Shakespeare · Tragedies

Hamlet

c. 1599–1601

Tragedy — from Saxo Grammaticus's Amleth via Belleforest

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is Shakespeare's longest play and the most performed and quoted work in English. At Elsinore, the ghost of the dead king tells his son that he was murdered by his brother Claudius, who has taken both the crown and the queen. Hamlet feigns madness, stages a play to catch the king's conscience, kills Polonius by mistake, drives Ophelia to madness and drowning, and dies in a rigged fencing match that also kills Claudius, Gertrude and Laertes, leaving Fortinbras of Norway to take the throne.

How to spot them

▸Elsinore, the Danish court; a ghost walking the battlements at midnight
▸A prince who feigns madness, an 'antic disposition', to test what the ghost told him
▸The play within the play, staged to catch the conscience of a king
▸A graveyard, a jester's skull, and a duel with a poisoned foil
▸Shakespeare's longest play — roughly 4,000 lines, with the largest role in the canon

Scenes, characters & lines

'To be, or not to be, that is the question'

The soliloquy on suicide and inaction, Act 3 Scene 1

The ghost on the battlements, who cries 'Swear!' from beneath the stage

A role Shakespeare himself is said to have played

'Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest'

The graveyard scene, with the skull of the old king's jester, twenty-three years in the ground

The Mousetrap — a play within the play, staged to catch the conscience of a king

The prince has the players perform The Murder of Gonzago with lines he has written himself

Polonius stabbed through an arras: 'How now! a rat? Dead, for a ducat, dead!'

The closet scene in the queen's chamber

A girl drowns gathering flowers, and her brother leaps into her grave

Ophelia's death, reported by Gertrude, and the fight with Laertes

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are sent to England carrying their own death warrant

Rewritten aboard ship; Tom Stoppard made a whole play out of their offstage fate

'The rest is silence'

The prince's last words, before Horatio's 'flights of angels sing thee to thy rest'

Key ideas

The play turns revenge tragedy inward: the question is not how to kill the usurper but why the avenger cannot act
Three substantially different early texts survive, so every modern edition is a construction rather than a single authorial original

Quick-fire facts

•It is Shakespeare's longest play, at roughly 4,000 lines; the title role alone runs to about 1,500 of them
•Three early texts survive: the short 'bad quarto' Q1 (1603), the much fuller Q2 (1604–05), and the First Folio (1623). Q1 famously renders the soliloquy as 'To be, or not to be, ay, there's the point'
•The source is the Amleth story in Saxo Grammaticus's Gesta Danorum, retold by François de Belleforest; a lost earlier play, the 'Ur-Hamlet', was on the London stage by 1589
•Phrases it gave English include 'hoist with his own petard', 'the primrose path', 'there's the rub', 'the mind's eye' and 'to thine own self be true'
•Laurence Olivier's 1948 film was the first non-American picture to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, and won him Best Actor
•Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film used the full conflated text and runs just over four hours
•Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) retells the play from the two courtiers' point of view
•Fortinbras of Norway, who never meets the prince, speaks the last lines and inherits the kingdom
•'Get thee to a nunnery' and 'Frailty, thy name is woman' both come from this play

Drill it — 10 cards

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Sources

Folger Shakespeare Library — Hamlet
Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (eds.) — Hamlet (The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series)
Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells — The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare