Hamlet

Overview

Hamlet was written around 1600 and exists in three early versions that do not match. The first quarto of 1603 is short, fast and probably reconstructed from memory by actors; it contains a version of the most famous soliloquy that begins with a line nobody quotes. The second quarto of 1604 is the longest text. The folio of 1623 cuts some four hundred lines and adds others. Every modern edition is an editor’s blend, and the play you read is a decision somebody made. Uncut, it runs about four hours, which is longer than any company has usually performed it.

Shakespeare did not invent the story. A Danish prince who feigns madness to avenge his father appears in Saxo Grammaticus and in a French retelling by Belleforest, and there was an earlier English revenge play about Hamlet on the London stage in the 1580s that is now lost. Revenge tragedy was a known genre with known furniture: a ghost, a delay, a play within a play, a pile of bodies. What Shakespeare did was slow the machinery down and let the avenger think.

The result is a play whose plot could be summarised in a paragraph and whose interest is almost entirely elsewhere: in seven soliloquies, in a comic scene with two gravediggers, in the courtesies Hamlet extends to actors and denies to his mother. Read it as a revenge tragedy that keeps getting interrupted by a man.

What happens

Act 1. Sentries on the battlements have seen a ghost. Horatio brings Hamlet, who has been in mourning while the court celebrated his uncle’s wedding to his mother. The ghost tells him it is his father, murdered by Claudius with poison poured in his ear, and orders him to avenge the murder but leave Gertrude to heaven. Hamlet swears his friends to secrecy and warns them he may start behaving strangely.

Act 2. Polonius, the lord chamberlain, decides Hamlet’s disorder is lovesickness for his daughter Ophelia and proposes to test it by setting her in his way while the king listens. Claudius also imports Hamlet’s school friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as informers. A company of travelling players arrives. Hamlet, watching an actor weep over the death of Hecuba, is disgusted by his own inaction and asks them to perform a play about a murdered duke, into which he will insert some lines.

Act 3. The nunnery scene: Hamlet, knowing he is watched, savages Ophelia. The play is performed; Claudius rises and leaves; Hamlet takes this as proof. He finds Claudius kneeling in prayer and does not kill him, arguing that a man killed at his devotions would go to heaven. He goes instead to his mother’s room, hears someone behind the arras, stabs through it and finds Polonius. The ghost reappears to remind him of the point.

Act 4. Hamlet is sent to England with sealed orders for his execution. Ophelia loses her mind and sings; her brother Laertes returns from France in arms, and Claudius redirects his fury at Hamlet. News comes that Hamlet has escaped after pirates attacked his ship. Ophelia drowns.

Act 5. In a graveyard two workmen argue about whether she is entitled to Christian burial and toss up skulls, one of which was the court jester’s. Hamlet, calm for the first time, grapples with Laertes in her grave. Claudius arranges a fencing match with an unblunted and poisoned blade and a poisoned cup in reserve. Gertrude drinks it. Laertes and Hamlet wound each other with the same sword. Laertes names the plot; Hamlet kills Claudius at last, both by blade and by cup, and dies asking Horatio to tell the story. Fortinbras of Norway marches in and takes the kingdom.

How to read it

See it or hear it before or alongside reading it. Even a mediocre production teaches you things about the pacing that print hides, and the Branagh, Tennant and Almereyda films are all easy to find and all read the prince differently.

On a first pass, resist the question of why Hamlet delays. It has been the central critical question for two centuries and it presupposes that the play is a psychological case study. Try the other question first: what would acting well look like here? He has a ghost’s word, no witnesses, no court that would believe him, and a target who is the anointed king.

Read the soliloquies as arguments, with their premises visible. Notice that the most famous one is impersonal, and that the most revealing ones are the two where he abuses himself for talking instead of doing.

Watch the minor characters. Polonius is a fool who is often right. Horatio is the only person Hamlet never lies to. Ophelia’s mad scene distributes flowers with meanings, and the text expects you to know some of them; use the notes. Gertrude has few lines and every reading of the play depends on what you decide she knew.

Any well-annotated edition works. The Folger is cheapest and clearest for a first reading; the Arden third series is where to go when you want to know why your line reads as it does.

Questions it raises

• Is the ghost telling the truth, and how would anyone in the play establish that it is?
• Hamlet spares Claudius at prayer on a theological argument. Does he believe it, or is it an excuse?
• Is the antic disposition entirely feigned by the end of act 4?
• What does Gertrude know, and when does the play let you decide?
• Laertes and Fortinbras both avenge fathers without hesitating. Does the play admire them?
• Hamlet’s last act is to arrange who tells his story. Why should that matter more to him than the throne?