Hamlet

Hamlet adopts a guise of melancholic and mad behaviour as a way of deceiving Claudius and others at court—a guise made all the easier by the fact that Hamlet is genuinely melancholic. Hamlet quickly sees through the scheme and begins to act the part of a madman in front of them. When the play is presented as planned, the performance clearly unnerves Claudius. This act of violence persuades Claudius that his own life is in danger.

He sends Hamlet to England escorted by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern , with secret orders that Hamlet be executed by the king of England.

ArtsEmerson: Hamlet

When Hamlet discovers the orders, he alters them to make his two friends the victims instead. Claudius is only too eager to arrange the duel. Hamlet dies of a wound inflicted by a sword that Claudius and Laertes have conspired to tip with poison; in the scuffle, Hamlet realizes what has happened and forces Laertes to exchange swords with him, so that Laertes too dies—as he admits, justly killed by his own treachery.

Gertrude, also present at the duel, drinks from the cup of poison that Claudius has had placed near Hamlet to ensure his death. Before Hamlet himself dies, he manages to stab Claudius and to entrust the clearing of his honour to his friend Horatio. We welcome suggested improvements to any of our articles. You can make it easier for us to review and, hopefully, publish your contribution by keeping a few points in mind. Your contribution may be further edited by our staff, and its publication is subject to our final approval.

Unfortunately, our editorial approach may not be able to accommodate all contributions. From me, whose love was of that dignity That it went hand in hand even with the vow I made to her in marriage, and to decline Upon a wretch whose natural gifts were poor To those of mine! But virtue, as it never will be moved, Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven, So lust, though to a radiant angel link'd, Will sate itself in a celestial bed, And prey on garbage.

Sleeping within my orchard, My custom always of the afternoon, Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole, With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial, And in the porches of my ears did pour The leperous distilment; whose effect Holds such an enmity with blood of man That swift as quicksilver it courses through The natural gates and alleys of the body, And with a sudden vigour doth posset And curd, like eager droppings into milk, The thin and wholesome blood: Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother's hand Of life, of crown, of queen, at once dispatch'd: Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd, No reckoning made, but sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head: If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not; Let not the royal bed of Denmark be A couch for luxury and damned incest.

But, howsoever thou pursuest this act, Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive Against thy mother aught: Fare thee well at once! The glow-worm shows the matin to be near, And 'gins to pale his uneffectual fire: Look you, sir, Inquire me first what Danskers are in Paris; And how, and who, what means, and where they keep, What company, at what expense; and finding By this encompassment and drift of question That they do know my son, come you more nearer Than your particular demands will touch it: Take you, as 'twere, some distant knowledge of him; As thus, 'I know his father and his friends, And in part him: But, if't be he I mean, he's very wild; Addicted so and so: You laying these slight sullies on my son, As 'twere a thing a little soil'd i' the working, Mark you, Your party in converse, him you would sound, Having ever seen in the prenominate crimes The youth you breathe of guilty, be assured He closes with you in this consequence; 'Good sir,' or so, or 'friend,' or 'gentleman,' According to the phrase or the addition Of man and country.

By the mass, I was about to say something: See you now; Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth: And thus do we of wisdom and of reach, With windlasses and with assays of bias, By indirections find directions out: So by my former lecture and advice, Shall you my son. You have me, have you not? Moreover that we much did long to see you, The need we have to use you did provoke Our hasty sending. Something have you heard Of Hamlet's transformation; so call it, Sith nor the exterior nor the inward man Resembles that it was.

What it should be, More than his father's death, that thus hath put him So much from the understanding of himself, I cannot dream of: I entreat you both, That, being of so young days brought up with him, And sith so neighbour'd to his youth and havior, That you vouchsafe your rest here in our court Some little time: If it will please you To show us so much gentry and good will As to expend your time with us awhile, For the supply and profit of our hope, Your visitation shall receive such thanks As fits a king's remembrance.

And I beseech you instantly to visit My too much changed son. Go, some of you, And bring these gentlemen where Hamlet is. A room in the castle. And he beseech'd me to entreat your majesties To hear and see the matter. Good gentlemen, give him a further edge, And drive his purpose on to these delights. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.

O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumbshows and noise: I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod: First Player I warrant your honour. Now this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of the which one must in your allowance o'erweigh a whole theatre of others.

O, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.

First Player I hope we have reformed that indifferently with us, sir. And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them; for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too; though, in the mean time, some necessary question of the play be then to be considered: Go, make you ready. Enter a King and a Queen very lovingly; the Queen embracing him, and he her. She kneels, and makes show of protestation unto him. He takes her up, and declines his head upon her neck: Anon comes in a fellow, takes off his crown, kisses it, and pours poison in the King's ears, and exit.

The Queen returns; finds the King dead, and makes passionate action. The Poisoner, with some two or three Mutes, comes in again, seeming to lament with her. The dead body is carried away. The Poisoner wooes the Queen with gifts: Therefore prepare you; I your commission will forthwith dispatch, And he to England shall along with you: The terms of our estate may not endure Hazard so dangerous as doth hourly grow Out of his lunacies. Polonius forces Ophelia to return Hamlet's love letters and tokens of affection to the prince while he and Claudius watch from afar to evaluate Hamlet's reaction.

Hamlet is walking alone in the hall as the King and Polonius await Ophelia's entrance, musing whether " to be or not to be ".

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When Ophelia enters and tries to return Hamlet's things, Hamlet accuses her of immodesty and cries "get thee to a nunnery", though it is unclear whether this, too, is a show of madness or genuine distress. His reaction convinces Claudius that Hamlet is not mad for love. Shortly thereafter, the court assembles to watch the play Hamlet has commissioned. After seeing the Player King murdered by his rival pouring poison in his ear, Claudius abruptly rises and runs from the room: Gertrude summons Hamlet to her room to demand an explanation.

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Meanwhile, Claudius talks to himself about the impossibility of repenting, since he still has possession of his ill-gotten goods: He sinks to his knees. Hamlet, on his way to visit his mother, sneaks up behind him, but does not kill him, reasoning that killing Claudius while he is praying will send him straight to heaven while his father's ghost is stuck in purgatory.

In the queen's bedchamber, Hamlet and Gertrude fight bitterly. Polonius, spying on the conversation from behind a tapestry , calls for help as Gertrude, believing Hamlet wants to kill her, calls out for help herself. Hamlet, believing it is Claudius, stabs wildly, killing Polonius, but pulls aside the curtain and sees his mistake.

In a rage, Hamlet brutally insults his mother for her apparent ignorance of Claudius's villainy, but the ghost enters and reprimands Hamlet for his inaction and harsh words. Unable to see or hear the ghost herself, Gertrude takes Hamlet's conversation with it as further evidence of madness. After begging the queen to stop sleeping with Claudius, Hamlet leaves, dragging Polonius's corpse away. Hamlet jokes with Claudius about where he has hidden Polonius's body, and the king, fearing for his life, sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to accompany Hamlet to England with a sealed letter to the English king requesting that Hamlet be executed immediately.

Demented by grief at Polonius's death, Ophelia wanders Elsinore. Laertes arrives back from France, enraged by his father's death and his sister's madness. Claudius convinces Laertes that Hamlet is solely responsible, but a letter soon arrives indicating that Hamlet has returned to Denmark, foiling Claudius' plan.

Claudius switches tactics, proposing a fencing match between Laertes and Hamlet to settle their differences. Laertes will be given a poison-tipped foil, and Claudius will offer Hamlet poisoned wine as a congratulation if that fails. Gertrude interrupts to report that Ophelia has drowned, though it is unclear whether it was suicide or an accident exacerbated by her madness. Horatio has received a letter from Hamlet, explaining that the prince escaped by negotiating with pirates who attempted to attack his England-bound ship, and the friends reunite offstage.

Two gravediggers discuss Ophelia's apparent suicide while digging her grave. Hamlet arrives with Horatio and banters with one of the gravediggers, who unearths the skull of a jester from Hamlet's childhood, Yorick. Hamlet picks up the skull, saying "alas, poor Yorick" as he contemplates mortality. Ophelia's funeral procession approaches, led by Laertes.

Hamlet and Horatio initially hide, but when Hamlet realizes that Ophelia is the one being buried, he reveals himself, proclaiming his love for her. Laertes and Hamlet fight by Ophelia's graveside, but the brawl is broken up. Back at Elsinore, Hamlet explains to Horatio that he had discovered Claudius's letter with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's belongings and replaced it with a forged copy indicating that his former friends should be killed instead. A foppish courtier, Osric , interrupts the conversation to deliver the fencing challenge to Hamlet. Hamlet, despite Horatio's pleas, accepts it.

Hamlet does well at first, leading the match by two hits to none, and Gertrude raises a toast to him using the poisoned glass of wine Claudius had set aside for Hamlet. Claudius tries to stop her, but is too late: Laertes slashes Hamlet with his poisoned blade. In the ensuing scuffle, they switch weapons and Hamlet wounds Laertes with his own poisoned sword.

