Shakespeare, Hamlet

A prince is told to kill his uncle. He thinks about it for five acts. Whether that makes him wise, cowardly, or something else entirely depends on which critic you ask.

About the work

Hamlet was probably written around 1599-1601 and first performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men, Shakespeare's company, at the Globe Theatre in London. It exists in three early texts -- the First Quarto (1603, a shorter, sometimes garbled version probably reconstructed from memory by actors), the Second Quarto (1604-05, the longest version), and the Folio text (1623, which cuts some passages found in Q2 and adds others). Most modern editions conflate Q2 and F1, though some editors argue for treating each text as a distinct version of the play.

The plot is drawn from the story of Amleth, recorded by the medieval Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum (c. 1200), and more immediately from a lost play sometimes called the Ur-Hamlet that was performed in London in the late 1580s or early 1590s, possibly by Thomas Kyd. Shakespeare inherited a revenge tragedy framework and transformed it into something that has never been comfortably categorized.

The play's cultural footprint is immense. "To be or not to be" is perhaps the most quoted line in English literature. The character of Hamlet has been played by virtually every major English-speaking actor, and the role's demands -- intelligence, emotional range, physical stamina (the part is one of the longest in Shakespeare) -- have made it a benchmark. The play has generated more criticism than any other work in English, and the critical tradition itself has become a subject of study.

Things to notice

The delay. The central critical question about Hamlet for nearly three hundred years has been: why doesn't he just kill Claudius? He has the motive, the opportunity, and (after the play-within-a-play confirms the Ghost's story) the proof. Instead, he delays, philosophizes, pretends to be mad, and kills four other people before he gets around to his uncle. The delay is not an incidental feature of the plot -- it is the plot. The entire play exists in the space between Hamlet's decision to act and his acting. Notice that Shakespeare does not provide a clear explanation. Hamlet himself offers several: he wants to catch Claudius in a guilty moment (not while praying, in Act 3 Scene 3), he needs to verify the Ghost's honesty, he is thinking too much. None of these fully accounts for the length and depth of the hesitation. The play gives you evidence for multiple readings but no definitive answer.

Madness -- real or performed. Hamlet announces early on that he will "put an antic disposition on" -- he will pretend to be mad. But as the play progresses, the boundary between performance and reality blurs. His treatment of Ophelia is cruel. His mood swings are extreme. His contemplation of suicide in the "To be or not to be" soliloquy, and his fixation on death in the graveyard scene, suggest something deeper than a strategic pose. Polonius thinks it's love-madness. Claudius suspects it's dangerous. Gertrude doesn't know what to think. Notice that other characters in the play also question whether Hamlet's madness is genuine, and the play never gives a definitive verdict.

The play-within-a-play. In Act 3, Hamlet stages "The Mousetrap" -- a play that reenacts his father's murder -- to observe Claudius's reaction. This is a formal device (a play within a play) that is also a thematic statement: the entire play is concerned with acting, performance, false surfaces, and hidden truths. Claudius is an actor playing a king. Hamlet is an actor playing a madman. The Ghost might be an actor playing Hamlet's father (Hamlet worries that it could be a demonic deception). In a play where nobody is quite what they seem, the play-within-a-play is both a trap for Claudius and a mirror for the audience.

The soliloquies. Hamlet has more soliloquies than any other Shakespearean protagonist -- seven, depending on how you count. ("To be or not to be" is the most famous, but "O that this too too solid flesh would melt," "O what a rogue and peasant slave am I," and "How all occasions do inform against me" are equally important.) Notice what the soliloquies do: they give us access to Hamlet's interior life, but they also raise questions about his reliability as a narrator of his own experience. He is articulate, self-aware, and frequently wrong about his own motives. The soliloquies are not transparent windows into a character's soul; they are performances, even when Hamlet is alone.

Ophelia's treatment and Ophelia's madness. Hamlet's treatment of Ophelia is harsh by any standard. He tells her to "get thee to a nunnery" (a word that in Shakespeare's English could mean a convent or a brothel). He denies having loved her. He is verbally abusive during the play scene. After her father's death (at Hamlet's hands), Ophelia goes genuinely mad, and her madness is presented with a pathos and seriousness that contrasts sharply with Hamlet's performed antic disposition. She drowns in ambiguous circumstances -- the text leaves open whether it was accident or suicide. Notice that Ophelia's madness is treated as a consequence of the actions of the men around her, and that she has far less ability to use madness as a strategy than Hamlet does. Feminist critics have made Ophelia's treatment a central concern of the play.

The graveyard scene (Act 5, Scene 1). The scene with the gravediggers is often played for comedy, but it is one of the play's most philosophically dense passages. Hamlet holds the skull of Yorick, a court jester he knew as a child, and reflects on the universality of death: Alexander the Great's dust might end up stopping a bunghole. This scene confronts Hamlet (and the audience) with the physical reality of death in a way the earlier soliloquies, which are more abstract, do not. It also marks a shift in Hamlet's character -- after the graveyard scene, he seems to move toward a kind of acceptance, a readiness for whatever comes.

