The great themes of Hamlet, revenge, madness, death, corruption, and performance, all grow from a single question the play keeps asking: how can anyone know what is true in a world where everyone is acting?
This guide explains the seven major themes of the play, with the lines that express each one, and then shows how they connect. For the plot and famous quotations, see our full guide to Hamlet; for the people, see the characters of Hamlet.
At a Glance
Here are the major themes of Hamlet for quick reference.
Revenge
Hamlet is built on the pattern of the revenge tragedy, a kind of play popular in Shakespeare’s day in which a wronged hero pursues bloody vengeance. The Ghost gives Hamlet his task in the first act, and in a conventional revenge play the rest would be a matter of how he carries it out. Instead, Shakespeare makes revenge itself the problem.
The play surrounds Hamlet with other avengers. Laertes, whose father Hamlet kills, wants revenge at once and at any price, and ends up cheating with a poisoned sword. Fortinbras wants to recover the lands his father lost to Denmark, until his uncle stops him. Even the speech Hamlet asks a player to recite is about revenge: Pyrrhus, sword raised over King Priam, freezes and “Did nothing,” before “Arousèd vengeance sets him new a-work.”
What the play shows is that revenge rarely goes as planned. When Hamlet finally has Claudius alone and defenseless, he spares him, because killing him at prayer would be “hire and salary, not revenge.” When he does kill, he kills the wrong man. And the revenge he finally takes comes by accident, in the middle of someone else’s plot. Horatio’s summary at the end, of “purposes mistook / Fall’n on th’ inventors’ heads,” could stand as the play’s verdict on revenge itself.
Thought and Action
Hamlet is a university student, and he thinks about everything, including his own failure to act. After hearing an actor weep over an imaginary grief, he rages at himself: “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” He cannot understand why he, with real cause, “can say nothing,” and he asks, “Am I a coward?”
In “To be or not to be,” he gives his own diagnosis. Thinking about consequences, he says, is what stops us: “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, / And thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, / And enterprises of great pitch and moment / With this regard their currents turn awry / And lose the name of action.” Resolution has a healthy natural color; thought turns it pale and sick.
But the play does not simply praise action over thought. Laertes acts without thinking and becomes Claudius’s tool. Hamlet’s one impulsive act, stabbing through a tapestry, kills Polonius. By the last act, Hamlet has found a middle way: he praises the rash impulse that saved his life at sea, “Our indiscretion sometime serves us well / When our deep plots do pall,” and concludes that “The readiness is all.”
Madness
After meeting the Ghost, Hamlet warns his friends that he may act strangely, and for much of the play he behaves as if he were mad. Some of it is plainly performance: he tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, “I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.” Even Polonius, listening to Hamlet’s wild answers, notices “Though this be madness, yet there is method in ’t.”
Yet the line between acting mad and being mad keeps blurring. Hamlet’s grief and fury are real, and his cruelty to Ophelia seems to go beyond any plan. At the end, apologizing to Laertes, he blames his madness for killing Polonius: “Was ’t Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet,” he says; “His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy.” Is that the truth, or one last performance?
Against Hamlet’s uncertain madness stands Ophelia’s, which is unmistakably real. After her father’s death she wanders through the court singing fragments of songs, and she soon drowns. Hamlet chooses his madness; hers is done to her. Even the court treats madness as something to be managed: “Madness in great ones must not unwatched go,” Claudius decides, and sends Hamlet away.
Death
The play begins with a dead king walking and ends with a stage full of bodies, and in between, Hamlet thinks about death more deeply than almost any character in literature. In “To be or not to be,” he imagines death as a sleep that might end all suffering, until he remembers that the sleep may bring dreams. What holds us back is “the dread of something after death, / The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveler returns.”
Beliefs about the afterlife shape the plot. The Ghost has returned from somewhere, and Hamlet cannot be sure where. He spares Claudius at prayer for fear of sending his soul to heaven. And Ophelia’s death raises the question of whether she may receive a Christian burial.
In the graveyard, death stops being an idea and becomes a skull in Hamlet’s hands. “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio,” he says of the jester who carried him as a child, and then imagines a fine lady looking at it: “let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come.” Beauty, wit, and power all end in the same place. By the final scene, Hamlet has made his peace with this: “If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.”
Corruption
A murder lies at the center of Denmark, and the play imagines its effects as a disease spreading through the whole state. The most famous line on the subject belongs to a guard: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” To Hamlet, the whole country has become a jail: “Denmark’s a prison.”
