlet and dies an honorable death.
Guildenstern and Rosencrantz: These two young fellows are Hamlet’s classmates. They bring the theatre group and also become tools in Claudius’ hands and spy on Hamlet. They are perhaps killed in England while taking the letter to the king about Hamlet. The letter was given by Claudius to get Hamlet killed when he returns to England. However, Hamlet intercepts the message and exchanges with his own letter about their instant death.

Writing Style of Hamlet

Hamlet starts with in medias res (into the middle of a narrative ) with guards watching the appearance of the ghost. They express their feelings of terror and horror . This is style is in contrast to the standard methods to tell a story and write plays. The play is written in mostly blank verse . Hence, Hamlet’s style shows the excellence of taking the argument to the pinnacles. Shakespeare brings the argument back to demonstrate the use of climax and anticlimax at the same time. Hamlet is a mixture of comic as well as tragic phrases. There has never been any play in the history of literature that has taken so much length and presented such a golden combination of literary devices . Here, each device seconds the other, presenting the text with multiple meanings and interpretations.

Analysis of Literary Devices in Hamlet

Alliteration : A play written in blank verse , Hamlet has many examples of the use of alliterations. A few examples are given below:
What we have two nights seen. (Act-I, Scene II, Line 32)
To wash it white as snow ? Whereto serves mercy (Act-III, Scene-III, Line, 47)
Look you lay home to him. (Act-III, Scene-IV, Line, 1)

The above-given lines taken from different acts show the use of alliteration that means the use of consonant sounds in quick succession in a line. For example, /w/, /l/ and /h/ sounds are used in the above lines.

2. Allegory : Hamlet is an allegory that shows the universal problems a man faces on this earth. These are the problems of good and evil in every era and generation. Hamlet faces both of these issues and reflects on himself whether he is doing good or bad. His final words to Horatio that he should justify his cause to the world show this allegorical nature of the play.

3. Assonance : The play, Hamlet, shows good use of assonance as well. For example,

For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come (Act-III, Scene-I, Line, 64)
A mote it is to trouble the mind’s eye. (Act-I, Scene-I, Line, 112)
Why, then, ’tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison. (Act-II, Scene-II, Lines 245-247)

In the above examples, vowel sounds appear after some pauses creating a sort of melodious impact in the verses. The sounds of long /e/, /i/ and /oo/ are used in the above examples.

4. Antagonist : Claudius is an antagonist in the play, as he weaves a plan to kill the protagonist, Hamlet, who is the representative of good, as compared to Claudius, the representative of evil in the play.

5. Allusion : The below lines show good use of allusion.

Oh, my offence is rank. It smells to heaven. It hath the primal eldest curse upon ‘t, A brother’s murder. (Act-III, Scene-III, Lines, 37-39)

These lines show a reference to the earliest murder in human history. It shows the murder of Abel by his brother, Cain, which has been used here as an allusion.

6. Chiasmus : The below example is one of the dialogues that has used this device to emphasize the connection between action and words.

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action—with this special observance, that you o’ erstep not the modesty of nature. (Act-III, Scene-II, Lines 16-18)

These lines mean the use of the phrase in reverse order in the same sentence such as “the action the word, the word to the action.”

7. Conflict : There are two types of conflicts in Hamlet. The first one is the physical conflict that is shown at two places; first, when Hamlet kills Polonius and second when Hamlet fights a duel with Laertes. The second is the mental conflict, which is seen throughout the play in Hamlet’s mind as well as his opponent, King Claudius.

8. Consonance : The play shows the use of consonance at various places. For example,

I prithee, when thou seest that act afoot, Even with the very comment of thy soul Observe mine uncle. (Act-III, Scene-II, Lines, 74-76)
You do surely bar the door upon your own liberty, if you deny your griefs to your friend. (Act-III, Scene-II, Lines 321-322)

In both examples, different consonant sounds such as /th/, /t/, and /r/ have been repeated in quick succession that they create melodious impacts.

9. Dramatic Irony : Dramatic Irony occurs at several places in the play. For example, when Claudius is shown praying, he is actually not feeling sorry for killing his brother. This is a dramatic irony that though he is confession doesn’t show any guilt or remorse.

10. Deus Ex Machina : The appearance of a ghost is a good use of deus ex machina in the play. In fact, when the ghost appears, Marcellus, one of the guards, is right in saying that “ Something is rotten in the state of Denmark .”

11. Foreshadowing : When Marcellus sees the ghost, he talks to Horatio and says that “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”. This line shows the use of foreshadowing that something terrible is going to happen. When Hamlet meets his father’s ghost, he learns that his uncle has killed him, and he utters, “O my prophet soul!” (Line 40) which is another use of foreshadowing. Here, Hamlet might have understood that either he or his uncle Claudius or both will kill each other.

12. Imagery : Imagery means to use visually descriptive statements. For example,

O Hamlet, what a falling-off was there. (Act-I, Scene-V, Line, 47)
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain. At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark. (Act-I, Scene V, Lines, 108-109)
Mad as the sea and wind, when both contend Which is the mightier. (Act-IV, Scene-I, Line, 7-8)

These lines show the sensory images that Shakespeare has used sparingly in the entire play. There are countless examples of excellent use of imagery that the readers have to use five senses to understand the underlying meanings.

13. Metaphor : Hamlet shows good use of various metaphors throughout the play. For example,

“ To die: to sleep; / No more; and by a sleep to say we end / The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to.” (Act-III, Scene-I, Lines, 60-64)
But that the dread of something after death , The undiscovered country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? (Act-III, Scene-I, Lines, 77-83)
The fair Ophelia! – Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remembered. (Act, III, Scene-I, Lines, 89-90)

The first and the second metaphors compare sleep with death and the world hereafter with the country that is undiscovered. In the third example, Hamlet compares Ophelia with a Nymph, a Grecian divine creature.

14. Mood : The entire play shows different moods according to the situation. When the play opens, the viewers and readers experience horrible and fearful in the foggy atmosphere of Elsinore. As the play progresses, the horror and terror encompass the whole atmosphere until the players arrive and bring some atmosphere of entertainment. A movement of tension and conflict reaches its point when the gravedigger provides comic relief . However, the light atmosphere is short-lived as the events turn grim, increasing more tension followed by duel.

15. Protagonist : Hamlet is the main protagonist of the play as he directs Horatio by the end of the play. Hamlet makes sure Horatio stays alive and becomes an orator to tell the public and justify his cause. Hamlet, indeed, stands for good in the play as compared to Claudius, who stands for evil.

16. Pun : Hamlet is also full of puns. For example,

Not so, my lord, I am too much in the sun. (Act-I, Scene-II, Line, 67)
I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me. (Act-I, Scene-II, Line, 85).
You are the Queen, your husband’s brother’s wife. (Act-III, Scene-IV, Line, 15)

In both of these examples, Hamlet plays upon the word “sun” in the first line that means “son” and “ghost” in the second line that means that he would kill that person who stops him.

17. Paradox : The play also shows good use of paradoxes.

“Thrift, thrift, Horatio! the funeral baked meats Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.” (Act-I, Scene-II, Lines, 180-181).
A little more than kin and less than kind.” (Act-I, Scene-II, Line, 65).

These lines show paradoxes that mean to use contradictory ideas in the same statement. For example, in the first statement shows that the meat baked for the funeral was served in the marriage ceremony. The second statement indicates that Claudius is more than kin, but less kind toward him. Here, Hamlet means that Claudius is family; he is nothing like him or his father.

18. Rhetorical Questions : The play shows good use of rhetorical questions at several places. For example,

“What then? What rests? Try what repentance can. What can it not?” (Act-III, Scene-III, Lines, 54-66)
How now ! A rat? (Act-III, Scene-IV, Line, 24)

These examples show the use of rhetorical questions and mostly by Hamlet. They also show Shakespeare’s expertise in using rhetorical devices and couple them with literary devices to serve his purpose of multiple interpretations.

19. Simile : The play also contains plenty of similes. For example,

In the same figure like the king that’s dead. (Act-I, Scene-I, Line, 41)
And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark. (Act-I, Scene-II, Line, 69)
Wretched state! O bosom black as death! (Act-III, Scene-III, Line, 68)
Be soft as sinews of the newborn babe. (Act-III, Scene-III, Line, 69)

Here are four similes used in Hamlet. In the first one, the figure is compared to the king. In the second example, the eyes are compared to the friend. In the third example, the black is compared to death. In the fourth example, the heart is compared to an innocent child.

20. Soliloquy : The play shows some memorable soliloquies. For example,

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt (Act-I, Scene-II, Line, 129)
O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I (Act-II, Scene-II, Line, 532)
To be, or not to be (Act-III, Scene-I, Line, 56)
Oh my offence is rank, it smells to heaven (Act-III, Scene-III, Line, 36)

Hamlet has delivered the first three examples. Claudius speaks the fourth one. These soliloquies shed some light on the mentality or conflict of the character. They also set the mood of the play.

21. Verbal Irony : The play shows verbal irony as;

Not so, my lord. I am too much i’the sun. (Act-I, Scene-II, Line 66)
Second is situational irony in that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern try to meet Hamlet to tell him that they have come to meet him to know what he is mad but his replies are very ironic.
It is also ironic that play is being stated to entertain Hamlet, while Hamlet is using it to know Claudius’s crime.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 25, 2020 • ( 2 )

With Shakespeare the dramatic resolution conveys us, beyond the man-made sphere of poetic justice, toward the ever-receding horizons of cosmic irony. This is peculiarly the case with Hamlet , for the same reasons that it excites such intensive empathy from actors and readers, critics and writers alike. There may be other Shakespearean characters who are just as memorable, and other plots which are no less impressive; but nowhere else has the outlook of the individual in a dilemma been so profoundly realized; and a dilemma, by definition, is an all but unresolvable choice between evils. Rather than with calculation or casuistry, it should be met with virtue or readiness; sooner or later it will have to be grasped by one or the other of its horns. These, in their broadest terms, have been—for Hamlet, as we interpret him—the problem of what to believe and the problem of how to act.

