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Hamlet cover

Literature

Literature

Hamlet

William Shakespeare

Shakespeare's tragedy of uncertainty, performance, grief, political legitimacy, and the struggle to turn thought into action.

Difficulty Level
Advanced
Academic Level
Undergraduate
ShakespearedramatragedyperformancelanguagePoliticsrevenge

01 / Reading Guide

Reading Guide

Citation

Shakespeare, W. (1998). Hamlet. Signet Classics. Free edition of the play text: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1524

Chapter Summary

Hamlet is a five-act tragedy set at the castle of Elsinore. The summaries below follow the acts and scenes, since the play has no chapters.

Act I: The Ghost and the Command

Scene i opens on the castle platform at midnight, where sentinels and Horatio see a ghost in the armour of the dead king, and Horatio explains that the nation is arming against young Fortinbras of Norway, who wants the lands his father lost to Hamlet's father. Scene ii shows Claudius addressing the court as the new king, having married Gertrude, and settling state business: an embassy to Norway, and leave for Laertes. He also urges Hamlet to stop mourning and stay at Elsinore rather than return to Wittenberg. Alone, Hamlet voices disgust at his mother's quick remarriage. Horatio then brings news of the ghost. In scene iii Laertes and Polonius warn Ophelia against Hamlet's attentions. In scenes iv and v the ghost leads Hamlet away, tells him that Claudius killed the king with poison poured in his ear, and commands revenge while sparing Gertrude. Hamlet swears his friends to secrecy and says he may put on an "antic disposition".

Act II: Watching and Testing

Polonius sends Reynaldo to spy on Laertes in Paris, and Ophelia reports Hamlet's disordered appearance. Claudius and Gertrude summon Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to find the cause of Hamlet's change, ambassadors report that Norway has restrained Fortinbras, and Polonius concludes from Hamlet's love letter that thwarted love explains his madness. Hamlet's exchanges with Polonius and with his two old friends show wit and evasion ("Denmark's a prison"). When a company of players arrives, Hamlet asks for a speech about Pyrrhus and Hecuba. His soliloquy afterwards condemns his own inaction and ends with a plan: have the players stage a murder like his father's "to catch the conscience of the King".

Act III: The Play and the Prayer

Scene i contains the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy and the confrontation in which Hamlet, watched by Claudius and Polonius, tells Ophelia to get to a nunnery. Scene ii begins with Hamlet's advice to the players on acting, then stages the play before the court; Claudius's reaction convinces Hamlet and Horatio of his guilt. In scene iii Claudius, alone, admits his crime and tries to pray; Hamlet finds him kneeling and decides not to kill him now, reasoning that it would send him to heaven. Scene iv is the closet scene, in which Hamlet confronts Gertrude, stabs Polonius, who is hiding behind the arras, and is visited again by the ghost.

Act IV: Exile and Madness

Claudius has Hamlet, who has hidden the body, sent to England under escort, and in scene iv Hamlet meets Fortinbras's army marching to fight over a worthless patch of Poland, which provokes a further soliloquy on his own delay. Ophelia, now mad, sings before the court, and Laertes returns from France demanding justice. A letter reaches Horatio describing Hamlet's capture by pirates and his return. Claudius persuades Laertes to avenge his father by means of a fencing match with an unbated, poisoned foil, and Gertrude reports Ophelia's drowning.

Act V: The Graveyard and the Duel

In the churchyard two gravediggers joke while preparing Ophelia's grave, and Hamlet holds Yorick's skull and reflects with Horatio on death. The burial procession interrupts, and Hamlet and Laertes grapple at the grave. In scene ii Hamlet tells Horatio how he opened the commission to England and rewrote it to doom Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and he accepts the wager with Laertes, saying "the readiness is all". During the match Gertrude drinks the poisoned cup, Laertes and Hamlet wound each other with the poisoned foil, and Laertes reveals the plot. Hamlet kills Claudius and dies, naming Fortinbras as his successor. Fortinbras arrives to take control, and Horatio promises to tell the story.

