Hamlet is a revenge tragedy about a prince who cannot act until he is certain, and the play’s great irony is that certainty never comes: when Hamlet finally takes his revenge, it is in a moment he did not plan, at the cost of his own life.
Written around 1600, it is the longest of Shakespeare’s plays and probably the most discussed work in English literature. This guide covers the plot act by act, the main characters, the themes, and the most famous lines, and ends with a reading of the play’s central question: why Hamlet waits. For the other plays, see our guide to all of Shakespeare’s plays.
At a Glance
Here are the key facts about Hamlet for quick reference.
Hamlet in Brief
The whole story in a few sentences, before the act-by-act detail.
The king of Denmark has died suddenly, and his brother, Claudius, has taken the throne and married the widowed queen, Gertrude, within a month. Her son, Prince Hamlet, is sunk in grief and disgust. Then a ghost in the shape of his father appears and tells him that Claudius murdered him, and demands revenge.
Hamlet pretends to be mad while he tests the Ghost’s story. He stages a play that mirrors the murder, and Claudius’s reaction confirms his guilt. But Hamlet then kills the wrong man, the king’s adviser Polonius, and is sent to England to be executed. He escapes and returns, but by then Polonius’s daughter, Ophelia, has gone mad and drowned, and her brother, Laertes, wants revenge of his own. Claudius and Laertes arrange a rigged fencing match. In the final scene, the queen, Laertes, Claudius, and Hamlet all die, and a foreign prince, Fortinbras, takes the crown.
Hamlet Plot Summary, Act by Act
What happens in each of the play’s five acts.
Act 1: The Ghost
On the battlements of Elsinore at night, guards and Hamlet’s friend Horatio see a ghost in the armor of the dead King Hamlet. In the court, the new king, Claudius, celebrates his marriage to Gertrude and refuses Hamlet permission to return to his university at Wittenberg. Alone, Hamlet pours out his disgust at his mother’s hasty remarriage. Polonius, the king’s chief adviser, orders his daughter, Ophelia, to stop seeing Hamlet.
That night, the Ghost speaks to Hamlet: Claudius poisoned him as he slept in his garden. Hamlet swears to remember and to take revenge, and warns his friends that he may choose to act strangely.
Act 2: Pretended Madness
Hamlet begins to behave as if he were mad. Ophelia reports a frightening visit from him, and Polonius concludes that he is mad with love for her. Claudius and Gertrude summon two of Hamlet’s school friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to spy on him, and he quickly sees through them.
A company of traveling actors arrives. Moved and shamed by an actor’s tears over an imaginary grief, Hamlet decides to have the players perform a play, The Murder of Gonzago, with a scene like his father’s murder, to test whether the Ghost told the truth.
Act 3: The Play and the Wrong Man
Claudius and Polonius spy on a meeting between Hamlet and Ophelia, arranged by Polonius. Before it, Hamlet delivers the “To be or not to be” soliloquy; during it, he turns savagely on Ophelia and tells her to go to a nunnery.
At the performance, when the player king is poisoned in his garden, Claudius stops the play and rushes out. Hamlet is now sure. He finds Claudius alone, kneeling in prayer, but spares him, afraid that killing him at prayer would send his soul to heaven. In his mother’s room, Hamlet hears someone hiding behind a tapestry, stabs through it, and kills Polonius. The Ghost appears again to remind him of his purpose.
Act 4: Madness and Plots
Claudius sends Hamlet to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, carrying secret orders for his execution. On the way, Hamlet sees Fortinbras of Norway leading an army to fight over a scrap of land, and resolves again on bloody action. Ophelia, grief-stricken at her father’s death, goes mad.
Laertes returns from France demanding vengeance for Polonius. A letter reveals that Hamlet has escaped on a pirate ship and is back in Denmark. Claudius and Laertes plot his death in a fencing match, with a poisoned blade and a poisoned cup of wine as a backup. Gertrude brings news that Ophelia has drowned.
Act 5: The Graveyard and the Duel
In a graveyard, Hamlet talks with a gravedigger and holds up the skull of Yorick, the court jester he knew as a child. Ophelia’s funeral arrives, and Hamlet and Laertes grapple in her grave.
Hamlet tells Horatio how he rewrote the orders he was carrying, sending Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths instead. He accepts the fencing match. During it, Gertrude drinks the poisoned wine; Laertes wounds Hamlet with the poisoned blade; in the scuffle they exchange weapons, and Hamlet wounds Laertes. Dying, Laertes confesses the plot. Hamlet kills Claudius and asks Horatio to live and tell his story. He dies, and Fortinbras arrives to claim the throne.
Characters
The main figures in the play, and what drives each of them.
Hamlet
The prince of Denmark, a university student called home by his father’s death. He is brilliant, bitter, funny, and self-accusing, and he speaks some of the most famous lines in English. Charged with revenge, he thinks more than he acts, and much of the play turns on why.
Claudius
Hamlet’s uncle, who murdered his brother to take his crown and his wife. He is a capable, smooth-spoken king, and not a simple villain: alone, he admits his guilt and tries and fails to pray.
Gertrude
Hamlet’s mother, who married Claudius within weeks of her husband’s death. The play never says whether she knew about the murder, and she dies drinking the poison meant for her son.
The Ghost
The spirit of Hamlet’s father, who reveals the murder and demands revenge. Hamlet is never fully sure whether it is truly his father or a devil sent to tempt him.
Polonius
The king’s chief adviser, a long-winded meddler who spies on everyone, including his own children. He is killed while hiding behind a tapestry to eavesdrop on Hamlet.
Ophelia
Polonius’s daughter, who loves Hamlet and is ordered by her father to reject him. Used as bait, rejected, and then bereaved by Hamlet’s own hand, she goes mad and drowns.
Laertes
Polonius’s son and Ophelia’s brother. When his father is killed, he returns ready to take revenge at once, making him Hamlet’s opposite, and he joins Claudius’s plot to kill Hamlet.
Horatio
Hamlet’s loyal friend from university, the one person he fully trusts. He survives the ending to tell Hamlet’s story.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Two of Hamlet’s school friends, recruited by Claudius to spy on him. They escort him toward his execution in England and die in his place.
Fortinbras
The prince of Norway, whose father was killed by Hamlet’s father. A man of quick action, he is another mirror for Hamlet, and he inherits the Danish throne at the end.
Themes
The ideas that run through Hamlet and give it its lasting power.
Revenge and Delay
The play follows the pattern of a revenge tragedy, a popular kind of play in Shakespeare’s day, but its hero keeps failing to take revenge. Shakespeare surrounds him with sons who act quickly: Laertes, who storms the palace to avenge Polonius, and Fortinbras, who marches to war over a patch of ground. Against them, Hamlet’s hesitation becomes the play’s great question.
Madness, Real and Pretended
Hamlet decides to act as if he were mad, and the performance is so convincing that readers still argue over whether it stays a performance. Ophelia’s madness, by contrast, is real, and it destroys her. The play keeps asking where the line between the two lies. As Polonius puts it, puzzled by Hamlet’s answers: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in ’t.”
Death and What Comes After
Few plays think as hard about death. Hamlet considers suicide in “To be or not to be,” and holds back only for fear of “the undiscovered country” beyond it. He spares Claudius because of what he believes about the afterlife. In the graveyard, he contemplates the skulls of the dead and imagines the greatest men turned to dust.
Corruption Beneath the Surface
Denmark looks orderly, but a murder lies at its center. The play’s language returns again and again to rot and disease: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” says a guard, and Claudius, alone, confesses, “O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven.” To Hamlet, “Denmark’s a prison,” a court full of spies where no one says what he means.
Key Quotations
The most famous lines in Hamlet, who speaks them, and what they mean.
“To Be or Not to Be, That Is the Question”
Hamlet, Act 3, scene 1. The opening of the most famous speech in English. Hamlet weighs whether it is better to live and endure life’s troubles or to die and end them, and concludes that fear of what comes after death “makes us rather bear those ills we have / Than fly to others that we know not of.” Our guide to Shakespeare’s soliloquies looks at how speeches like this work.
“Something Is Rotten in the State of Denmark”
Marcellus, a guard, Act 1, scene 4, as Hamlet follows the Ghost. It is not Hamlet’s line, though it is often credited to him. It sums up the sense that something is badly wrong at the heart of the kingdom.
“Though This Be Madness, Yet There Is Method in ’t”
Polonius, aside, Act 2, scene 2, after Hamlet mocks him with apparently wild answers. The source of the phrase “method in the madness,” it points to the sense that runs beneath Hamlet’s act.
“What a Piece of Work Is a Man”
Hamlet, Act 2, scene 2, to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He praises humanity as “the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals,” then turns: “and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?” The speech captures his depression in a single swing from wonder to disgust.
