Hamlet
William Shakespeare
Hamlet
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The prince of Denmark comes home to find his father dead, his uncle on the throne and married to his mother, and a ghost on the battlements with an account of how it happened. Certain of nothing and required to act, Hamlet delays, tests, feigns madness and talks — and the delay kills nearly everyone at the court, including several who had no part in it.
About the book
Written about 1600 and Shakespeare’s longest play, Hamlet begins with soldiers on a freezing battlement who have seen the dead king walking. The prince, home from university to find his father buried, his uncle crowned and his mother remarried inside a month, meets the ghost and is told it was murder. He believes it, and then does not know whether to, and spends the play testing — with a feigned madness, with a company of travelling players, with a speech to his mother that ends in a killing behind a curtain. The delay is the play’s subject and the reason it has never been settled: every generation has produced a different Hamlet, and the text supports most of them. Around him the collateral damage accumulates — Ophelia, Polonius, Laertes, two school friends sent to England with sealed orders — and the last scene clears the stage.
Characters
Hamlet — Prince of Denmark
Required by a ghost to avenge a murder, and unable to act until the choice is taken out of his hands.
Claudius — King
Hamlet’s uncle, who took the crown and the queen, and who prays without being able to repent.
Gertrude — Queen
Hamlet’s mother, remarried within a month, and never clearly shown to know what her husband did.
Ophelia — Polonius’s daughter
Used by her father and the king as bait, discarded by Hamlet, and driven mad between them.
Polonius — Lord Chamberlain
A sententious old counsellor who spies on his own children and dies behind an arras.
Horatio — Friend
The one person Hamlet trusts, and the one left alive to tell the story properly.
Laertes — Polonius’s son
Who returns from Paris to find his father dead and his sister mad, and needs no time to decide.
The Ghost — The dead king
Hamlet’s father in armour, demanding revenge and giving an account nobody else can confirm.
About the author
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor, born in Stratford-upon-Avon to a glovemaker and educated no further than the grammar school there. In London he became a sharer — a part-owner — in the Lord Chamberlain's Men and in the Globe theatre, which is what made him money; the plays were the company's stock rather than literature, and he took no part in printing them. Two fellow actors collected thirty-six of them in the First Folio of 1623, seven years after his death, and eighteen plays exist only because they did. He also wrote 154 sonnets.