The images of rot and sickness keep coming. The old king was killed with poison, and poison ends the play. Claudius, alone, describes his own crime as a stench: “O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven.” He also sees how corruption works in the world, where “Offense’s gilded hand may shove by justice,” though he knows that “’tis not so above,” in heaven, where no one can bribe the judge.
Even Denmark’s customs are sick. On the night he first sees the Ghost, Hamlet complains of the king’s heavy drinking, a custom he says is “More honored in the breach than the observance,” better broken than kept. Only at the end, with the whole royal family dead and a foreign prince taking the crown, does the infection finally burn out.
Appearance and Reality
Almost no one in Elsinore is what they seem. Claudius plays the grieving brother and loving stepfather. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern pretend to be visiting friends. Polonius presents himself as a wise counselor and spends the play hiding behind curtains. Hamlet himself pretends to be mad.
The court runs on spying. Claudius and Polonius hide to watch Hamlet meet Ophelia; Polonius sends a servant to spy on his own son in Paris; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern report back to the king; Polonius dies eavesdropping. As they arrange one of these traps, Polonius admits that with “devotion’s visage / And pious action we do sugar o’er / The devil himself,” and Claudius, in an aside, feels the sting: his deed is as ugly beneath his “most painted word” as a harlot’s face beneath her makeup.
Hamlet turns the same charge on Ophelia, and on all women: “God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.” The play asks whether, in a world like this, any face can be trusted, and whether Hamlet himself, who plays so many parts, knows which one is real.
Acting and Theater
Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s most theatrical plays, and it is fascinated by theater itself. When a company of actors arrives at Elsinore, Hamlet greets them with delight and calls them “the abstract and brief chronicles of the time.” He is struck that an actor can weep for a character he has never known: “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, / That he should weep for her?”
Then Hamlet realizes that acting can do more than imitate. “I have heard / That guilty creatures sitting at a play / Have, by the very cunning of the scene, / Been struck so to the soul that presently / They have proclaimed their malefactions.” So he has the players perform a murder like his father’s: “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” It works. When the player king is poisoned in his garden, Claudius stops the play and rushes out.
In a court where everyone is performing, it takes a performance to reveal the truth. Shakespeare, himself an actor and playwright, is making a claim about his own art: a play can show people what they are.
A Closer Reading: One Question Behind Every Theme
Each of these themes can be read on its own, but together they return to one question: how can anyone know the truth when everything can be faked?
Revenge depends on it: Hamlet cannot act until he knows whether the Ghost is honest, or a devil that “hath power / T’ assume a pleasing shape.” Madness depends on it: no one, perhaps not even Hamlet, can be sure which of his words are an act. The court’s corruption is hidden behind “painted” words and pious faces, and death is the greatest unknown of all, a country from which no traveler returns to report. Hamlet puts the problem in a single line to Rosencrantz: “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
The play’s answers are strange ones. The truth about Claudius comes out through a piece of fiction, a play. And Hamlet finds peace not by finally knowing everything, but by accepting that he cannot: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will.” The last word goes, fittingly, to storytelling. Dying, Hamlet begs Horatio to live on “To tell my story,” because the truth of what happened in Elsinore is still unknown to the world, and only an honest account can make it known.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about the themes of Hamlet, answered briefly.
What Is the Main Theme of Hamlet?
Revenge is the theme that drives the plot, but most readers see the deeper theme as the difficulty of knowing the truth and acting on it, in a world where appearances deceive and certainty is never available.
What Does Hamlet Say About Revenge?
That it is far harder, and more destructive, than the old revenge stories made it seem. Every avenger in the play either fails, dies by his own plot, or gives revenge up, and Hamlet’s own revenge comes only by accident, at the cost of his life.
What Does “Something Is Rotten in the State of Denmark” Mean?
That something is deeply wrong at the heart of the kingdom. The guard Marcellus says it when the Ghost appears, sensing an evil he cannot name. The audience soon learns it is the murder of the old king by his brother.
Why Is There So Much Spying in Hamlet?
Because the court is built on a secret, and everyone is trying either to hide one or to uncover one. The spying makes the play’s theme of appearance and reality concrete: people are always watching, and always being watched.
What Is the Play Within the Play About?
It shows a king poisoned in his garden by a relative, closely matching how Claudius killed Hamlet’s father. Hamlet stages it to watch Claudius’s reaction, and when Claudius stops the performance, Hamlet takes it as proof of his guilt.
Related Reading
Three pages that take the themes of Hamlet further.