—Harry Levin, The Question of Hamlet

Hamlet is almost certainly the world’s most famous play, featuring drama’s and literature’s most fascinating and complex character. The many-sided Hamlet—son, lover, intellectual, prince, warrior, and avenger—is the consummate test for each generation’s leading actors, and to be an era’s defining Hamlet is perhaps the greatest accolade one can earn in the theater. The play is no less a proving ground for the critic and scholar, as successive generations have refashioned Hamlet in their own image, while finding in it new resonances and entry points to plumb its depths, perplexities, and possibilities. No other play has been analyzed so extensively, nor has any play had a comparable impact on our culture. The brooding young man in black, skull in hand, has moved out of the theater and into our collective consciousness and cultural myths, joining only a handful of comparable literary archetypes—Oedipus, Faust, and Don Quixote—who embody core aspects of human nature and experience. “It is we ,” the romantic critic William Hazlitt observed, “who are Hamlet.”

Hamlet also commands a crucial, central place in William Shakespeare’s dramatic career. First performed around 1600, the play stands near the midpoint of the playwright’s two-decade career as a culmination and new departure. As the first of his great tragedies, Hamlet signals a decisive shift from the comedies and history plays that launched Shakespeare’s career to the tragedies of his maturity. Although unquestionably linked both to the plays that came before and followed, Hamlet is also markedly exceptional. At nearly 4,000 lines, almost twice the length of Macbeth , Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest and, arguably, his most ambitious play with an enormous range of characters—from royals to gravediggers—and incidents, including court, bedroom, and graveyard scenes and a play within a play. Hamlet also bristles with a seemingly inexhaustible array of ideas and themes, as well as a radically new strategy for presenting them, most notably, in transforming soliloquies from expositional and motivational asides to the audience into the verbalization of consciousness itself. As Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt has asserted, “In its moral complexity, psychological depth, and philosophical power, Hamlet seems to mark an epochal shift not only in Shakespeare’s own career but in Western drama; it is as if the play were giving birth to a whole new kind of literary subjectivity.” Hamlet, more than any other play that preceded it, turns its action inward to dramatize an isolated, conflicted psyche struggling to cope with a world that has lost all certainty and consolation. Struggling to reconcile two contradictory identities—the heroic man of action and duty and the Christian man of conscience—Prince Hamlet becomes the modern archetype of the self-divided, alienated individual, desperately searching for self-understanding and meaning. Hamlet must contend with crushing doubt without the support of traditional beliefs that dictate and justify his actions. In describing the arrival of the fragmentation and chaos of the modern world, Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold declared that “the calm, cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity have disappeared, the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced.” Hamlet anticipates that dialogue by more than two centuries.

Like all of Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet makes strikingly original uses of borrowed material. The Scandinavian folk tale of Amleth, a prince called upon to avenge his father’s murder by his uncle, was first given literary form by the Danish writer Saxo the Grammarian in his late 12th century Danish History and later adapted in French in François de Belleforest’s Histoires tragiques (1570). This early version of the Hamlet story provided Shakespeare with the basic characters and relationships but without the ghost or the revenger’s uncertainty. In the story of Amleth there is neither doubt about the usurper’s guilt nor any moral qualms in the fulfillment of the avenger’s mission. In preChristian Denmark blood vengeance was a sanctioned filial obligation, not a potentially damnable moral or religious violation, and Amleth successfully accomplishes his duty by setting fire to the royal hall, killing his uncle, and proclaiming himself king of Denmark. Shakespeare’s more immediate source may have been a nowlost English play (c. 1589) that scholars call the Ur – Hamlet. All that has survived concerning this play are a printed reference to a ghost who cried “Hamlet, revenge!” and criticism of the play’s stale bombast. Scholars have attributed the Ur-Hamle t to playwright Thomas Kyd, whose greatest success was The Spanish Tragedy (1592), one of the earliest extant English tragedies. The Spanish Tragedy popularized the genre of the revenge tragedy, derived from Aeschylus’s Oresteia and the Latin plays of Seneca, to which Hamlet belongs. Kyd’s play also features elements that Shakespeare echoes in Hamlet, including a secret crime, an impatient ghost demanding revenge, a protagonist tormented by uncertainty who feigns madness, a woman who actually goes mad, a play within a play, and a final bloodbath that includes the death of the avenger himself. An even more immediate possible source for Hamlet is John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1599), another story of vengeance on a usurper by a sensitive protagonist.

Whether comparing Hamlet to its earliest source or the handling of the revenge plot by Kyd, Marston, or other Elizabethan or Jacobean playwrights, what stands out is the originality and complexity of Shakespeare’s treatment, in his making radically new and profound uses of established stage conventions. Hamlet converts its sensational material—a vengeful ghost, a murder mystery, madness, a heartbroken maiden, a fistfight at her burial, and a climactic duel that results in four deaths—into a daring exploration of mortality, morality, perception, and core existential truths. Shakespeare put mystery, intrigue, and sensation to the service of a complex, profound epistemological drama. The critic Maynard Mack in an influential essay, “The World of Hamlet ,” has usefully identified the play’s “interrogative mode.” From the play’s opening words—“Who’s there?”—to “What is this quintessence of dust?” through drama’s most famous soliloquy—“To be, or not to be, that is the question.”— Hamlet “reverberates with questions, anguished, meditative, alarmed.” The problematic nature of reality and the gap between truth and appearance stand behind the play’s conflicts, complicating Hamlet’s search for answers and his fulfillment of his role as avenger.

Hamlet opens with startling evidence that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” The ghost of Hamlet’s father, King Hamlet, has been seen in Elsinore, now ruled by his brother, Claudius, who has quickly married his widowed queen, Gertrude. When first seen, Hamlet is aloof and skeptical of Claudius’s justifications for his actions on behalf of restoring order in the state. Hamlet is morbidly and suicidally disillusioned by the realization of mortality and the baseness of human nature prompted by the sudden death of his father and his mother’s hasty, and in Hamlet’s view, incestuous remarriage to her brother-in-law:

O that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God! God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on’t! ah, fie! ’Tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. That it should come to this!

A recent student at the University of Wittenberg, whose alumni included Martin Luther and the fictional Doctor Faustus, Hamlet is an intellectual of the Protestant Reformation, who, like Luther and Faustus, tests orthodoxy while struggling to formulate a core philosophy. Brought to encounter the apparent ghost of his father, Hamlet alone hears the ghost’s words that he was murdered by Claudius and is compelled out of his suicidal despair by his pledge of revenge. However, despite the riveting presence of the ghost, Hamlet is tormented by doubts. Is the ghost truly his father’s spirit or a devilish apparition tempting Hamlet to his damnation? Is Claudius truly his father’s murderer? By taking revenge does Hamlet do right or wrong? Despite swearing vengeance, Hamlet delays for two months before taking any action, feigning madness better to learn for himself the truth about Claudius’s guilt. Hamlet’s strange behavior causes Claudius’s counter-investigation to assess Hamlet’s mental state. School friends—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—are summoned to learn what they can; Polonius, convinced that Hamlet’s is a madness of love for his daughter Ophelia, stages an encounter between the lovers that can be observed by Claudius. The court world at Elsinore, is, therefore, ruled by trickery, deception, role playing, and disguise, and the so-called problem of Hamlet, of his delay in acting, is directly related to his uncertainty in knowing the truth. Moreover, the suspicion of his father’s murder and his mother’s sexual betrayal shatter Hamlet’s conception of the world and his responsibility in it. Pushed back to the suicidal despair of the play’s opening, Hamlet is paralyzed by indecision and ambiguity in which even death is problematic, as he explains in the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy in the third act:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death— The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn No traveller returns—puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action.

The arrival of a traveling theatrical group provides Hamlet with the empirical means to resolve his doubts about the authenticity of the ghost and Claudius’s guilt. By having the troupe perform the Mousetrap play that duplicates Claudius’s crime, Hamlet hopes “to catch the conscience of the King” by observing Claudius’s reaction. The king’s breakdown during the performance seems to confirm the ghost’s accusation, but again Hamlet delays taking action when he accidentally comes upon the guilt-ridden Claudius alone at his prayers. Rationalizing that killing the apparently penitent Claudius will send him to heaven and not to hell, Hamlet decides to await an opportunity “That has no relish of salvation in’t.” He goes instead to his mother’s room where Polonius is hidden in another attempt to learn Hamlet’s mind and intentions. This scene between mother and son, one of the most powerful and intense in all of Shakespeare, has supported the Freudian interpretation of Hamlet’s dilemma in which he is stricken not by moral qualms but by Oedipal guilt. Gertrude’s cries of protest over her son’s accusations cause Polonius to stir, and Hamlet finally, instinctively strikes the figure he assumes is Claudius. In killing the wrong man Hamlet sets in motion the play’s catastrophes, including the madness and suicide of Ophelia, overwhelmed by the realization that her lover has killed her father, and the fatal encounter with Laertes who is now similarly driven to avenge a murdered father. Convinced of her son’s madness, Gertrude informs Claudius of Polonius’s murder, prompting Claudius to alter his order for Hamlet’s exile to England to his execution there.

Hamlet’s mental shift from reluctant to willing avenger takes place offstage during his voyage to England in which he accidentally discovers the execution order and then after a pirate attack on his ship makes his way back to Denmark. He returns to confront the inescapable human condition of mortality in the graveyard scene of act 5 in which he realizes that even Alexander the Great must return to earth that might be used to “stop a beer-barrel” and Julius Caesar’s clay to “stop a hole to keep the wind away.” This sobering realization that levels all earthly distinctions of nobility and acclaim is compounded by the shock of Ophelia’s funeral procession. Hamlet sustains his balance and purpose by confessing to Horatio his acceptance of a providential will revealed to him in the series of accidents on his voyage to England: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Roughhew them how we will.” Finally accepting his inability to control his life, Hamlet resigns himself to accept whatever comes. Agreeing to a duel with Laertes that Claudius has devised to eliminate his nephew, Hamlet asserts that “There’s a 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.”

In the carnage of the play’s final scene, Hamlet ironically manages to achieve his revenge while still preserving his nobility and moral stature. It is the murderer Claudius who is directly or indirectly responsible for all the deaths. Armed with a poisonedtip sword, Laertes strikes Hamlet who in turn manages to slay Laertes with the lethal weapon. Meanwhile, Gertrude drinks from the poisoned cup Claudius intended to insure Hamlet’s death, and, after the remorseful Laertes blames Claudius for the plot, Hamlet, hesitating no longer, fatally stabs the king. Dying in the arms of Horatio, Hamlet orders his friend to “report me and my cause aright / To the unsatisfied” and transfers the reign of Denmark to the last royal left standing, the Norwegian prince Fortinbras. King Hamlet’s death has been avenged but at a cost of eight lives: Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencranz, Guildenstern, Laertes, Gertrude, Claudius, and Prince Hamlet. Order is reestablished but only by Denmark’s sworn enemy. Shakespeare’s point seems unmistakable: Honor and duty that command revenge consume the guilty and the innocent alike. Heroism must face the reality of the graveyard.