Gertrude collapses and, claiming she has been poisoned, dies. In his dying moments, Laertes reconciles with Hamlet and reveals Claudius's plan. Hamlet rushes at Claudius and kills him. As the poison takes effect, Hamlet, hearing that Fortinbras is marching through the area, names the Norwegian prince as his successor. Horatio, distraught at the thought of being the last survivor and living whilst Hamlet does not, says he will commit suicide by drinking the dregs of Gertrude's poisoned wine, but Hamlet begs him to live on and tell his story. Hamlet dies in Horatio's arms, proclaiming "the rest is silence".

Fortinbras, who was ostensibly marching towards Poland with his army, arrives at the palace, along with an English ambassador bringing news of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's deaths. Horatio promises to recount the full story of what happened, and Fortinbras, seeing the entire Danish royal family dead, takes the crown for himself, and orders a military funeral to honour Hamlet. Hamlet -like legends are so widely found for example in Italy, Spain, Scandinavia, Byzantium, and Arabia that the core "hero-as-fool" theme is possibly Indo-European in origin.

The first is the anonymous Scandinavian Saga of Hrolf Kraki. In this, the murdered king has two sons— Hroar and Helgi —who spend most of the story in disguise, under false names, rather than feigning madness, in a sequence of events that differs from Shakespeare's. Its hero, Lucius "shining, light" , changes his name and persona to Brutus "dull, stupid" , playing the role of a fool to avoid the fate of his father and brothers, and eventually slaying his family's killer, King Tarquinius.

Similarities include the prince's feigned madness, his accidental killing of the king's counsellor in his mother's bedroom, and the eventual slaying of his uncle. Many of the earlier legendary elements are interwoven in the 13th-century "Life of Amleth" Latin: According to one theory, Shakespeare's main source is an earlier play—now lost—known today as the Ur-Hamlet. Possibly written by Thomas Kyd or even William Shakespeare, the Ur-Hamlet would have existed by , and would have incorporated a ghost.

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Consequently, there is no direct evidence that Kyd wrote it, nor any evidence that the play was not an early version of Hamlet by Shakespeare himself. This latter idea—placing Hamlet far earlier than the generally accepted date, with a much longer period of development—has attracted some support.

The upshot is that scholars cannot assert with any confidence how much material Shakespeare took from the Ur-Hamlet if it even existed , how much from Belleforest or Saxo, and how much from other contemporary sources such as Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. No clear evidence exists that Shakespeare made any direct references to Saxo's version. However, elements of Belleforest's version which are not in Saxo's story do appear in Shakespeare's play.

Whether Shakespeare took these from Belleforest directly or from the hypothetical Ur-Hamlet remains unclear. Most scholars reject the idea that Hamlet is in any way connected with Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet Shakespeare , who died in at age eleven. Conventional wisdom holds that Hamlet is too obviously connected to legend, and the name Hamnet was quite popular at the time. He notes that the name of Hamnet Sadler, the Stratford neighbour after whom Hamnet was named, was often written as Hamlet Sadler and that, in the loose orthography of the time, the names were virtually interchangeable.

Rowse speculated that Polonius's tedious verbosity might have resembled Burghley's. Chamberleyne his servantes ". In , Francis Meres published his Palladis Tamia , a survey of English literature from Chaucer to its present day, within which twelve of Shakespeare's plays are named. Hamlet is not among them, suggesting that it had not yet been written.

As Hamlet was very popular, Bernard Lott, the series editor of New Swan , believes it "unlikely that he [Meres] would have overlooked The phrase "little eyases" [42] in the First Folio F1 may allude to the Children of the Chapel , whose popularity in London forced the Globe company into provincial touring. A contemporary of Shakespeare's, Gabriel Harvey , wrote a marginal note in his copy of the edition of Chaucer's works, which some scholars use as dating evidence.

Harvey's note says that "the wiser sort" enjoy Hamlet , and implies that the Earl of Essex —executed in February for rebellion—was still alive. Other scholars consider this inconclusive. Edwards, for example, concludes that the "sense of time is so confused in Harvey's note that it is really of little use in trying to date Hamlet ".

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This is because the same note also refers to Spenser and Watson as if they were still alive "our flourishing metricians " , but also mentions " Owen's new epigrams", published in Three early editions of the text have survived, making attempts to establish a single "authentic" text problematic and inconclusive. Other folios and quartos were subsequently published—including John Smethwick 's Q3, Q4, and Q5 —37 —but these are regarded as derivatives of the first three editions.

Early editors of Shakespeare's works , beginning with Nicholas Rowe and Lewis Theobald , combined material from the two earliest sources of Hamlet available at the time, Q2 and F1. Each text contains material that the other lacks, with many minor differences in wording: Editors have combined them in an effort to create one "inclusive" text that reflects an imagined "ideal" of Shakespeare's original. Theobald's version became standard for a long time, [52] and his "full text" approach continues to influence editorial practice to the present day.

