# Hamlet by William Shakespeare Source: https://thegisthub.com/books/hamlet-by-william-shakespeare Last updated: 2026-10-24 Published 1603 · 342 pages · ISBN 9781451669411 · Categories: Fiction, Philosophy and stoicism Shakespeare's tragedy about a Danish prince ordered by his father's ghost to avenge a murder, and the delay, madness and deaths that follow. For readers who want the plot act by act and the ideas behind the famous speeches. ## The gist Prince **Hamlet** returns to the Danish court to find his father dead and his mother Gertrude married to his uncle **Claudius**, the new king. His father's ghost tells him Claudius poisoned him and demands revenge. Hamlet pretends to be mad while he tests the ghost's story with a play that re-enacts the murder. He kills the wrong man, Polonius, and is sent to England. His delay pulls in everyone around him: Ophelia, Laertes, Gertrude and his friend Horatio. Shakespeare turns a revenge plot into a study of thought, action, grief and what it means to die. ## Key ideas ### 1. Thinking too precisely on the event Hamlet has a clear command from the ghost and spends four acts not carrying it out. He doubts the ghost, tests Claudius, spares him at prayer and then kills the wrong man. He blames himself in every soliloquy for talking instead of acting. Shakespeare does not settle whether the delay is cowardice, conscience or intelligence. The idea is that thought and action pull against each other, and that a person who sees every side of a question may never move. ### 2. Seeming is not being When Gertrude asks why grief seems so particular to him, Hamlet answers that he knows not seems. Claudius smiles and is a murderer. Polonius sends spies on his own son. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern pretend friendship on the king's orders. Hamlet pretends madness. The court is a place where everyone watches and no one shows a true face. Shakespeare asks the audience to judge people by what they do when they think no one is looking, as Hamlet does with the play. ### 3. Test the evidence before you act Hamlet will not kill a king on the word of a ghost that might be a devil. He stages The Mousetrap, a play that copies the murder, and watches Claudius's reaction. The king breaks and leaves. Only then does Hamlet accept the ghost's story as true. The scene is a model for acting on strong claims: find a way to make the claim show itself before you commit. The cost of the test is time, and the delay has its own victims. ### 4. Madness as a mask and as a wound Hamlet announces he will put on an antic disposition, and his madness is a tactic: it lets him insult Polonius, dodge the king's spies and speak truths no sane courtier could. Ophelia's madness is real. After her father is killed by the man she loved, she sings broken songs and gives out flowers. Shakespeare places the two side by side. The feigned madness protects a prince; the true madness destroys a young woman who had no power to begin with. ### 5. Corruption spreads from the top A guard says something is rotten in the state of Denmark, and the play shows the rot spreading from one crime. Claudius kills his brother. To hold the crown he spies, lies, exiles his nephew and plans a poisoned duel. Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern serve the rot without knowing its source. Shakespeare argues that a state takes its character from its ruler, and that a crime at the head infects every hand below it. ### 6. Death levels everyone Hamlet holds the skull of Yorick, the jester who once carried him on his back, and asks where the jokes went. He traces Alexander the Great and Caesar to dust that might stop a beer barrel or patch a wall. Earlier, he tells Claudius that a king may pass through the guts of a beggar. The idea is that rank, wit and beauty all end in the same earth. Shakespeare uses it both to mock the court's ambition and to prepare Hamlet for his own end. ### 7. (Spoiler) Revenge consumes the avenger and the state Hamlet kills Claudius in the last scene, but by then Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Gertrude and Laertes are dead, and Hamlet dies within minutes. The crown goes to Fortinbras of Norway, the foreign prince whose father Old Hamlet defeated. The ghost's command is fulfilled and the royal house is gone. Shakespeare gives the revenge tragedy its expected bloodbath and shows that it settles nothing for the people who wanted it. ### 8. (Spoiler) Readiness replaces control After his escape from the ship, Hamlet stops planning. He tells Horatio there is providence in