Fortinbras closes the play by ordering that Hamlet be carried off “like a soldier” to be given a military funeral underscoring the point that Hamlet has fallen as a warrior on a battlefield of both the duplicitous court at Elsinore and his own mind. The greatness of Hamlet rests in the extraordinary perplexities Shakespeare has discovered both in his title character and in the events of the play. Few other dramas have posed so many or such knotty problems of human existence. Is there a special providence in the fall of a sparrow? What is this quintessence of dust? To be or not to be?

Hamlet Oxford Lecture by Emma Smith

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Plays

William Shakespeare

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Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on William Shakespeare's Hamlet . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Hamlet: Introduction

Hamlet: plot summary, hamlet: detailed summary & analysis, hamlet: themes, hamlet: quotes, hamlet: characters, hamlet: symbols, hamlet: literary devices, hamlet: quizzes, hamlet: theme wheel, brief biography of william shakespeare.

Historical Context of Hamlet

Other books related to hamlet.

Full Title: The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
When Written: Likely between 1599 and 1602
Where Written: Stratford-upon-Avon or London, England
When Published: First Quarto printed 1603; Second Quarto printed 1604; First Folio printed 1623
Literary Period: Renaissance
Genre: Tragic play; revenge play
Setting: Elsinore Castle, Denmark, during the late Middle Ages
Climax: After seeing Claudius’s emotional reaction to a play Hamlet has had staged in order to make Claudius face a fictionalized version of his own murder plot against the former king, Hamlet resolves to kill the Claudius without guilt.
Antagonist: Claudius
Point of View: Dramatic

Extra Credit for Hamlet

The Role of a Lifetime. The role of Hamlet is often considered one of the most challenging theatrical roles ever written, and has been widely interpreted on stage and screen by famous actors throughout history. Shakespeare is rumored to have originally written the role for John Burbage, one of the most well-known actors of the Elizabethan era. Since Shakespeare’s time, actors John Barrymore, Laurence Olivier, Ian McKellen, Jude Law, Kenneth Branagh, and Ethan Hawke are just a few actors who have tried their hand at playing the Dane. When Daniel Day-Lewis took to the stage as Hamlet in London in 1989, he left the stage mid-performance one night after reportedly seeing the ghost of his real father, the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, and has not acted in a single live theater production since.

Shakespeare or Not? There are some who believe Shakespeare did not actually write many—or any—of the plays attributed to him. The most common “Anti-Stratfordian” theory is that Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays and used Shakespeare as a front man, as aristocrats were not supposed to write plays. Others claim Shakespeare’s contemporaries such as Thomas Kyd or Christopher Marlowe may have authored his works. Most contemporary scholarship, however, supports the idea that the Bard really did compose the numerous plays and poems which have established him, in the eyes of many, as the greatest writer in history.

Utility Menu

Jeffrey R. Wilson

Essays on hamlet.

Written as the author taught Hamlet every semester for a decade, these lightning essays ask big conceptual questions about the play with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover, and answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. In doing so, Hamlet becomes a lens for life today, generating insights on everything from xenophobia, American fraternities, and religious fundamentalism to structural misogyny, suicide contagion, and toxic love.

Prioritizing close reading over historical context, these explorations are highly textual and highly theoretical, often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Readers see King Hamlet as a pre-modern villain, King Claudius as a modern villain, and Prince Hamlet as a post-modern villain. Hamlet’s feigned madness becomes a window into failed insanity defenses in legal trials. He knows he’s being watched in “To be or not to be”: the soliloquy is a satire of philosophy. Horatio emerges as Shakespeare’s authorial avatar for meta-theatrical commentary, Fortinbras as the hero of the play. Fate becomes a viable concept for modern life, and honor a source of tragedy. The metaphor of music in the play makes Ophelia Hamlet’s instrument. Shakespeare, like the modern corporation, stands against sexism, yet perpetuates it unknowingly. We hear his thoughts on single parenting, sending children off to college, and the working class, plus his advice on acting and writing, and his claims to be the next Homer or Virgil. In the context of four centuries of Hamlet hate, we hear how the text draws audiences in, how it became so famous, and why it continues to captivate audiences.

At a time when the humanities are said to be in crisis, these essays are concrete examples of the mind-altering power of literature and literary studies, unravelling the ongoing implications of the English language’s most significant artistic object of the past millennium.

Publications

Why is Hamlet the most famous English artwork of the past millennium? Is it a sexist text? Why does Hamlet speak in prose? Why must he die? Does Hamlet depict revenge, or justice? How did the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, transform into a story about a son dealing with the death of a father? Did Shakespeare know Aristotle’s theory of tragedy? How did our literary icon, Shakespeare, see his literary icons, Homer and Virgil? Why is there so much comedy in Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy? Why is love a force of evil in the play? Did Shakespeare believe there’s a divinity that shapes our ends? How did he define virtue? What did he think about psychology? politics? philosophy? What was Shakespeare’s image of himself as an author? What can he, arguably the greatest writer of all time, teach us about our own writing? What was his theory of literature? Why do people like Hamlet ? How do the Hamlet haters of today compare to those of yesteryears? Is it dangerous for our children to read a play that’s all about suicide?

These are some of the questions asked in this book, a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet stemming from my time teaching the play every semester in my Why Shakespeare? course at Harvard University. During this time, I saw a series of bright young minds from wildly diverse backgrounds find their footing in Hamlet, and it taught me a lot about how Shakespeare’s tragedy works, and why it remains with us in the modern world. Beyond ghosts, revenge, and tragedy, Hamlet is a play about being in college, being in love, gender, misogyny, friendship, theater, philosophy, theology, injustice, loss, comedy, depression, death, self-doubt, mental illness, white privilege, overbearing parents, existential angst, international politics, the classics, the afterlife, and the meaning of it all.

These essays grow from the central paradox of the play: it helps us understand the world we live in, yet we don't really understand the text itself very well. For all the attention given to Hamlet , there’s no consensus on the big questions—how it works, why it grips people so fiercely, what it’s about. These essays pose first-order questions about what happens in Hamlet and why, mobilizing answers for reflections on life, making the essays both highly textual and highly theoretical.

Each semester that I taught the play, I would write a new essay about Hamlet . They were meant to be models for students, the sort of essay that undergrads read and write – more rigorous than the puff pieces in the popular press, but riskier than the scholarship in most academic journals. While I later added scholarly outerwear, these pieces all began just like the essays I was assigning to students – as short close readings with a reader and a text and a desire to determine meaning when faced with a puzzling question or problem.

The turn from text to context in recent scholarly books about Hamlet is quizzical since we still don’t have a strong sense of, to quote the title of John Dover Wilson’s 1935 book, What Happens in Hamlet. Is the ghost real? Is Hamlet mad, or just faking? Why does he delay? These are the kinds of questions students love to ask, but they haven’t been – can’t be – answered by reading the play in the context of its sources (recently addressed in Laurie Johnson’s The Tain of Hamlet [2013]), its multiple texts (analyzed by Paul Menzer in The Hamlets [2008] and Zachary Lesser in Hamlet after Q1 [2015]), the Protestant reformation (the focus of Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory [2001] and John E. Curran, Jr.’s Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency [2006]), Renaissance humanism (see Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness [2017]), Elizabethan political theory (see Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet [2007]), the play’s reception history (see David Bevington, Murder Most Foul: Hamlet through the Ages [2011]), its appropriation by modern philosophers (covered in Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster’s The Hamlet Doctrine [2013] and Andrew Cutrofello’s All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity [2014]), or its recent global travels (addressed, for example, in Margaret Latvian’s Hamlet’s Arab Journey [2011] and Dominic Dromgoole’s Hamlet Globe to Globe [2017]).

Considering the context and afterlives of Hamlet is a worthy pursuit. I certainly consulted the above books for my essays, yet the confidence that comes from introducing context obscures the sharp panic we feel when confronting Shakespeare’s text itself. Even as the excellent recent book from Sonya Freeman Loftis, Allison Kellar, and Lisa Ulevich announces Hamlet has entered “an age of textual exhaustion,” there’s an odd tendency to avoid the text of Hamlet —to grasp for something more firm—when writing about it. There is a need to return to the text in a more immediate way to understand how Hamlet operates as a literary work, and how it can help us understand the world in which we live.

That latter goal, yes, clings nostalgically to the notion that literature can help us understand life. Questions about life send us to literature in search of answers. Those of us who love literature learn to ask and answer questions about it as we become professional literary scholars. But often our answers to the questions scholars ask of literature do not connect back up with the questions about life that sent us to literature in the first place—which are often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Those first-order questions are diluted and avoided in the minutia of much scholarship, left unanswered. Thus, my goal was to pose questions about Hamlet with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover and to answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar.

In doing so, these essays challenge the conventional relationship between literature and theory. They pursue a kind of criticism where literature is not merely the recipient of philosophical ideas in the service of exegesis. Instead, the creative risks of literature provide exemplars to be theorized outward to help us understand on-going issues in life today. Beyond an occasion for the demonstration of existing theory, literature is a source for the creation of new theory.

Chapter One How Hamlet Works

Whether you love or hate Hamlet , you can acknowledge its massive popularity. So how does Hamlet work? How does it create audience enjoyment? Why is it so appealing, and to whom? Of all the available options, why Hamlet ? This chapter entertains three possible explanations for why the play is so popular in the modern world: the literary answer (as the English language’s best artwork about death—one of the very few universal human experiences in a modern world increasingly marked by cultural differences— Hamlet is timeless); the theatrical answer (with its mixture of tragedy and comedy, the role of Hamlet requires the best actor of each age, and the play’s popularity derives from the celebrity of its stars); and the philosophical answer (the play invites, encourages, facilitates, and sustains philosophical introspection and conversation from people who do not usually do such things, who find themselves doing those things with Hamlet , who sometimes feel embarrassed about doing those things, but who ultimately find the experience of having done them rewarding).