Some contemporary scholarship, however, discounts this approach, instead considering "an authentic Hamlet an unrealisable ideal. Colin Burrow has argued that "most of us should read a text that is made up by conflating all three versions I suspect most people just won't want to read a three-text play Traditionally, editors of Shakespeare's plays have divided them into five acts. None of the early texts of Hamlet , however, were arranged this way, and the play's division into acts and scenes derives from a quarto.

Modern editors generally follow this traditional division, but consider it unsatisfactory; for example, after Hamlet drags Polonius's body out of Gertrude's bedchamber, there is an act-break [59] after which the action appears to continue uninterrupted. The discovery in of Q1—whose existence had been quite unsuspected—caused considerable interest and excitement, raising many questions of editorial practice and interpretation. Scholars immediately identified apparent deficiencies in Q1, which was instrumental in the development of the concept of a Shakespearean " bad quarto ". The major deficiency of Q1 is in the language: New Cambridge editor Kathleen Irace has noted that "Q1's more linear plot design is certainly easier [ Q1 is considerably shorter than Q2 or F1 and may be a memorial reconstruction of the play as Shakespeare's company performed it, by an actor who played a minor role most likely Marcellus.

It is suggested by Irace that Q1 is an abridged version intended especially for travelling productions, thus the question of length may be considered as separate from issues of poor textual quality. Irace, in her introduction to Q1, wrote that "I have avoided as many other alterations as possible, because the differences From the early 17th century, the play was famous for its ghost and vivid dramatisation of melancholy and insanity , leading to a procession of mad courtiers and ladies in Jacobean and Caroline drama.

Before then, he was either mad, or not; either a hero, or not; with no in-betweens. Hamlet departed from contemporary dramatic convention in several ways. For example, in Shakespeare's day, plays were usually expected to follow the advice of Aristotle in his Poetics: In Hamlet , Shakespeare reverses this so that it is through the soliloquies , not the action, that the audience learns Hamlet's motives and thoughts. The play is full of seeming discontinuities and irregularities of action, except in the "bad" quarto.

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At one point, as in the Gravedigger scene, [a] Hamlet seems resolved to kill Claudius: Scholars still debate whether these twists are mistakes or intentional additions to add to the play's themes of confusion and duality. Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play. The Riverside edition constitutes 4, lines totaling 29, words, typically requiring over four hours to stage. Kenneth Branagh 's version , which runs slightly more than four hours. Much of Hamlet' s language is courtly: This work specifically advises royal retainers to amuse their masters with inventive language.

Osric and Polonius, especially, seem to respect this injunction. Claudius's speech is rich with rhetorical figures—as is Hamlet's and, at times, Ophelia's—while the language of Horatio, the guards, and the gravediggers is simpler. Claudius's high status is reinforced by using the royal first person plural "we" or "us" , and anaphora mixed with metaphor to resonate with Greek political speeches. Of all the characters, Hamlet has the greatest rhetorical skill. He uses highly developed metaphors, stichomythia , and in nine memorable words deploys both anaphora and asyndeton: An unusual rhetorical device, hendiadys , appears in several places in the play.

Examples are found in Ophelia's speech at the end of the nunnery scene: One explanation may be that Hamlet was written later in Shakespeare's life, when he was adept at matching rhetorical devices to characters and the plot. Wright suggests that hendiadys had been used deliberately to heighten the play's sense of duality and dislocation. She gives the example of Hamlet's advice to Ophelia, "get thee to a nunnery", which is simultaneously a reference to a place of chastity and a slang term for a brothel, reflecting Hamlet's confused feelings about female sexuality.

Hamlet's soliloquies have also captured the attention of scholars. Hamlet interrupts himself, vocalising either disgust or agreement with himself, and embellishing his own words. He has difficulty expressing himself directly and instead blunts the thrust of his thought with wordplay. It is not until late in the play, after his experience with the pirates, that Hamlet is able to articulate his feelings freely.

Written at a time of religious upheaval, and in the wake of the English Reformation , the play is alternately Catholic or piously medieval and Protestant or consciously modern. The ghost describes himself as being in purgatory , and as dying without last rites. This and Ophelia's burial ceremony, which is characteristically Catholic, make up most of the play's Catholic connections.

Some scholars have observed that revenge tragedies come from Catholic countries like Italy and Spain, where the revenge tragedies present contradictions of motives, since according to Catholic doctrine the duty to God and family precedes civil justice. Hamlet's conundrum, then, is whether to avenge his father and kill Claudius, or to leave the vengeance to God, as his religion requires. Much of the play's Protestant tones derive from its setting in Denmark—both then and now a predominantly Protestant country, [l] though it is unclear whether the fictional Denmark of the play is intended to portray this implicit fact.

Dialogue refers explicitly to Wittenberg , where Hamlet, Horatio, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern attend university, implying where Martin Luther in first proposed his 95 theses and thereby initiated the Protestant Reformation. Hamlet is often perceived as a philosophical character, expounding ideas that are now described as relativist , existentialist , and sceptical.

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For example, he expresses a subjectivistic idea when he says to Rosencrantz: Hamlet reflects the contemporary scepticism promoted by the French Renaissance humanist Michel de Montaigne. Hamlet's " What a piece of work is a man " seems to echo many of Montaigne's ideas, and many scholars have discussed whether Shakespeare drew directly from Montaigne or whether both men were simply reacting similarly to the spirit of the times. In the first half of the 20th century, when psychoanalysis was at the height of its influence, its concepts were applied to Hamlet , notably by Sigmund Freud , Ernest Jones , and Jacques Lacan , and these studies influenced theatrical productions.

In his The Interpretation of Dreams , Freud's analysis starts from the premise that "the play is built up on Hamlet's hesitations over fulfilling the task of revenge that is assigned to him; but its text offers no reasons or motives for these hesitations". A Study in Motive" [] Ernest Jones —a psychoanalyst and Freud's biographer—developed Freud's ideas into a series of essays that culminated in his book Hamlet and Oedipus Influenced by Jones's psychoanalytic approach, several productions have portrayed the "closet scene", where Hamlet confronts his mother in her private quarters, in a sexual light.

Ophelia's madness after her father's death may also be read through the Freudian lens: Ophelia is overwhelmed by having her unfulfilled love for him so abruptly terminated and drifts into the oblivion of insanity. In the s, Lacan's structuralist theories about Hamlet were first presented in a series of seminars given in Paris and later published in "Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet ".

Lacan postulated that the human psyche is determined by structures of language and that the linguistic structures of Hamlet shed light on human desire. In the Bloom's Shakespeare Through the Ages volume on Hamlet, editors Bloom and Foster express a conviction that the intentions of Shakespeare in portraying the character of Hamlet in the play exceeded the capacity of the Freudian Oedipus complex to completely encompass the extent of characteristics depicted in Hamlet throughout the tragedy: Eliot, who preferred Coriolanus to Hamlet , or so he said.

Who can believe Eliot, when he exposes his own Hamlet Complex by declaring the play to be an aesthetic failure? Joshua Rothman has written in The New Yorker that "we tell the story wrong when we say that Freud used the idea of the Oedipus complex to understand Hamlet ". Rothman suggests that "it was the other way around: Hamlet helped Freud understand, and perhaps even invent, psychoanalysis".

He concludes, "The Oedipus complex is a misnomer. It should be called the 'Hamlet complex'. Gontar turns the tables on the psychoanalysts by suggesting that Claudius is not a symbolic father figure but actually Prince Hamlet's biological father. The hesitation in killing Claudius results from an unwillingness on Hamlet's part to slay his real father.

If Hamlet is the biological son of Claudius, that explains many things. Hamlet does not become King of Denmark on the occasion of the King's death inasmuch as it is an open secret in court that he is Claudius's biological son, and as such he is merely a court bastard not in the line of succession. He is angry with his mother because of her long standing affair with a man Hamlet hates, and Hamlet must face the fact that he has been sired by the man he loathes.

That point overturns T. Eliot's complaint that the play is a failure for not furnishing an "objective correlative" to account for Hamlet's rage at his mother. Gontar suggests that if the reader assumes that Hamlet is not who he seems to be, the objective correlative becomes apparent. Hamlet is suicidal in the first soliloquy not because his mother quickly remarries but because of her adulterous affair with the despised Claudius which makes Hamlet his son.

Finally, the ghost's confirmation of an alternative fatherhood for Hamlet is a fabrication that gives the prince a motive for revenge. In the 20th century, feminist critics opened up new approaches to Gertrude and Ophelia. New Historicist and cultural materialist critics examined the play in its historical context, attempting to piece together its original cultural environment.

In this analysis, the essence of Hamlet is the central character's changed perception of his mother as a whore because of her failure to remain faithful to Old Hamlet. In consequence, Hamlet loses his faith in all women, treating Ophelia as if she too were a whore and dishonest with Hamlet. Ophelia, by some critics, can be seen as honest and fair; however, it is virtually impossible to link these two traits, since 'fairness' is an outward trait, while 'honesty' is an inward trait.