the fall of a sparrow: if death comes now, it will not come later, and the readiness is all. He walks into a duel he suspects is a trap. The change is from a man who must control every outcome to one who accepts that he cannot. Shakespeare offers this as a kind of peace, though it arrives only in time for Hamlet to die with it. ## Questions this book answers ### What is Hamlet about? Hamlet by William Shakespeare is about a Danish prince whose father's ghost tells him that his uncle Claudius murdered the king and married the queen. Hamlet pretends to be mad, tests the story with a play, and delays his revenge. His delay leads to the deaths of Polonius, Ophelia and others. The play is about thought and action, grief, appearance and reality, and death. ### Why does Hamlet delay killing Claudius? The play gives several reasons without choosing one. Hamlet doubts the ghost and wants proof, which he gets from the play The Mousetrap. He spares Claudius at prayer because he wants him damned. He is grieving and disgusted with his mother. Critics have added melancholy, an Oedipus complex and simple thinking too much. Shakespeare leaves the question open. ### Is Hamlet really mad? Hamlet announces that he will put on an antic disposition, a show of madness, and much of what he says to Polonius and the court is calculated insult. He stays rational with Horatio throughout. Some scenes, such as the closet scene with the ghost, let actors play him as truly unstable. Ophelia's madness, by contrast, is real. Most readers see Hamlet's as mostly feigned. ### How does Hamlet end? Spoiler: In a rigged fencing match, Laertes wounds Hamlet with a poisoned sword. Gertrude drinks the poisoned cup meant for Hamlet. Hamlet wounds Laertes with the same sword, then kills Claudius. Laertes, Gertrude, Claudius and Hamlet all die. Hamlet asks Horatio to tell his story and names Fortinbras of Norway as the next king. ### What does "to be or not to be" mean? In the soliloquy in Act 3, Scene 1, Hamlet asks whether it is better to live and suffer or to die and end the suffering. He compares death to sleep, then notes that no one knows what dreams may come after. That fear of the unknown, he says, keeps people alive and makes cowards of them all. The speech is about choice under uncertainty, not a plan for suicide. ## Quotes > To be, or not to be, that is the question. (Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1) > Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't. (Polonius, Act 2, Scene 2) > This above all: to thine own self be true. (Polonius to Laertes, Act 1, Scene 3) ## Full summary ### A revenge play that questions revenge **Hamlet** is Shakespeare's longest play, written around 1600. It survives in three early texts: a short, rough first quarto (1603), a long second quarto (1604) and the version in the First Folio (1623). Most editions combine the last two. The story comes from a Danish legend recorded by Saxo Grammaticus, and an earlier lost play on the same subject, now called the Ur-Hamlet, was on the London stage in the 1580s. Revenge tragedy was a popular form. A ghost demands vengeance, the hero plots, and a bloodbath ends the play. Shakespeare keeps the frame and fills it with a hero who thinks. Hamlet asks whether the ghost is honest, whether revenge is right, whether action means anything, and whether life is worth living. The play has more soliloquies than any other by Shakespeare, and they are where the real action happens. The setting is the royal castle at Elsinore in Denmark. Old King Hamlet is dead. His brother **Claudius** has taken the throne and married the widowed queen, **Gertrude**, less than two months after the funeral. Prince **Hamlet**, home from university at Wittenberg, mourns and resents both. Around the royal family are **Polonius**, the king's chief counselor, his daughter **Ophelia** and son **Laertes**, Hamlet's friend **Horatio**, and two school friends, **Rosencrantz and Guildenstern**. Beyond Denmark, young **Fortinbras** of Norway gathers an army to recover lands his father lost to Old Hamlet. Three themes run through all five acts. The first is the gap between thought and action. The second is the difference between appearance and reality: Claudius smiles and is a murderer, Hamlet acts mad and may be sane, and the court watches everyone. The third is death, from the ghost in the first scene to the graveyard in the last act. ### Act 1: the ghost's command On the castle walls at night, two guards and Horatio see a ghost in the armor of the dead king. Horatio decides to tell Hamlet. Inside, Claudius