Chapter Two “It Started Like a Guilty Thing”: The Beginning of Hamlet and the Beginning of Modern Politics

King Hamlet is a tyrant and King Claudius a traitor but, because Shakespeare asked us to experience the events in Hamlet from the perspective of the young Prince Hamlet, we are much more inclined to detect and detest King Claudius’s political failings than King Hamlet’s. If so, then Shakespeare’s play Hamlet , so often seen as the birth of modern psychology, might also tell us a little bit about the beginnings of modern politics as well.

Chapter Three Horatio as Author: Storytelling and Stoic Tragedy

This chapter addresses Horatio’s emotionlessness in light of his role as a narrator, using this discussion to think about Shakespeare’s motives for writing tragedy in the wake of his son’s death. By rationalizing pain and suffering as tragedy, both Horatio and Shakespeare were able to avoid the self-destruction entailed in Hamlet’s emotional response to life’s hardships and injustices. Thus, the stoic Horatio, rather than the passionate Hamlet who repeatedly interrupts ‘The Mousetrap’, is the best authorial avatar for a Shakespeare who strategically wrote himself and his own voice out of his works. This argument then expands into a theory of ‘authorial catharsis’ and the suggestion that we can conceive of Shakespeare as a ‘poet of reason’ in contrast to a ‘poet of emotion’.

Chapter Four “To thine own self be true”: What Shakespeare Says about Sending Our Children Off to College

What does “To thine own self be true” actually mean? Be yourself? Don’t change who you are? Follow your own convictions? Don’t lie to yourself? This chapter argues that, if we understand meaning as intent, then “To thine own self be true” means, paradoxically, that “the self” does not exist. Or, more accurately, Shakespeare’s Hamlet implies that “the self” exists only as a rhetorical, philosophical, and psychological construct that we use to make sense of our experiences and actions in the world, not as anything real. If this is so, then this passage may offer us a way of thinking about Shakespeare as not just a playwright but also a moral philosopher, one who did his ethics in drama.

Chapter Five In Defense of Polonius

Your wife dies. You raise two children by yourself. You build a great career to provide for your family. You send your son off to college in another country, though you know he’s not ready. Now the prince wants to marry your daughter—that’s not easy to navigate. Then—get this—while you’re trying to save the queen’s life, the prince murders you. Your death destroys your kids. They die tragically. And what do you get for your efforts? Centuries of Shakespeare scholars dumping on you. If we see Polonius not through the eyes of his enemy, Prince Hamlet—the point of view Shakespeare’s play asks audiences to adopt—but in analogy to the common challenges of twenty-first-century parenting, Polonius is a single father struggling with work-life balance who sadly choses his career over his daughter’s well-being.

Chapter Six Sigma Alpha Elsinore: The Culture of Drunkenness in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Claudius likes to party—a bit too much. He frequently binge drinks, is arguably an alcoholic, but not an aberration. Hamlet says Denmark is internationally known for heavy drinking. That’s what Shakespeare would have heard in the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth, English writers feared Denmark had taught their nation its drinking habits. Synthesizing criticism on alcoholism as an individual problem in Shakespeare’s texts and times with scholarship on national drinking habits in the early-modern age, this essay asks what the tragedy of alcoholism looks like when located not on the level of the individual, but on the level of a culture, as Shakespeare depicted in Hamlet. One window into these early-modern cultures of drunkenness is sociological studies of American college fraternities, especially the social-learning theories that explain how one person—one culture—teaches another its habits. For Claudius’s alcoholism is both culturally learned and culturally significant. And, as in fraternities, alcoholism in Hamlet is bound up with wealth, privilege, toxic masculinity, and tragedy. Thus, alcohol imagistically reappears in the vial of “cursed hebona,” Ophelia’s liquid death, and the poisoned cup in the final scene—moments that stand out in recent performances and adaptations with alcoholic Claudiuses and Gertrudes.

Chapter Seven Tragic Foundationalism

This chapter puts the modern philosopher Alain Badiou’s theory of foundationalism into dialogue with the early-modern playwright William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . Doing so allows us to identify a new candidate for Hamlet’s traditionally hard-to-define hamartia – i.e., his “tragic mistake” – but it also allows us to consider the possibility of foundationalism as hamartia. Tragic foundationalism is the notion that fidelity to a single and substantive truth at the expense of an openness to evidence, reason, and change is an acute mistake which can lead to miscalculations of fact and virtue that create conflict and can end up in catastrophic destruction and the downfall of otherwise strong and noble people.

Chapter Eight “As a stranger give it welcome”: Shakespeare’s Advice for First-Year College Students

Encountering a new idea can be like meeting a strange person for the first time. Similarly, we dismiss new ideas before we get to know them. There is an answer to the problem of the human antipathy to strangeness in a somewhat strange place: a single line usually overlooked in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . If the ghost is “wondrous strange,” Hamlet says, invoking the ancient ethics of hospitality, “Therefore as a stranger give it welcome.” In this word, strange, and the social conventions attached to it, is both the instinctual, animalistic fear and aggression toward what is new and different (the problem) and a cultivated, humane response in hospitality and curiosity (the solution). Intellectual xenia is the answer to intellectual xenophobia.

Chapter Nine Parallels in Hamlet

Hamlet is more parallely than other texts. Fortinbras, Hamlet, and Laertes have their fathers murdered, then seek revenge. Brothers King Hamlet and King Claudius mirror brothers Old Norway and Old Fortinbras. Hamlet and Ophelia both lose their fathers, go mad, but there’s a method in their madness, and become suicidal. King Hamlet and Polonius are both domineering fathers. Hamlet and Polonius are both scholars, actors, verbose, pedantic, detectives using indirection, spying upon others, “by indirections find directions out." King Hamlet and King Claudius are both kings who are killed. Claudius using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet mirrors Polonius using Reynaldo to spy on Laertes. Reynaldo and Hamlet both pretend to be something other than what they are in order to spy on and detect foes. Young Fortinbras and Prince Hamlet both have their forward momentum “arrest[ed].” Pyrrhus and Hamlet are son seeking revenge but paused a “neutral to his will.” The main plot of Hamlet reappears in the play-within-the-play. The Act I duel between King Hamlet and Old Fortinbras echoes in the Act V duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Claudius and Hamlet are both king killers. Sheesh—why are there so many dang parallels in Hamlet ? Is there some detectable reason why the story of Hamlet would call for the literary device of parallelism?

Chapter Ten Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Why Hamlet Has Two Childhood Friends, Not Just One

Why have two of Hamlet’s childhood friends rather than just one? Do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have individuated personalities? First of all, by increasing the number of friends who visit Hamlet, Shakespeare creates an atmosphere of being outnumbered, of multiple enemies encroaching upon Hamlet, of Hamlet feeling that the world is against him. Second, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not interchangeable, as commonly thought. Shakespeare gave each an individuated personality. Guildenstern is friendlier with Hamlet, and their friendship collapses, while Rosencrantz is more distant and devious—a frenemy.

Chapter Eleven Shakespeare on the Classics, Shakespeare as a Classic: A Reading of Aeneas’s Tale to Dido

Of all the stories Shakespeare might have chosen, why have Hamlet ask the players to recite Aeneas’ tale to Dido of Pyrrhus’s slaughter of Priam? In this story, which comes not from Homer’s Iliad but from Virgil’s Aeneid and had already been adapted for the Elizabethan stage in Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Dido, Pyrrhus – more commonly known as Neoptolemus, the son of the famous Greek warrior Achilles – savagely slays Priam, the king of the Trojans and the father of Paris, who killed Pyrrhus’s father, Achilles, who killed Paris’s brother, Hector, who killed Achilles’s comrade, Patroclus. Clearly, the theme of revenge at work in this story would have appealed to Shakespeare as he was writing what would become the greatest revenge tragedy of all time. Moreover, Aeneas’s tale to Dido supplied Shakespeare with all of the connections he sought to make at this crucial point in his play and his career – connections between himself and Marlowe, between the start of Hamlet and the end, between Prince Hamlet and King Claudius, between epic poetry and tragic drama, and between the classical literature Shakespeare was still reading hundreds of years later and his own potential as a classic who might (and would) be read hundreds of years into the future.

Chapter Twelve How Theater Works, according to Hamlet

According to Hamlet, people who are guilty of a crime will, when seeing that crime represented on stage, “proclaim [their] malefactions”—but that simply isn’t how theater works. Guilty people sit though shows that depict their crimes all the time without being prompted to public confession. Why did Shakespeare—a remarkably observant student of theater—write this demonstrably false theory of drama into his protagonist? And why did Shakespeare then write the plot of the play to affirm that obviously inaccurate vision of theater? For Claudius is indeed stirred to confession by the play-within-the-play. Perhaps Hamlet’s theory of people proclaiming malefactions upon seeing their crimes represented onstage is not as outlandish as it first appears. Perhaps four centuries of obsession with Hamlet is the English-speaking world proclaiming its malefactions upon seeing them represented dramatically.

Chapter Thirteen “To be, or not to be”: Shakespeare Against Philosophy

This chapter hazards a new reading of the most famous passage in Western literature: “To be, or not to be” from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . With this line, Hamlet poses his personal struggle, a question of life and death, as a metaphysical problem, as a question of existence and nothingness. However, “To be, or not to be” is not what it seems to be. It seems to be a representation of tragic angst, yet a consideration of the context of the speech reveals that “To be, or not to be” is actually a satire of philosophy and Shakespeare’s representation of the theatricality of everyday life. In this chapter, a close reading of the context and meaning of this passage leads into an attempt to formulate a Shakespearean image of philosophy.

Chapter Fourteen Contagious Suicide in and Around Hamlet

As in society today, suicide is contagious in Hamlet , at least in the example of Ophelia, the only death by suicide in the play, because she only becomes suicidal after hearing Hamlet talk about his own suicidal thoughts in “To be, or not to be.” Just as there are media guidelines for reporting on suicide, there are better and worse ways of handling Hamlet . Careful suicide coverage can change public misperceptions and reduce suicide contagion. Is the same true for careful literary criticism and classroom discussion of suicide texts? How can teachers and literary critics reduce suicide contagion and increase help-seeking behavior?