The ending. The final scene is a bloodbath: Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes, and Hamlet all die, poisoned by various means. Fortinbras, the Norwegian prince who has been hovering at the edge of the play for four acts, arrives and takes over. Hamlet's dying wish is that Horatio tell his story. Notice the political implication: Denmark's internal crisis has left it vulnerable to foreign takeover. The personal and the political are inseparable. Notice also that Hamlet's death is not the neat resolution of a revenge plot -- it is a mess, involving a poisoned sword, a poisoned cup, and multiple accidental exposures. The revenge, when it finally comes, is not clean.

Questions to ask

Why does Hamlet delay? Is it a character flaw, a philosophical temperament, a strategic decision, or something the play deliberately refuses to explain?
Is Hamlet's madness real or performed? Does the distinction matter? What would it mean for the madness to be "real" in a fictional character?
What is the Ghost? Is it Hamlet's father's spirit, a demon tempting Hamlet toward murder, or a psychological projection? The play gives evidence for all three readings.
How responsible is Hamlet for the deaths of Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern? Are these collateral damage, or are they evidence that Hamlet's moral position is compromised?
What does the play say about the ethics of revenge? Is revenge a duty, a sin, or something the play treats as inevitably destructive regardless of justification?
Why does Hamlet treat Ophelia the way he does? Is he protecting her, punishing her, using her, or is he too consumed by his own crisis to consider her?
What is the political dimension of the play? Claudius is a usurper but apparently an effective ruler. Hamlet is the rightful heir but unstable. Who should rule Denmark?
Horatio survives to tell the story. Is he a reliable narrator? What does it mean that the story we have is the story Hamlet wanted told?

What critics have argued

Romantic criticism -- Hamlet as a character. The dominant tradition from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth century read Hamlet as a portrait of a sensibility too refined for action. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his lectures on Shakespeare (1811-12), described Hamlet as a man "whose ruling passion is to think rather than to act" and argued that the delay reflects an excess of reflection. August Wilhelm Schlegel made a similar argument, seeing Hamlet as a mind overwhelmed by the disproportion between thought and deed. William Hazlitt, in Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817), wrote that Hamlet "is not a character marked by strength of will or even of passion, but by refinement of thought and sentiment." The Romantic tradition treats Hamlet as essentially like us -- a modern consciousness trapped in a medieval revenge plot.

Freudian and psychoanalytic criticism. Freud himself cited Hamlet in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), arguing that Hamlet hesitates to kill Claudius because Claudius has acted out Hamlet's own repressed Oedipal desires -- killing his father and sleeping with his mother. To kill Claudius would be to punish himself. Ernest Jones developed this reading in Hamlet and Oedipus (1949). Psychoanalytic critics have also focused on Hamlet's relationship with Gertrude, his disgust with female sexuality, and his fixation on his father. Jacques Lacan, in his seminar on Hamlet (1958-59), analyzed the play in terms of desire, the signifier, and the relationship between the subject and the object of desire. Feminist critics have challenged the psychoanalytic tradition for treating Gertrude and Ophelia primarily as objects of Hamlet's psychic drama rather than as subjects in their own right.

Formalist and New Critical approaches. In the mid-twentieth century, critics associated with New Criticism and formalism turned away from character-based and psychological readings toward close analysis of the play's language, imagery, and structure. Cleanth Brooks, in "The Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness" (1947), analyzed the play's imagery patterns. Maynard Mack, in "The World of Hamlet" (1952), argued that the play creates a distinctive "world" defined by ambiguity, uncertainty, and the interpenetration of appearance and reality. These readings focus on the text as a verbal artifact rather than as a psychological case study.

Feminist criticism. Feminist critics have fundamentally reshaped Hamlet studies by focusing on the women in the play. Elaine Showalter, in "Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism" (1985), traced the history of Ophelia's representation in criticism and performance, showing how each era has made Ophelia reflect its own anxieties about women and madness. Carolyn Heilbrun, in Hamlet's Mother and Other Women (1990), argued that Gertrude has been underestimated by a critical tradition that too readily accepts Hamlet's view of her. These readings do not simply "add women" to existing interpretations; they challenge the assumption that Hamlet is the play's only significant consciousness.

Postcolonial and political readings. More recent criticism has examined the play's political dimensions: the succession crisis, the threat from Norway, the role of surveillance and espionage (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are spies; Polonius spies on Hamlet; Claudius monitors Hamlet's movements). Stephen Greenblatt, in Hamlet in Purgatory (2001), examined the play in the context of post-Reformation debates about the afterlife: Protestants had abolished Purgatory, which meant that the Ghost -- if it comes from Purgatory -- is a Catholic ghost in a Protestant world, and its status is inherently uncertain.

Performance criticism. The play's performance history is itself a critical tradition. Richard Burbage originated the role. David Garrick, in the eighteenth century, cut the play heavily and emphasized Hamlet's nobility. Edmund Kean, in the early nineteenth century, played Hamlet as passionate and impulsive. John Gielgud (1930s-40s) emphasized the character's poetic sensitivity. Laurence Olivier's 1948 film presented a Freudian Hamlet, with heavy emphasis on the Gertrude relationship. More recent productions have explored Hamlet in diverse settings -- some political (dictatorships, surveillance states), some personal, some abstract.

About the work

Things to notice

Questions to ask

What critics have argued

Further reading