conducts business as a confident new king. He sends ambassadors to Norway, gives Laertes leave to return to France, and tells Hamlet to stop grieving. Alone, Hamlet wishes his flesh would melt and speaks of his mother's speed in remarrying: "frailty, thy name is woman." Horatio tells him about the ghost. Laertes warns Ophelia that Hamlet, as a prince, cannot marry whom he likes, and that she should not trust his love. Polonius gives Laertes a list of advice for his travels, then orders Ophelia to refuse Hamlet's letters and visits. She obeys. That night the ghost appears to Hamlet and draws him apart. It says it is his father's spirit, suffering in purgatory. Claudius poured poison in his ear while he slept in his orchard, then took his crown and his wife. The ghost demands revenge on Claudius but tells Hamlet to leave Gertrude to heaven and her own conscience. Hamlet swears to act. He makes Horatio and the guards swear secrecy and warns them that he may put on an "antic disposition," a show of madness. ### Act 2: the antic disposition Weeks pass. Polonius sends a servant to spy on Laertes in Paris. Ophelia reports that Hamlet came to her room with his clothes undone, stared at her face and left without a word. Polonius decides Hamlet is mad from rejected love and goes to tell the king. Claudius and Gertrude have summoned Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to find out what troubles Hamlet. The ambassadors return from Norway: Fortinbras has agreed to turn his army against Poland and asks only for safe passage through Denmark. Polonius reads Hamlet's love letter to Ophelia aloud and proposes a test. He will send his daughter to Hamlet while he and Claudius hide and watch. Hamlet enters reading, calls Polonius a fishmonger and mocks him with answers that are half nonsense and half insult. He sees through Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at once and makes them admit they were sent for. He tells them he has lost all his mirth and that man, the paragon of animals, no longer delights him. A company of traveling players arrives. Hamlet asks the lead actor for a speech about the fall of Troy and the grief of Queen Hecuba. The actor weeps real tears for a fictional queen. Alone, Hamlet rages at himself: an actor can weep for Hecuba, while he, with a father murdered, does nothing but talk. He also doubts the ghost, which could be a devil in a pleasing shape. He decides to have the players perform a play that mirrors the murder and to watch Claudius's face. ### Act 3: the play, the prayer and the closet Claudius and Polonius hide to watch Hamlet meet Ophelia. Before she enters, Hamlet speaks the soliloquy that begins "To be, or not to be." He weighs death as an escape from life's pain against the fear of what may follow it, and concludes that this fear makes cowards of everyone. With Ophelia he turns cruel. He denies he ever loved her, tells her to go to a nunnery, and attacks the deceit of women and the court. He may know he is watched. Claudius, listening, decides this is not love madness and resolves to send Hamlet to England. Hamlet coaches the actors on natural delivery and tells Horatio to watch the king. The play, which Hamlet calls **The Mousetrap**, shows a king poisoned in his garden by his nephew, who then woos the widow. Claudius stands, calls for light and leaves. Hamlet has his proof. Claudius, alone, tries to pray. He admits the murder but cannot repent, because he still holds the crown and the queen he killed for. Hamlet comes up behind him with his sword drawn and stops. If he kills Claudius at prayer, the man's soul goes to heaven. He wants him damned, and walks on. Claudius rises and admits his prayers never reached heaven. Hamlet goes to his mother's closet. Polonius hides behind a tapestry. Hamlet's anger frightens Gertrude, and she cries for help. Polonius cries out too, and Hamlet stabs through the cloth, thinking it is the king. He drags the body out, then turns on his mother with a comparison of her two husbands so fierce that the ghost reappears to calm him. Gertrude cannot see the ghost and takes this as proof of madness. Hamlet tells her to stay away from Claudius's bed and warns her that he knows he is being sent to England. ### Act 4: exile and return Claudius sends Hamlet to England at once with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and sealed letters ordering the English king to execute him. On the way to the ship, Hamlet sees Fortinbras's army marching to fight over a worthless strip of Polish land. He asks how twenty thousand men can die