Chapter Fifteen Is Hamlet a Sexist Text? Overt Misogyny vs. Unconscious Bias

Students and fans of Shakespeare’s Hamlet persistently ask a question scholars and critics of the play have not yet definitively answered: is it a sexist text? The author of this text has been described as everything from a male chauvinist pig to a trailblazing proto-feminist, but recent work on the science behind discrimination and prejudice offers a new, better vocabulary in the notion of unconscious bias. More pervasive and slippery than explicit bigotry, unconscious bias involves the subtle, often unintentional words and actions which indicate the presence of biases we may not be aware of, ones we may even fight against. The Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet exhibited an unconscious bias against women, I argue, even as he sought to critique the mistreatment of women in a patriarchal society. The evidence for this unconscious bias is not to be found in the misogynistic statements made by the characters in the play. It exists, instead, in the demonstrable preference Shakespeare showed for men over women when deciding where to deploy his literary talents. Thus, Shakespeare's Hamlet is a powerful literary example – one which speaks to, say, the modern corporation – showing that deliberate efforts for egalitarianism do not insulate one from the effects of structural inequalities that both stem from and create unconscious bias.

Chapter Sixteen Style and Purpose in Acting and Writing

Purpose and style are connected in academic writing. To answer the question of style ( How should we write academic papers? ) we must first answer the question of purpose ( Why do we write academic papers? ). We can answer these questions, I suggest, by turning to an unexpected style guide that’s more than 400 years old: the famous passage on “the purpose of playing” in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . In both acting and writing, a high style often accompanies an expressive purpose attempting to impress an elite audience yet actually alienating intellectual people, while a low style and mimetic purpose effectively engage an intellectual audience.

Chapter Seventeen 13 Ways of Looking at a Ghost

Why doesn’t Gertrude see the Ghost of King Hamlet in Act III, even though Horatio, Bernardo, Francisco, Marcellus, and Prince Hamlet all saw it in Act I? It’s a bit embarrassing that Shakespeare scholars don’t have a widely agreed-upon consensus that explains this really basic question that puzzles a lot of people who read or see Hamlet .

Chapter Eighteen The Tragedy of Love in Hamlet

The word “love” appears 84 times in Shakespeare’s Hamlet . “Father” only appears 73 times, “play” 60, “think” 55, “mother” 46, “mad” 44, “soul” 40, “God" 39, “death” 38, “life” 34, “nothing” 28, “son” 26, “honor” 21, “spirit” 19, “kill” 18, “revenge” 14, and “action” 12. Love isn’t the first theme that comes to mind when we think of Hamlet , but is surprisingly prominent. But love is tragic in Hamlet . The bloody catastrophe at the end of that play is principally driven not by hatred or a longing for revenge, but by love.

Chapter Nineteen Ophelia’s Songs: Moral Agency, Manipulation, and the Metaphor of Music in Hamlet

This chapter reads Ophelia’s songs in Act IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the context of the meaning of music established elsewhere in the play. While the songs are usually seen as a marker of Ophelia’s madness (as a result of the death of her father) or freedom (from the constraints of patriarchy), they come – when read in light of the metaphor of music as manipulation – to symbolize her role as a pawn in Hamlet’s efforts to deceive his family. Thus, music was Shakespeare’s platform for connecting Ophelia’s story to one of the central questions in Hamlet : Do we have control over our own actions (like the musician), or are we controlled by others (like the instrument)?

Chapter Twenty A Quantitative Study of Prose and Verse in Hamlet

Why does Hamlet have so much prose? Did Shakespeare deliberately shift from verse to prose to signal something to his audiences? How would actors have handled the shifts from verse to prose? Would audiences have detected shifts from verse to prose? Is there an overarching principle that governs Shakespeare’s decision to use prose—a coherent principle that says, “If X, then use prose?”

Chapter Twenty-One The Fortunes of Fate in Hamlet : Divine Providence and Social Determinism

In Hamlet , fate is attacked from both sides: “fortune” presents a world of random happenstance, “will” a theory of efficacious human action. On this backdrop, this essay considers—irrespective of what the characters say and believe—what the structure and imagery Shakespeare wrote into Hamlet say about the possibility that some version of fate is at work in the play. I contend the world of Hamlet is governed by neither fate nor fortune, nor even the Christianized version of fate called “providence.” Yet there is a modern, secular, disenchanted form of fate at work in Hamlet—what is sometimes called “social determinism”—which calls into question the freedom of the individual will. As such, Shakespeare’s Hamlet both commented on the transformation of pagan fate into Christian providence that happened in the centuries leading up to the play, and anticipated the further transformation of fate from a theological to a sociological idea, which occurred in the centuries following Hamlet .

Chapter Twenty-Two The Working Class in Hamlet

There’s a lot for working-class folks to hate about Hamlet —not just because it’s old, dusty, difficult to understand, crammed down our throats in school, and filled with frills, tights, and those weird lace neck thingies that are just socially awkward to think about. Peak Renaissance weirdness. Claustrophobicly cloistered inside the castle of Elsinore, quaintly angsty over royal family problems, Hamlet feels like the literary epitome of elitism. “Lawless resolutes” is how the Wittenberg scholar Horatio describes the soldiers who join Fortinbras’s army in exchange “for food.” The Prince Hamlet who has never worked a day in his life denigrates Polonius as a “fishmonger”: quite the insult for a royal advisor to be called a working man. And King Claudius complains of the simplicity of "the distracted multitude.” But, in Hamlet , Shakespeare juxtaposed the nobles’ denigrations of the working class as readily available metaphors for all-things-awful with the rather valuable behavior of working-class characters themselves. When allowed to represent themselves, the working class in Hamlet are characterized as makers of things—of material goods and services like ships, graves, and plays, but also of ethical and political virtues like security, education, justice, and democracy. Meanwhile, Elsinore has a bad case of affluenza, the make-believe disease invented by an American lawyer who argued that his client's social privilege was so great that it created an obliviousness to law. While social elites rot society through the twin corrosives of political corruption and scholarly detachment, the working class keeps the machine running. They build the ships, plays, and graves society needs to function, and monitor the nuts-and-bolts of the ideals—like education and justice—that we aspire to uphold.

Chapter Twenty-Three The Honor Code at Harvard and in Hamlet

Students at Harvard College are asked, when they first join the school and several times during their years there, to affirm their awareness of and commitment to the school’s honor code. But instead of “the foundation of our community” that it is at Harvard, honor is tragic in Hamlet —a source of anxiety, blunder, and catastrophe. As this chapter shows, looking at Hamlet from our place at Harvard can bring us to see what a tangled knot honor can be, and we can start to theorize the difference between heroic and tragic honor.

Chapter Twenty-Four The Meaning of Death in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

By connecting the ways characters live their lives in Hamlet to the ways they die – on-stage or off, poisoned or stabbed, etc. – Shakespeare symbolized hamartia in catastrophe. In advancing this argument, this chapter develops two supporting ideas. First, the dissemination of tragic necessity: Shakespeare distributed the Aristotelian notion of tragic necessity – a causal relationship between a character’s hamartia (fault or error) and the catastrophe at the end of the play – from the protagonist to the other characters, such that, in Hamlet , those who are guilty must die, and those who die are guilty. Second, the spectacularity of death: there exists in Hamlet a positive correlation between the severity of a character’s hamartia (error or flaw) and the “spectacularity” of his or her death – that is, the extent to which it is presented as a visible and visceral spectacle on-stage.

Chapter Twenty-Five Tragic Excess in Hamlet

In Hamlet , Shakespeare paralleled the situations of Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras (the father of each is killed, and each then seeks revenge) to promote the virtue of moderation: Hamlet moves too slowly, Laertes too swiftly – and they both die at the end of the play – but Fortinbras represents a golden mean which marries the slowness of Hamlet with the swiftness of Laertes. As argued in this essay, Shakespeare endorsed the virtue of balance by allowing Fortinbras to be one of the very few survivors of the play. In other words, excess is tragic in Hamlet .

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Read our detailed notes below on the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Our notes cover Hamlet summary, themes, characters and analysis.

Introduction

Hamlet is a tragic play written by William Shakespeare somewhat in 1599. The exact date of publication is unknown, however, many believe that it was published between 1601 and 1603. The play is set in Denmark.

Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, is Shakespeare’s longest play and is well-thought-out as the most influential literary work of literature. The play stages the revenge that Hamlet is to wreak upon his uncle, Claudius, for killing his (Hamlet’s) father.

The story of Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, is supposed to be derived from the fable of Amleth, written in the 13th century and reiterated in the 16th century by a scholar named Francois de Belleforest. We can assume the popularity of the play by this that throughout centuries, the role of Hamlet is staged by the highly skillful artist.

Hamlet has different version published at different ages. Each version is different from others as it includes lines or excludes them making them entirely different from other. The main characters of the play are Hamlet, the protagonist; Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle; Queen Gertrude; Polonius; Ophelia; Laertes. The major themes of the play include fate, free will, revenge, political instability, mortality, and madness. Yorick’s skull is the major symbol used by the writer to introduce artistic effect in the play.

Hamlet by William Shakespeare Summary

The play opens with Prince Hamlet being summoned to Denmark from Germany for his father’s funeral. When he reaches there, he finds that his mother Queen Gertrude has already remarried to his fraternal uncle, Claudius. For Hamlet, this marriage was a big shock and considered it “foul incest”. Even worse than this, Claudius has crowned himself disregard of the fact that being King’s son, this crown belongs to Hamlet. Hamlet doubts the whole scenario as foul play.

All of Hamlet’s doubts and suspicions are confirmed when his father’s ghost visits the Castle and complains that because he is murdered, he is unable to rest in peace. Moreover, the ghost claims that Claudius had poured poison in the ear of King Hamlet when he was sleeping causing his death. The king’s ghost, impotent to confess and find redemption, is now condemned to pass his days in despair and walk on earth at night. He persuades and begs his son Hamlet to take revenge from Claudius, however, he asks to spare Gertrude and let her fate decided by heaven.

Hamlet pledges to avenge his father’s death and wears a mask of madness so that he would be able to observe the interactions among people in the castle. However, by doing so, Hamlet finds himself somewhat very confused and questions the trustworthiness of the ghost. What if the ghost is a devil’s agent directed to allure him? What if by killing Claudius consequences Hamlet to revive his memory throughout for life? Hamlet cannot stop himself from over-thinking and worries over his thought and perceive them as his cowardice. Words restrict action, however, the world in which he lives pay back every action.

To test the sincerity of the Ghost. Hamlet takes help from the troupe of actors who staged a play named The Murder of Gonzago. Hamlet added few scenes to play that resembles the murder of the King Hamlet as described by the ghost. Hamlet named this revised play as “The Mousetrap”. The play is proved successful as the Claudius reacted to the play and seems to be conscience-stricken, as hoped by Prince Hamlet. Claudius immediately leaves the place as he faces difficulty to breathe. Prince Hamlet, being convinced by the sincerity of the ghost, vows to avenge his father’s death and decided to kill Claudius. But “conscience doth make cowards of us all”, as observed by Hamlet.

Hamlet, by his unwillingness to avenge Claudius, causes six subsidiary deaths. The first victim is Polonius, an old man, who is stabbed by Hamlet through a wall hanging as Polonius spies on hamlet and his mother. Claudius banishes Hamlet to England to punish him for Polonius’ death and instructs Hamlet’s school chums, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to handover him to English king for execution. Hamlet, during the journey, discovers what is going on and arranges a plot for the execution of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Ophelia, highly upset on her father’s death and Hamlet’s behavior, drown herself while singing a song and lamenting over the fate of a despised lover. Laertes, her brother, follows next.

When Laertes returned to Denmark to kill Claudius to avenge his father’s death, sees that Ophelia, his sister, has drowned by madness. Laertes, in the love of her sister, pledges to kill Hamlet for being the cause of Ophelia’s death. Through his creative words, Laertes convinced Claudius to kill Hamlet. Hamlet and Laertes have a sword fight. In the middle of the fight, Laertes drops his poisoned sword that is retrieved by Hamlet and wounds Laertes. Laertes tells Hamlet of the poisoned sword and as Hamlet is already been wounded by the sword, he, too, will die soon. Meanwhile, Horatio informs Hamlet that “Queen Falls”. Gertrude has drunk a sip from the poisoned cup, that was prepared by Claudius for Hamlet and she dies.

Laertes, before he dies, made another confession to Hamlet of his part in the plot and tell him the Claudius is responsible for Gertrude’s death. Enraged Hamlet stabs the poisoned sword into Claudius and pours the remaining poisoned wine into Claudius’ throat.

Before he dies, the throne should pass to the Prince Fortibras of Norway, declares Hamlet. He also begs his friend Horatio to tell him accurately the events that lead to such bloodshed.

The play ends with a grand funeral for Prince Hamlet as ordered by King Fortinbras of Denmark.

Themes in Hamlet

The question of life and death is introduced just as the play opens. Hamlet, throughout the play, ponders the complexity of life and considers the meaning of life. Throughout the play, many questions emerge as what happens when one dies? Will someone directly goes to heaven, if he/she is murdered? etc. Furthermore, Hamlet is very uncertain about the afterlife and causes him to quit suicide. The death of almost all the major characters of the play, towards the end of the play, doesn’t fully answer the question of mortality. The character of Hamlet represents exploration and discussion disregard of a true perseverance.

Hamlet, after hearing confessions from the ghost acts like a mad person to fool people in order to know the reality of the people around him. He acts so to prove himself harmless. However, this madness was recognized by Polonius. The irony arises when he falsely believes that Hamlet’s method stems from his love for Ophelia. It was impressive of Polonius that he recognizes the method behind Hamlet’s madness.

However, Hamlet starts losing his hold on reality by acting mad. He faces difficulty in handling the circumstances that are emotionally driven. Surrendering himself to physical violence displays that he has more issues than merely acting mad. This all scenario comes up with a question that what compels Hamlet to act such without considering the consequences?

There are only two female characters in the play Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother and Ophelia, Polonius’ daughter and Hamlet’s beloved.

Hamlets seem to be nervous while communicating with both of the women. In Hamlet’s life, both of these women have a special position, however, he is suspicious of both. The too early remarriage of her made him very suspicious of her mother. Secondly, Ophelia is in cahoots with her family and Hamlet realizes it when he starts acting mad.

Both of the ladies let Hamlet down. However, Ophelia is viewed as a victim of Hamlet brutality while Gertrude is represented as the more flexible character.

Political Livelihood

With the death of King Hamlet, the nation of Denmark starts deteriorating as the death of a king causes political turmoil in the country. Hamlet erratic behavior leads to unrest in the country. At various points in the play, the mad behavior of Hamlet is linked with the political livelihood of the country.

Hamlet Characters Analysis

He is the Prince of Denmark and son of the deceased king. He is called from Wittenberg University in Germany to attend his father’s funeral. When he reaches Denmark, he comes to know that his mother has remarried very soon to his uncle. Moreover, his uncle has crowned himself. This makes Hamlet very suspicious. These suspicious changes to reality when Hamlet encounters his father’s ghost. After hearing his father’s confession he vows to avenge his father’s death. Hamlet, in the play, is a highly confused person that leads to the bloody end of the play. To be or not to be is one the most celebrated dialogue of Hamlet and representation of his confused state of mind.

He is the present king of Denmark and brother of the deceased king, King Hamlet. He is accused of killing his brother and remarries widow of the Queen.

She is the Queen of Denmark and also the wife of deceased King Hamlet. She immediately remarries to Claudius, brother of King Hamlet.

He is a son of Polonius and brother of Ophelia. He is a student in Paris. Who first appears at the funeral of the King Hamlet and secondly at the death of his sister, Ophelia.

He is a loyal friend and a schoolmate of Prince Hamlet.

He is an old chief counselor of Claudius. He is murdered by Prince Hamlet when caught him spying.

She is the daughter of Polonius, sister of Laertes and Hamlet’s beloved. She commits suicide after her father’s death.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

The classmates of Hamlet at Wittenberg whom Claudius called to spy on him.

The minor characters of the play are:

He is King of Norway, who vows to avenge his father’s death who was killed by the Danes’ hands.

A minor character who acts as the messenger between Hamlet and Laertes.

Voltimand and Cornelius

They are the courtiers of Danish kingdom who are directed as diplomats to the Courtyard of Norway.

Marcellus and Barnardo

They are Danish officers who guard the castle of Elsinore.

A Danish soldier to guard castle of Elsinore.

A young man whom Polonius trains to spy on his son and report him.

Hamlet Literary Analysis

Throughout the play, Hamlets seems to be highly confused regarding the idea of death. His famous soliloquies line “to be or not to be” shows Hamlet confused mindset for suicide; whether he should suicide or not; what would be an afterlife.

The play has a turning point where Hamlet realizes at the graveyard and encounters the skull of a man whom he is fond of. In his contemplation, Hamlet realizes that death vanishes the class difference among society. Everything is created by man himself. All these differences are illusions that diminish with death.

The play demonstrates a conflict between fate and free will and this what the classical tragedians appreciated. In every great tragedy, there lies a struggle between the predisposition a man to accept the fate and his natural desire to control his destiny.

Whether it is Sophocles or Shakespeare, both demonstrate that there is a continuous struggle between destiny and choice to control human life. To Shakespeare, man’s dilemma is represented when he is given to choose between good and bad. In the play, Hamlet was well aware of his shortcomings and his powerlessness to stand for what is right and to correct what seems to be wrong to him.

He, through his intellectual guidance, tries to pursue his fate. Hamlet resembles a modern man who is tossed between good and bad. To him, there is nothing good or bad, it is what our thinking makes it so. Like Hamlet, every man struggles to live between what he expects and what he gets; the battle that a man never wins. God asks man one thing and he demands another.

William Shakespeare

Literature Notes
Hamlet at a Glance
Play Summary
About Hamlet
Character List
Summary and Analysis
Act I: Scene 1
Act I: Scene 2
Act I: Scene 3
Act I: Scene 4
Act I: Scene 5
Act II: Scene 1
Act II: Scene 2
Act III: Scene 1
Act III: Scene 2
Act III: Scene 3
Act III: Scene 4
Act IV: Scene 1
Act IV: Scene 2
Act IV: Scene 3
Act IV: Scene 4
Act IV: Scene 5
Act IV: Scene 6
Act IV: Scene 7
Act V: Scene 1
Act V: Scene 2
Character Analysis
Character Map
William Shakespeare Biography
Critical Essays
Major Themes
Yorick's Skull as a Major Symbol
Free Will and Fate
Ophelia's Dilemma
Top 8 Quotes Explained
Film Versions
Full Glossary
Essay Questions
Practice Projects
Cite this Literature Note

Character Analysis Hamlet

Hamlet is an enigma. No matter how many ways critics examine him, no absolute truth emerges. Hamlet breathes with the multiple dimensions of a living human being, and everyone understands him in a personal way. Hamlet's challenge to Guildenstern rings true for everyone who seeks to know him: "You would pluck out the heart of my mystery." None of us ever really does.

The conundrum that is Hamlet stems from the fact that every time we look at him, he is different. In understanding literary characters, just as in understanding real people, our perceptions depend on what we bring to the investigation. Hamlet is so complete a character that, like an old friend or relative, our relationship to him changes each time we visit him, and he never ceases to surprise us. Therein lies the secret to the enduring love affair audiences have with him. They never tire of the intrigue.

The paradox of Hamlet's nature draws people to the character. He is at once the consummate iconoclast, in self-imposed exile from Elsinore Society, while, at the same time, he is the adulated champion of Denmark — the people's hero. He has no friends left, but Horatio loves him unconditionally. He is angry, dejected, depressed, and brooding; he is manic, elated, enthusiastic, and energetic. He is dark and suicidal, a man who loathes himself and his fate. Yet, at the same time, he is an existential thinker who accepts that he must deal with life on its own terms, that he must choose to meet it head on. "We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow."

Hamlet not only participates in his life, but astutely observes it as well. He recognizes the decay of the Danish society (represented by his Uncle Claudius ), but also understands that he can blame no social ills on just one person. He remains aware of the ironies that constitute human endeavor, and he savors them. Though he says, "Man delights not me," the contradictions that characterize us all intrigue him. "What a 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!"

As astutely as he observes the world around him, Hamlet also keenly critiques himself. In his soliloquys he upbraids himself for his failure to act as well as for his propensity for words.

Hamlet is infuriatingly adept at twisting and manipulating words. He confuses his so-called friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — whom he trusts as he "would adders fang'd" — with his dissertations on ambition, turning their observations around so that they seem to admire beggars more than their King. And he leads them on a merry chase in search of Polonius ' body. He openly mocks the dottering Polonius with his word plays, which elude the old man's understanding. He continually spars with Claudius, who recognizes the danger of Hamlet's wit but is never smart enough to defend himself against it.

Words are Hamlet's constant companions, his weapons, and his defenses. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, a play that was later adapted into a film, playwright and screenplaywright Tom Stoppard imagines the various wordplays in Hamlet as games. In one scene, his characters play a set of tennis where words serve as balls and rackets. Hamlet is certainly the Pete Sampras of wordplay.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Plays — Hamlet

Essays on Hamlet

Hamlet essay topics and outline examples, essay title 1: the tragic hero in "hamlet": analyzing the complex character of prince hamlet.

Thesis Statement: This essay delves into the character of Prince Hamlet in Shakespeare's "Hamlet," examining his tragic flaws, internal conflicts, and the intricate web of relationships that contribute to his downfall, ultimately highlighting his status as a classic tragic hero.

Introduction
Defining Tragic Heroes: Characteristics and Literary Tradition
The Complex Psychology of Prince Hamlet: Ambiguity, Doubt, and Melancholy
The Ghost's Revelation: Hamlet's Quest for Justice and Revenge
The Theme of Madness: Feigned or Real?
Hamlet's Relationships: Ophelia, Gertrude, Claudius, and Horatio
The Tragic Climax: The Duel, Poisoned Foils, and Fatal Consequences

Essay Title 2: "Hamlet" as a Reflection of Political Intrigue: Power, Corruption, and the Tragedy of Denmark

Thesis Statement: This essay explores the political dimensions of Shakespeare's "Hamlet," analyzing the themes of power, corruption, and political manipulation as portrayed in the play, and their impact on the fate of the characters and the kingdom of Denmark.

The Political Landscape of Denmark: Claudius's Ascension to the Throne
The Machiavellian Villainy of Claudius: Murder, Deception, and Ambition
Hamlet's Struggle for Justice: The Role of Political Morality
The Foils of Polonius and Laertes: Pawns in Political Games
The Fate of Denmark: Chaos, Rebellion, and the Climactic Tragedy
Shakespeare's Political Commentary: Lessons for Society

Essay Title 3: "Hamlet" in a Contemporary Context: Adaptations, Interpretations, and the Play's Enduring Relevance

Thesis Statement: This essay examines modern adaptations and interpretations of "Hamlet," exploring how the themes, characters, and dilemmas presented in the play continue to resonate with audiences today, making "Hamlet" a timeless and relevant work of literature.

From Stage to Screen: Iconic Film and Theater Productions of "Hamlet"
Contemporary Readings: Gender, Race, and Identity in "Hamlet" Interpretations
Psychological and Existential Interpretations: Hamlet's Inner Turmoil in the Modern World
Relevance in the 21st Century: Themes of Revenge, Justice, and Moral Dilemma
Adapting "Hamlet" for New Audiences: Outreach, Education, and Cultural Engagement
Conclusion: The Timelessness of "Hamlet" and Its Place in Literature

Monologue of Ophelia

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Theme of Soliloquies in Shakespeares Hamlet

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The Tragic Story of Hamlet

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"Act": The Theme of "Acting" in Hamlet

The question of hamlet's madness, analysis of ophelia's story through the context of gender and madness, death and revenge in hamlet, a play by william shakespeare, existentialism as a part of hamlet, revenge and its consequences in hamlet, claudius as the master of manipulation in hamlet, the important theme of madness in hamlet by william shakespeare, trickery and deception in hamlet by william shakespeare, the role of grief in shakespeare’s hamlet, reflection on the act 2 of shakespeare’s hamlet, hamlet by william shakespeare: the impact of parents on their children, the relationship between hamlet and horatio, revenge and justice in william shakespeare’s hamlet, justice and revenge in shakespeare's hamlet, hamlet's intelligence is the factor of his procrastination nature, the dishonesty of the ghost in hamlet, king lear and hamlet: freudian interpretation of the two plays, hamlet's procrastination: a study on his unwillingness to act, shakespeare's use of machiavellian politics in hamlet.

1603, William Shakespeare

Play; Shakespearean tragedy

Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius

The play Hamlet is the most cited work in the English language and is often included in the lists of the world's greatest literature.

"Frailty, thy name is woman!" "Brevity' is the soul of wit" "To be, or not to be, that is the question" "I must be cruel to be kind" "Why, then, ’tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me, it is a prison."

1. Wright, G. T. (1981). Hendiadys and Hamlet. PMLA, 96(2), 168-193. (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/abs/hendiadys-and-hamlet/B61A80FAB6569984AB68096FE483D4FB) 2. Leverenz, D. (1978). The woman in Hamlet: An interpersonal view. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 4(2), 291-308. (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/493608?journalCode=signs) 3. Lesser, Z., & Stallybrass, P. (2008). The first literary Hamlet and the commonplacing of professional plays. Shakespeare Quarterly, 59(4), 371-420. (https://academic.oup.com/sq/article-abstract/59/4/371/5064575) 4. De Grazia, M. (2001). Hamlet before its Time. MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly, 62(4), 355-375. (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/22909) 5. Calderwood, J. L. (1983). To be and not to be. Negation and Metadrama in Hamlet. In To Be and Not to Be. Negation and Metadrama in Hamlet. Columbia University Press. (https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7312/cald94400/html) 6. Kastan, D. S. (1987). " His semblable is his mirror":" Hamlet" and the Imitation of Revenge. Shakespeare Studies, 19, 111. (https://www.proquest.com/openview/394df477873b27246b71f83d3939c672/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=1819311) 7. Neill, M. (1983). Remembrance and Revenge: Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest. Jonson and Shakespeare, 35-56. (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-06183-9_3) 8. Gates, S. (2008). Assembling the Ophelia fragments: gender, genre, and revenge in Hamlet. Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 34(2), 229-248. (https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA208534875&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=00982474&p=AONE&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7Eebb234db)

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Guidelines for Writing A Great Hamlet Analysis Essay

To enhance the independent work of students and the development of public speaking skills, many teachers resort to such a form of knowledge control as an essay. This type of activity can be attributed to small written works. The essay in its volume is significantly inferior to the thesis since it is usually related to a specific subject under study and includes an analysis of a limited number of concepts considered during training.

Writing a literary essay is usually based on an analysis of a literary text. Sometimes it’s difficult for students to complete this assignment, but at any time they can contact professionals, such as WriteMyPaper4Me , and get a stellar paper! However, it is very important to learn to overcome such difficulties and to complete an essay without any help. Below we will give you recommendations for writing a great Hamlet analysis essay.

5 Key Writing Tips

As it is known, Hamlet has long been recognized by society as the great eternal image of world literature. The play “Hamlet” became not only the closest story for the reader, literary and theatrical critics, actors and directors, but acquired the significance of a text-generating work of art. The eternal image of the doubting Hamlet inspired a whole string of writers who, one way or another, used his character traits in their literary works.

In order to conduct a good literary analysis of the protagonist and the novel as a whole, and as a result, write an excellent essay, the author should take into account the following recommendations:

Define the structure of your paper. As a rule, an essay consists of three main structural elements: introduction, main part, and conclusion;
In the introduction a narrator should point the topic, highlight the main issues that need to be considered;
In the main part, it is advisable to represent a system of argumentation based on a deep study of the play. You should put forward new different ideas in a logical sequence, which will enable the reader to trace the direction of your answer. For the convenience of presentation and clarity of the logic of each argument, evidence, and statement, the main content is divided into paragraphs or sections that may have independent subheadings;
The conclusion is the last basic element of an essay. The writer usually represents here a summary of basic ideas;
When checking the work, it is necessary first of all to pay attention to whether the ideas are arranged in a logical order. Usually, each paragraph of the main text should contain no more than one idea in question. In addition, it is important to check each sentence of the work for errors, as a good knowledge of the language should be demonstrated in the essay.

We hope our tips will help you to write a Hamlet analysis essay at the highest level!

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Hamlet Literary Analysis Essay

Characters in Hamlet:

Hamlet is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare. It is one of his most popular and well-known works. The play tells the story of Prince Hamlet, who is grieving the death of his father, King Hamlet. When Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius, becomes king, Hamlet is suspicious of him. This leads to a series of events that eventually lead to tragedy. The play is full of complex characters, each with their own motivations and agendas. Here is a closer look at some of the key Characters in Hamlet.

Hamlet: The titular character and protagonist of the play, Hamlet is the Prince of Denmark. He is grieving the death of his father and is suspicious of his uncle, who has married his mother and taken the throne. Hamlet is a complex character full of contradictions. He is capable of great intelligence and wit, but he is also prone to fits of madness. He is torn between his duty to revenge his father’s murder and his love for Ophelia. In the end, Hamlet’s indecision leads to tragedy.

Horatio: Hamlet’s best friend and confidante. Horatio is a level-headed and loyal friend who helps Hamlet in his quest to uncover the truth about his father’s death. He is a voice of reason for Hamlet, and he often tries to restrain him from acting rashly.

Polonius: The Lord Chamberlain of Claudius’s court. Polonius is a manipulative politician who is more concerned with advancing his own career than with doing what is right. He is a disloyal friend to Hamlet and is eventually killed by him.

Ophelia: Polonius’s daughter and Hamlet’s love interest. Ophelia is a kind and gentle young woman who is caught in the middle of the conflict between Hamlet and her father. She eventually goes mad and drowns herself.

Laertes: Polonius’s son and Ophelia’s brother. Laertes is a hot-headed young man who is easily manipulated by those in power. He is initially allied with Hamlet, but he later turns against him and fights him in a duel to the death.

Gertrude: Hamlet’s mother and the Queen of Denmark. Gertrude is a beautiful and vain woman who married Claudius soon after the death of her first husband, King Hamlet. She is unaware of Claudius’s role in her first husband’s murder, but she eventually realizes that he is responsible for it.

Claudius: The new King of Denmark and Hamlet’s uncle. Claudius is a ambitious politician who murdered his brother, King Hamlet, in order to take the throne. He later marries Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, which further fuels Hamlet’s suspicion of him. Claudius is a manipulative and devious character who will stop at nothing to maintain his power.

Hamlet’s inner struggle is illuminated by his doubt of the ghost’s instructions, his refusal to kill the king while praying (or attempted prayer), and his inability to kill Claudius a second time, all of which are symptoms of his emotional upheaval. Hamlet’s effort to get revenge is first apparent when he examines the words of the ghost. When Hamlet talks with the ghost, he begins to doubt its goals.

The ghost claims to be Hamlet’s father, who was murdered by Claudius. The ghost tells Hamlet to avenge his death, but Hamlet is hesitant. Hamlet does not want to kill Claudius while he is praying because he believes that would send him to heaven.