“The Play’s the Thing Wherein I’ll Catch the Conscience of the King”
Hamlet, the end of Act 2, scene 2. Having worried that the Ghost may be a devil, he decides to use the actors to test Claudius’s guilt.
“There’s a Divinity That Shapes Our Ends”
Hamlet, Act 5, scene 2, to Horatio: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will.” Whatever plans people make, a higher power finishes them. It marks a change in Hamlet, who has stopped trying to control events.
“The Readiness Is All”
Hamlet, Act 5, scene 2, just before the fencing match, when Horatio offers to call it off. Death will come when it comes; what matters is to be ready. They are among the calmest words he speaks.
“The Rest Is Silence”
Hamlet’s last words, Act 5, scene 2. The character with more lines than any other in Shakespeare ends by falling silent, leaving Horatio to tell his story.
Language and Form
How Shakespeare builds the play, and the techniques that make it work.
Soliloquies
Hamlet’s soliloquies are the most famous in Shakespeare, and they are where the play really happens. They let us hear him argue with himself, accuse himself, and change his mind, so that his inner life becomes the real drama.
Verse and Prose
Most of the play is in blank verse, but Hamlet often drops into prose when he is playing mad or mocking Polonius and the spies. The switch lets him move between the formal speech of the court and the sharp, loose talk of his performance. Our guide to Shakespeare’s use of prose explains the pattern.
A Play Within the Play
Hamlet uses a performance, The Murder of Gonzago, to expose a real crime. The device turns the audience into spectators of spectators, watching Hamlet watch Claudius watch a play, and it makes Hamlet one of Shakespeare’s most self-aware works about acting and truth.
Images of Disease
The murder was committed with poison poured in the king’s ear, and the language of the play keeps returning to infection, rot, and sickness. The corruption at the top of Denmark is imagined as a disease spreading through the whole body of the state.
A Closer Reading: Why Hamlet Waits
Hamlet does not delay because he is weak or cowardly; he delays because he wants certainty, and the play shows that certainty is exactly what a revenger can never have.
His first doubt is about the Ghost. At the end of Act 2, he admits that “The spirit that I have seen / May be a devil,” come to trick him into damnation, and he resolves, “I’ll have grounds / More relative than this.” The play within the play is his experiment, and it works: Claudius breaks off the performance, and Hamlet has his proof.
But proof of guilt turns out not to be enough. Minutes later, Hamlet finds Claudius kneeling alone and draws his sword: “Now might I do it pat, now he is a-praying.” Then he stops. If Claudius dies while praying, he may go to heaven, and “this is hire and salary, not revenge.” Hamlet now wants certainty about Claudius’s soul as well as his crime. The irony is that he is wrong. As soon as Hamlet leaves, Claudius rises and admits, “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.” The prayer never reached heaven.
The one time Hamlet acts without certainty, in his mother’s room, he stabs blindly through a tapestry and kills the wrong man. Knowledge has kept him from acting, and action without knowledge has led to disaster.
By Act 5, Hamlet has given up the demand to be sure. Describing how he saved his own life on the voyage, he praises the rash impulse that made him do it, “And praised be rashness for it,” and concludes, “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will.” Before the duel he tells Horatio, “The readiness is all.” He no longer plans his revenge. And when it finally comes, it comes inside Claudius’s own plot, with Claudius’s own poison, in a moment no one arranged. The play’s answer to its central question is not that Hamlet learns to act, but that he learns to stop waiting for the certainty that would let him.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about Hamlet, answered briefly.
What Is Hamlet About?
A Danish prince who learns from his father’s ghost that his uncle murdered his father to become king. Hamlet sets out to take revenge, but hesitates, and his delay leads to the deaths of almost everyone around him.
Why Does Hamlet Delay His Revenge?
Mainly because he wants to be certain. He doubts whether the Ghost is honest, then wants to be sure Claudius will be damned, and only acts when he stops insisting on certainty. Readers have also blamed grief, depression, and conscience.
Is Hamlet Really Mad?
He says he will pretend to be, and much of his madness is clearly an act. But his grief and rage are real, and some of his behavior, especially toward Ophelia, has led readers to wonder whether the act sometimes becomes the truth.
Who Dies in Hamlet?
Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Gertrude, Laertes, Claudius, and Hamlet. Hamlet’s father has been murdered before the play begins.
Is Hamlet Named After Shakespeare’s Son?
Not directly: the name comes from the old Danish story. But Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, died in 1596, a few years before the play was written, and Hamnet and Hamlet were then the same name.
Related Reading
Three pages that take Hamlet further.