for an eggshell while he does nothing, and resolves that his thoughts will be bloody from now on. Ophelia goes mad. She wanders the court singing fragments of songs about death and lost maidenhood and hands out flowers with meanings: rosemary for remembrance, rue for repentance. Laertes returns from France with an armed mob, ready to kill the king for his father's death. Claudius calms him and turns his anger toward Hamlet. Letters arrive. Hamlet's ship was taken by pirates, and he is back in Denmark. Claudius and Laertes plan a fencing match. Laertes will use a sharp sword instead of a blunted one and tip it with poison. As a backup, Claudius will offer Hamlet a poisoned cup. Gertrude enters and reports that Ophelia has drowned. She fell from a willow into a brook while hanging garlands and sank, still singing. ### Spoilers: the ending This section reveals the ending. Two gravediggers joke about suicide and burial as they dig a grave. Hamlet and Horatio watch. The gravedigger tosses up the skull of **Yorick**, the king's jester who carried Hamlet on his back as a child. Hamlet holds it and reflects that Alexander and Caesar came to the same dust. The funeral is Ophelia's. Laertes leaps into the grave, and Hamlet, revealing himself, jumps in after him. They fight over who loved her more. Hamlet tells Horatio how he escaped. He opened the sealed letters, found the order for his death, and rewrote it so that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern would be executed in his place. He feels no guilt. He now sees Claudius's crimes as a clear case and says there is providence in the fall of a sparrow: the readiness is all. The fencing match begins before the court. Hamlet apologizes to Laertes and blames his madness. Hamlet scores the first two hits. Claudius drops a pearl, the poison, into the cup and offers it. Hamlet refuses for now. Gertrude drinks to his success. Laertes wounds Hamlet with the poisoned blade. In the scuffle they exchange swords, and Hamlet wounds Laertes with it. Gertrude collapses and cries that the drink has poisoned her. Laertes, dying, confesses the plot and names the king. Hamlet stabs Claudius and forces the poisoned cup down his throat. Laertes and Hamlet exchange forgiveness. Hamlet stops Horatio from drinking the poison and asks him to live and tell the story. He gives his dying voice for Fortinbras as the next king. His last words are "the rest is silence." Fortinbras enters with the English ambassadors, who announce that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. Fortinbras claims the throne and orders Hamlet carried off like a soldier. Eight people die: Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Gertrude, Laertes, Claudius and Hamlet. Denmark passes to a foreign prince. The revenge is complete, and it costs the whole royal house. ### What the critics say The central debate is why Hamlet delays. Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw a man whose thinking overwhelms his will. A. C. Bradley argued for melancholy. Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones read an Oedipus complex: Hamlet cannot kill the man who did what he unconsciously wanted to do. T. S. Eliot called the play an artistic failure because Hamlet's disgust exceeds anything the facts justify. Other critics answer that the delay is short in stage time and that the real subject is the gap between a revenge plot and a thinking hero. Readers still argue whether Hamlet is ever mad, whether Gertrude knew about the murder, and whether Ophelia's death is suicide. Feminist critics note how little voice Ophelia and Gertrude have for how much the men say about them. ### Who should read it Read it if you want to know the play behind the quotations, or if you are studying it and need the acts in order with the reasons behind each turn. It suits anyone interested in grief, doubt and the cost of waiting. ## Do this week - Read the seven soliloquies in order and write one line for each on what Hamlet decides, if anything. - Watch one filmed production, such as the 1996 Branagh or the 2009 Tennant version, and note where the actor plays the madness as real. - Read Act 3, Scene 3, the prayer scene, and write a paragraph arguing for and against Hamlet's choice not to strike. - Discuss with a friend whether Gertrude knew about the murder, using only lines from the closet scene as evidence. - Write down one decision you have delayed, list what more evidence you are waiting for, and set a date to act. Summary by The Gist Hub (https://thegisthub.com). In our own words, not the book's text.