Act 5 of Hamlet brings the tragedy to its end: Hamlet returns calmer and ready for whatever comes, holds the skull of a jester he loved, fights Laertes in Ophelia’s grave, and dies in a fencing match rigged by Claudius, taking the king with him.
This summary takes Act 5 scene by scene. It has only two scenes, but each is long, so the second is divided into parts. Each covers what happens, the key lines, and why it matters. For the whole story, see our full guide to Hamlet. For what came before, see our Act 4 summary, and for everyone who appears here, see our guide to the Hamlet characters.
At a Glance
Here is Act 5 of Hamlet in brief.
Act 5, Scene 1: The Graveyard
The act opens with two gravediggers, played as clowns, digging a grave and arguing.
“Is she to be buried in Christian burial that wilfully seeks her own salvation?” one asks. The grave is for Ophelia, and the question is whether she took her own life. The coroner has allowed her a Christian burial, and the gravedigger twists legal logic around it. If a man goes to the water and drowns himself, he drowns himself; but if the water comes to him, “he drowns not himself.” The truth, the other says, is that if she had not been a gentlewoman, she would not have been buried in holy ground.
Hamlet and Horatio arrive and watch the gravedigger sing as he works and toss up skulls. Hamlet wonders whose they were, great men and ordinary ones, all reduced to the same bone. He talks with the gravedigger, who does not recognize him. The gravedigger says he began the job on the day old King Hamlet defeated Fortinbras, “the very day that young Hamlet was born,” the one “that is mad, and sent into England.” He has been at it “thirty years,” which is how readers work out that Hamlet is thirty. Why was Hamlet sent to England? Because he was mad, and there it will not matter, since the men there are as mad as he.
The gravedigger holds up a skull that has lain in the earth twenty-three years: it belonged to Yorick, the king’s jester. Hamlet takes it. “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.” Yorick carried him on his back a thousand times. Now Hamlet asks the skull where its jokes and songs have gone. Even Alexander the Great, he reasons, turned to dust, and his dust might now plug a beer barrel: “Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, / Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.”
A funeral procession arrives with the king, the queen, and Laertes. The rites are cut short, and Laertes demands more. The priest answers that her death “was doubtful,” and that without the king’s command she would have been buried in unsanctified ground. Laertes turns on him: “Lay her i’ the earth: / And from her fair and unpolluted flesh / May violets spring! I tell thee, churlish priest, / A ministering angel shall my sister be, / When thou liest howling.” Hamlet realizes for the first time whose grave it is. Gertrude scatters flowers: “Sweets to the sweet: farewell!” She had hoped Ophelia would be Hamlet’s wife.
Laertes curses the man who drove his sister mad and leaps into the grave to hold her once more. Hamlet comes forward: “This is I, / Hamlet the Dane.” He leaps in too, and they grapple until they are pulled apart. Hamlet will not be outdone in grief: “I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers / Could not, with all their quantity of love, / Make up my sum.” “O, he is mad, Laertes,” says Claudius, and Hamlet leaves.
Act 5, Scene 2: The Final Scene
Hamlet’s Story
In the castle, Hamlet tells Horatio what happened at sea.
Unable to sleep, he acted on impulse, and he now believes such rashness can serve us well when careful plans fail: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will.” In the dark, he found the sealed commission Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were carrying and read it: an order for his own death. He wrote a new one, ordering the English king to put the bearers to death instead, and sealed it. Then came the pirates. Horatio is shocked that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are going to their deaths. Hamlet is not: “They are not near my conscience.” They chose to serve the king’s scheme.
Now, he says, it is surely right to kill the man who killed his father, seduced his mother, and tried to take his life. The time is short, before news arrives from England, but “the interim is mine.” He also regrets his fight with Laertes: in Laertes’s cause, he sees the image of his own.
The Challenge
A fussy young courtier, Osric, arrives with a message. The king has placed a large wager on Hamlet in a fencing match against Laertes.
Hamlet mocks Osric’s flowery speech, but agrees to fight. Horatio warns that he will lose the wager. Hamlet thinks not, since he has been practicing, and yet he admits he feels an unease around his heart. Horatio urges him to call it off. Hamlet refuses: “we defy augury: there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. 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.”
The Duel and the Deaths
The court assembles. Before the match, Hamlet asks Laertes’s pardon in front of everyone, saying that whatever he did to wrong him was done in madness. Laertes says he accepts it. The foils are chosen, and Laertes takes the unblunted, poisoned one.