Key Concepts

Act I

  • Appearance and reality: Hamlet's "I know not seems" separates mourning that is performed from grief that is felt.
  • The ghost's command: revenge is presented as a duty received from the dead, yet the apparition's trustworthiness stays an open question.
  • The antic disposition: Hamlet announces that he may behave strangely on purpose, which makes his later conduct hard to read.

Acts II and III

  • Spying and surveillance: Polonius's scheme with Reynaldo, the eavesdropping on Hamlet and Ophelia, and the hidden listener in the closet scene make observation the court's main habit.
  • Theatre as test: the play staged before Claudius is meant to prove the ghost's story, and Hamlet's lecture to the players makes a case for acting that holds "the mirror up to nature".
  • Delay: Hamlet's self-reproaches and the decision not to strike Claudius at prayer raise the question of why vengeance is postponed.

Acts IV and V

  • Foils: Fortinbras and Laertes both act with a resolve Hamlet lacks, and the play uses them to measure him.
  • Mortality: the gravediggers and Yorick's skull turn the revenge plot toward death in general.
  • Providence and readiness: Hamlet's talk of "a divinity that shapes our ends" and a "special providence" marks a change from planning to acceptance.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

  • One play, many questions. The text allows readings centred on delay and psychology, on theatricality, on politics and succession, and on grief, without forcing a choice among them. The play's own devices (soliloquy, the play within the play, the advice to the players) invite a reader to ask how drama itself works.
  • A clear dramatic structure. The ghost's command in Act I, the staged test in Act III, the delayed consequences in Act IV and the final duel give a reader a firm plot to hold onto while the language and ideas grow more complex.
  • Built-in comparisons. Laertes, whose father is killed, and Fortinbras, whose father was killed by Hamlet's father, each pursue a father's cause with a directness Hamlet lacks, so the play itself invites a reader to compare their conduct with his.

Limitations

  • Difficult language. The play is in early modern verse and prose with many puns and obsolete words; a plain text without notes will leave first-time readers stuck. An annotated edition is the realistic choice for study.
  • Edition differences. Modern editions assemble the play from early printed texts that differ, so some passages and line numbers vary from one edition to another. Quote from the edition your course uses.
  • A text, not a performance. Reading cannot show staging, timing or the choices actors make at crucial moments such as Claudius's prayer or the closet scene. The play is best paired with recordings or performances.

Where It Fits in the Course

In the drama course Hamlet is the primary text, and the other books are tools for reading it. Studying Plays is an introduction that teaches how to analyse a play text as material for performance, through character, dialogue, plot, the actor's body and theatrical space, and it prepares a reader for the questions Hamlet raises. The Norton Anthology of Drama gathers complete plays from ancient Greece to the contemporary stage, so it suits placing Hamlet within a longer tradition of tragedy and theatre.

For background, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Studies approaches the discipline through performers, spectators and space, and moves on to theory and historiography. Theatre Histories: An Introduction covers theatre across world cultures, and Theories of the Theatre by Marvin Carlson traces Western thinking about drama from Aristotle onward. Hamlet's own advice to the players is a short piece of theatre theory, which makes Carlson a natural companion after a first reading.

How to Use This Book

The play suits undergraduates and general readers with no special preparation, though a course in drama or Shakespeare helps. The full text is roughly 30,000 words and can be read in a few sittings, but the language rewards a slower second pass.

A practical plan: read Act I straight through to learn the situation, then read the soliloquies aloud (Act I scene ii; Act II scene ii; Act III scene i; Act IV scene iv). Read Act III scene ii and Act III scene iii as a pair, since Hamlet's certainty about Claudius changes how the prayer scene reads. Treat Act V scene ii as the resolution of the plans made in Act IV. Keep a list of who is spying on whom, and note every moment where Hamlet acts, hesitates or says that he will.

Use an annotated edition for the notes, and read or watch at least one scene performed. The free Gutenberg text is convenient for searching a speech or checking a line, while an annotated edition is better for sustained reading.

Edition and Sources

This guide covers the play text published by Project Gutenberg (eBook #1524), the public-domain text of Hamlet available at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1524. The citation names the Signet Classics edition listed for this page; that edition's introduction and notes are not summarised here. The scenes and speeches that carry the plot in each act were read closely in that text.