Hamlet also does not want to kill Claudius while he is sinning because he believes that would send him to hell. Hamlet’s inner struggle is evident when he says, “The spirit that I have seen/ May be the devil…And yet, within a month— / Let me not think on’t—Frailty, thy name is woman!— / A little month, or ere those shoes were old/ With which she followed my poor father’s body, / Like niobium to methought they glitter’d on her feet,” (Shakespeare 3.2.88-93). Hamlet is unsure of the ghost’s intentions and whether or not it is really his father.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ask Hamlet, “What made you do it?” His response redirects to his own motives. “Nothing good or bad,” he says, “but thinking makes it so.” He reveals to his fellow man that he is grappling with issues of thought and whether the task the ghost has unexpectedly bestowed upon him is moral and true or deceptive.

This is noted by Bloom in Hamlet’s perception that “The essential question about a dramatic mirror was like the one Hamlet found himself asking about the ghost: Is this ‘thing’ strange because its revealing a hidden truth—or because some power is trying to deceive me?” (Bloom 56).

The choices that Hamlet makes are a direct result of his contemplation and the actions that stem from these thoughts. Characters in Hamlet such as Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Polonius are used by Shakespeare to further enhance this idea of contemplation.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are two Characters in Hamlet that seem content with never questioning why or how, they simply do as they are told. From the moment they enter Elsinore their purpose is to figure out Hamlet’s madness, yet they never stop to think about why he may be mad. As noted by T.S. Eliot in his essay “Hamlet”, “With Rosencrantz and Guildenstern we are presented with two Characters in Hamlet who represent the thoughtless acceptance of things as they are.” (Eliot). Their lack of questioning allows them to be used as pawns in other Characters in Hamlet plans, such as Polonius’s scheme to find out the truth about Hamlet’s madness.

Polonius is another Characters in Hamlet who never questions his actions or words, he is content with being a yes-man and following orders. This is most evident when he agrees to help Claudius spy on Hamlet under the guise of motherly concern. He does not question whether or not it is morally wrong to eavesdrop on a grieving son, he simply does as he is told. This ultimately leads to his death, as Hamlet stabs him through the arras without knowing who it is. If Polonius had stopped to think about his actions, he may have realized that what he was doing was wrong and avoided his untimely death.

In conclusion, Characters in Hamlet such as Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Polonius represent the thoughtless acceptance of things as they are. Their lack of questioning allows them to be used as pawns in other Characters in Hamlet plans. This ultimately leads to their downfall, as they are unable to see the larger picture and make informed decisions. Hamlet on the other hand, represents the power of contemplation and thought. He is able to see the larger picture and make informed decisions based on his moral compass. Characters in Hamlet such as Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Polonius could learn a lot from Hamlet, and maybe then they would be able to avoid their untimely demise.

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Hamlet Analysis Essay: Shakespeare’s Play Analysis Example

Looking for the Hamlet analysis essay? Read this drama analysis essay example and get an insight into Hamlet themes and characters.

Introduction to the Drama Analysis Example

Hamlet themes, analysis of characters in hamlet, conclusion of the hamlet analysis essay.

In the play Hamlet, William Shakespeare who is one of the most influential writers in history has elaborated the contemporary themes in society into a piece of literature as revealed in the drama. Due to his universal way of creating themes, he has been able to influence the western literature. In the contemporary theatre of the western, they still view Shakespeare’s work being relevant.

Shakespeare therefore uses the stylistic device of a play within a play to pass his information to the audience as well as helping him develop his plot. Shakespeare has in this case therefore used the main actor Hamlet in portraying this device. Hamlet who is a character in the play is again seen in another play within the play, which he acts in order to be in a position to kill Claudius.

Hamlet is a play that depicts a vivid drama of melancholy and insanity as well as famous of its ghostliness. In this play, Shakespeare has used various elements of literature to develop the plot of the play. In this case, the writer has used characters, settings, symbols, themes, characterization and other elements of literature in the development of the plot. The writer has used these elements correlatively to achieve his plot.

Themes are used to develop characters in the play. For instance, the writer has used the theme of betrayal to develop the main character Hamlet in the play hence the development of the plot. The writer used the name of the play as the name of the main actor while other characters in the play helped in development of the predominant theme in the main character.

Therefore, four main characters have greatly contributed by playing major roles. Hamlet experienced character development through the betrayals of Ophelia with whom he is romantically involved. Gertrude is his mother and Claudius’ wife while Gildernstern and Rosencrantz were his friends from the University of Wittenberg.

When the scene begins, there is a very close relationship between Hamlet and the mother, which later fades off when Gertrude remarries his uncle Claudius two months after his father’s death. This culminated the distrust in women since his mother was the most important female in his life.

He therefore uses mockery phrases like “such dexterity to incestuous sheets” and “frailty, thy name is woman”. Such phrases illustrated how disgusted and disappointed he was towards his mother and women as well as depicting how isolated he was as a young man.

The theme of madness has also played major role in the development of the plot. Insanity was used in many revenge tragedies like in the first revenge tragedy of Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus. Unlike in the case of Hamlet where the madness is ambiguous, other revenge tragedies in the character have been unambiguous.

In the source of Shakespeare’ plot in Hamlet, the main protagonist feigns his madness to be in the position to revenge without being suspected by the king (Claudius) whom he plots to kill. In the play, Hamlet’s madness tends to distract him from accomplishing his mission as it is depicted in the play as being with very little interest in accomplishing the mission of the ghost even after proving that Claudius is guilty (act 4 scene 2).

Hamlet therefore acts like a mad person in the play since he is aware in a bizarre manner that he should act as a mad man to accomplish the role of revenge in Hamlet. He knows the role that he is supposed to play even though to some extent he does not attain it satisfactorily.

This in return built Hamlet as a character who wants to revenge. Ophelia is another character who plays the part of a mad person but in her case, she is innocently mad. Ophelia loses her senses of self-knowledge and composure completely and therefore insane.

Suicide is another theme that has been used by Shakespeare to develop the plot in Hamlet. The play has been shaped using Ophelia as well as Hamlet. Hamlet deeply contemplates about the issue of suicide and this is seen in his soliloquies. He keeps on asking himself questions about the act of murder.

Hamlet had the fear to kill because of his social as well as religious morals. He views suicide as a crime in the societal view and even before God who gives life. He also had the fear of what happens to the person after he has departed from this world and going to the world of the deaths.

Ophelia’s death also arouses many issues where some people say that she died a natural death while others say that she committed suicide. According to Hamlet’s mother, Ophelia’s death was accidental because she drowned while on the other hand, the priest and the gravediggers said it clearly that Ophelia killed herself. This therefore left the people feeling that Gertrude’s narration was just a story to cover up the whole issue of murder since it was viewed as an immoral act in the society (act 5).

In Hamlet, Shakespeare has used women characters in the development of the plot. In the play, women are seen to play minor roles but very essential in development of the plot. In the play, Gertrude and Ophelia are the two women in direct relationship with the main protagonist. The writer develops the theme of love in the play using Gertrude who is the main protagonist’s mother. This is seen when Gertrude tries to stop the death of his son because Hamlet never loved her as a mother.

This is because; he felt that her mother was involved in the murder of his father. She is concerned about the well-being of her son, which proves the reason why Claudius could not inform her about the plot of killing his stepson. Ophelia is portrayed as loving because after the death of her father she became insane.

This is evident when she started using abusive language in public without fear as she used to behave in the previous scene, where Hamlet could abuse her and she could not respond due to the fear she had as woman who was under the power of a man.

The theme of patriarchal is built around the two women to show how they were not allowed to make decisions on their own. For example, in the case of Ophelia, she is forced by the father (Claudius) and her brother Laertes not to love Hamlet because the brother feels that Hamlet is playing with her feelings.

Trying to satisfy the wants of the father and brother, Hamlet blames her and even insults her, but since Ophelia does not have power to explain to him what was underlying the whole issue, she ends up suffering. The husband on the other hand see Gertrude as a less repressed person but Claudius married her so that he can be able to promptly take over the throne after Hamlet’s death and pretend that he is good just like the previous king by remarrying his wife.

Ophelia has been used to develop the stylistic device of symbolism in the play towards the development of the plot. The symbolism of her language in the play increases the range of meanings depicted in the play.

For example, Ophelia is emotional after hearing about the death of her father and throws flowers in every place around her as a sign of purity (act 4 scene 4). On the contrary, this symbolizes her deflowering as a person, on the other scene of her madness.

Lastly, the two characters have contributed in the development of the plot and again helped the writer to portray the fate of his heroes in the play. When Ophelia rejects Hamlet, Hamlet’s disgust his mother’s remarriage, taints the opinion about all women hence making him an isolated man. The madness death of Ophelia fortifies her brother’s determination of revenging on Hamlet, which results to the final catastrophe in the play. Gertrude cared for his son but could not control the tragedy from taking place.

The writer has used Hamlet who is the main character in the play to build other themes hence the development of the plot. After the death of Hamlet’s father, Hamlet plots on how to kill Claudius after the spirit confirmed to him that Claudius is the one who killed his father.

However, in the play Hamlets avenge on Claudius. “… I, his son, do this same villain send to heaven, why, this is hire and salary, not revenge” (Act 3 scene 3 78-84).

Honor is another theme portrayed through Hamlet the main protagonist. This theme is best depicted when Hamlet takes order from the ghost to revenge on Claudius as if the order came from God. “… With wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love may sweep to my revenge” (1.v.35-37).

The writer develops the plot using Claudius, Hamlet’s brother the king who later marries Gertrude his brother’s wife. In the play, he is Hamlet’s major avenger who is portrayed as lustful because he took his brother’s wife, Shrewd. He takes the throne that does not belong to him and allows his son revenge on Hamlet.

Due to these characters, he stands out as a man with contrasting characters from other men in the play. The ideas of Hamlet are just, honest and full of revenge but Claudius ensures that his power is maintained. In conclusion, the writer has also used other elements in correlation like the setting of the play to bring out the meaning in Hamlet.

Shakespeare therefore does not present various elements of literature as single entities in the play but he uses his concept of unity to express them as a single entity. Therefore, in this case, he uses characters in the play to develop themes and stylistic devices as well as using the themes to create the characters hence the clear development of the play.

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IvyPanda . "Hamlet Analysis Essay: Shakespeare’s Play Analysis Example." October 28, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/drama-analysis-of-hamlet-by-shakespeare/.

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