Hamlet scores the first hits. Claudius drops a pearl into a cup of wine, calling it a “union,” and offers it to Hamlet, who will not drink yet. The poison is in the cup. Gertrude picks it up to drink to her son. “Gertrude, do not drink,” Claudius says. “I will, my lord; I pray you, pardon me,” she answers, and drinks. Laertes, preparing to strike, admits in an aside that it is “almost ’gainst my conscience.”
Laertes wounds Hamlet with the poisoned tip. They scuffle, the swords are exchanged, and Hamlet wounds Laertes with the same blade. The queen collapses: “the drink, the drink! I am poison’d.” She dies. Laertes, dying, confesses everything: “I am justly kill’d with mine own treachery.” Hamlet has less than half an hour to live, the sword is poisoned, and so was the cup. “The king, the king’s to blame.”
At last, Hamlet acts without a moment’s pause. “The point envenom’d too! / Then, venom, to thy work.” He stabs Claudius, then forces the poisoned wine down his throat: “Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damned Dane, / Drink off this potion.” Claudius dies. Laertes asks Hamlet to “Exchange forgiveness” with him: neither will be to blame for the other’s death, or for Polonius’s. Hamlet forgives him, and Laertes dies.
Horatio reaches for the cup to die with his friend, calling himself “more an antique Roman than a Dane.” Hamlet wrestles it away. If Horatio ever loved him, he must stay alive: “Absent thee from felicity awhile, / And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, / To tell my story.” Guns are heard. Young Fortinbras is returning in triumph from Poland. Hamlet gives Fortinbras his “dying voice” for the throne of Denmark. His last words: “the rest is silence.” Horatio says goodbye: “Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince: / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”
Fortinbras enters with ambassadors from England, who bring the news that “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.” Horatio promises to tell everyone how all this came about. Fortinbras claims the kingdom and orders a soldier’s funeral: “Let four captains / Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage; / For he was likely, had he been put on, / To have proved most royal.” The play ends with his command for the soldiers to shoot.
A Closer Reading: “To Tell My Story”
The play began with a dead father asking to be remembered. It ends with a dying son asking the same thing.
In Act 1, the ghost’s last words to Hamlet were “remember me,” and Hamlet vowed to wipe his memory clean of everything else. The Denmark around him had already forgotten its king within a month. Act 5 opens in the place where forgetting is complete. The gravedigger tosses up skulls without knowing whose they are. Hamlet wonders whose they were, and no one can say. Alexander the Great may be plugging a barrel. Only one skull has a name, Yorick’s, and it has a name only because someone happened to remember him. The graveyard is a lesson in what happens to everyone, and to every story, once no one is left to tell it.
That is why Hamlet’s last act of will is not killing Claudius but saving Horatio. When Horatio reaches for the poisoned cup, Hamlet fights him for it, with his last strength, because a story needs a teller. If Horatio dies too, Hamlet’s wounded name will live behind him, and the court will remember only a mad prince who killed an old man behind a curtain. So he asks Horatio to stay in “this harsh world” a little longer, “To tell my story.”
The ghost asked for memory and got revenge. Hamlet, having finally got revenge, asks only for memory. The play that follows his request, Horatio’s account of “how these things came about,” is in a sense the play the audience has just watched. Our guide to the themes in Hamlet follows memory, death, and revenge through the whole play, and our Act 1 summary reads the ghost’s “remember me.”
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about Act 5 of Hamlet, answered briefly.
What Happens in Act 5 of Hamlet?
Hamlet returns to Denmark, talks with a gravedigger, and holds the skull of the jester Yorick. At Ophelia’s funeral he fights Laertes in her grave. Claudius arranges a fencing match with a poisoned sword and a poisoned cup. Gertrude drinks the poison, Laertes and Hamlet are both wounded by the poisoned blade, and Hamlet kills Claudius before dying. Fortinbras arrives and takes the throne.
How Does Hamlet End?
Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, and Laertes all die in the final scene. Hamlet names Fortinbras as the next king and asks Horatio to live and tell his story. Fortinbras orders that Hamlet be carried off with a soldier’s honors.
Who Was Yorick?
The old king’s jester, who carried Hamlet on his back when Hamlet was a child. His skull, dug up by the gravedigger, prompts Hamlet’s meditation on death: “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio.” The line is often misquoted as “I knew him well.”
How Old Is Hamlet?
The gravedigger says he started work the day Hamlet was born and has been at it thirty years, which suggests Hamlet is thirty. Many readers find that surprisingly old for a university student, and the question is often debated.
What Are Hamlet’s Last Words?
“The rest is silence.” Just before, he gives his support to Fortinbras as the next king and asks Horatio to tell his story.
Related Reading
Three pages that take Hamlet further.