Act 1 of Hamlet sets the whole tragedy in motion: a ghost walks the battlements of Elsinore, a grieving prince watches his mother marry his uncle, and the ghost reveals that the new king is his murderer.
This summary takes Act 1 scene by scene, from the frozen watch on the battlements to Hamlet’s vow of revenge. Each scene covers what happens, the key lines, and why it matters for the rest of the play. For the whole story, see our full guide to Hamlet, and for everyone who appears here, see our guide to the Hamlet characters.
At a Glance
Here is Act 1 of Hamlet in brief.
Act 1, Scene 1: The Ghost on the Battlements
The play opens at midnight on the battlements of Elsinore, the royal castle of Denmark, with a nervous challenge: “Who’s there?”
One guard relieves another, who leaves with a line that sets the mood for everything that follows: “For this relief much thanks: ’tis bitter cold, / And I am sick at heart.” The guards have seen something on two nights running, and they have brought Horatio, a scholar and friend of Prince Hamlet, to see it for himself. Horatio does not believe them. Then the ghost appears, dressed in armor and looking exactly like the dead King Hamlet. Horatio orders it to speak, but it stalks away in silence.
Shaken, Horatio takes it as a warning: “This bodes some strange eruption to our state.” Denmark is preparing for war, he explains, because young Fortinbras of Norway is raising an army to win back lands his father lost to King Hamlet in single combat. The ghost returns and seems about to speak, but it vanishes as a cock crows at dawn. The men decide to tell young Hamlet what they have seen. If the ghost will speak to anyone, it will be his son.
Act 1, Scene 2: The New King’s Court
Inside the castle, the new king, Claudius, holds his first court, and the atmosphere could not be more different from the cold battlements.
Claudius is the dead king’s brother. His opening speech is smooth and carefully balanced. Though the memory of his brother’s death is still “green,” he says, wisdom requires them to think of him “Together with remembrance of ourselves.” And so he has married “our sometime sister, now our queen,” Gertrude, his brother’s widow, “With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage.” He deals briskly with business: he sends ambassadors to Norway to stop Fortinbras, and gives Laertes, son of his chief adviser Polonius, permission to return to France.
Then he turns to Hamlet, still dressed in black: “But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son.” Hamlet’s first words are a bitter aside, “A little more than kin, and less than kind.” Claudius is now doubly related to him, as uncle and stepfather, and feels no kindness toward him at all. Gertrude asks why his grief “seems” so particular. “Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not ‘seems,’” he replies. His black clothes and tears are only outward shows; he has “that within which passeth show.” Claudius lectures him that such long mourning is “unmanly grief” and asks him not to return to university at Wittenberg. At his mother’s request, Hamlet agrees to stay.
Left alone, Hamlet speaks the first of his great soliloquies: “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt.” The world seems “weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,” an “unweeded garden.” His father has been dead less than two months, and his mother, who once hung on her husband, married his uncle “within a month.” “Frailty, thy name is woman!” he cries, but he must stay silent: “break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue.” Our guide to Hamlet’s soliloquies reads the speech in full.
Horatio and the guards arrive. When Horatio says he came for the funeral, Hamlet answers that he came for the wedding, which followed so quickly that “the funeral baked meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.” Then Horatio tells him about the ghost. Hamlet resolves to watch that night and speak to it: “foul deeds will rise, / Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes.”
Act 1, Scene 3: Polonius’s Family
At the home of Polonius, Laertes says goodbye to his sister, Ophelia, before leaving for France.
Laertes warns her not to take Hamlet’s attentions seriously. His love is “A violet in the youth of primy nature,” sweet but short-lived, and as a prince he cannot choose his own wife. Ophelia promises to take the advice, but tells him to follow it himself, not to preach “the steep and thorny way to heaven” while treading “the primrose path of dalliance.”
Polonius arrives and gives his son a string of advice for life abroad: “Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice”; “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”; and, above all, “to thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.” After Laertes leaves, Polonius questions Ophelia about Hamlet. She says Hamlet has made her many tenders of his affection. Polonius mocks her for believing them and orders her to stop speaking to him, and she promises to obey.
Act 1, Scene 4: Hamlet Meets the Ghost
That night, Hamlet waits on the battlements with Horatio and Marcellus. “The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold.”
Trumpets sound and cannons fire from inside the castle. The king, Hamlet explains, is up late drinking, and he calls the custom “More honour’d in the breach than the observance.” Then the ghost appears. Hamlet speaks to it directly, calling it by his father’s name, and it beckons him to follow. Horatio begs him not to go, warning that it might lure him to the cliff edge and drive him mad. Hamlet does not care: “I do not set my life at a pin’s fee.” When his friends hold him back, he draws his sword, “Unhand me, gentlemen. / By heaven, I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me!”, and follows the ghost into the dark.
Marcellus speaks the scene’s most famous line: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” “Heaven will direct it,” Horatio replies. “Nay, let’s follow him,” says Marcellus.
Act 1, Scene 5: The Ghost’s Story
Alone with Hamlet, the ghost finally speaks: “I am thy father’s spirit.”
He is condemned to walk at night and suffer in fire by day until the sins of his life are burned away. He could tell a tale of that prison that would freeze Hamlet’s blood, but he is forbidden. Instead he gives a command: “Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.” The official story, he says, is that a serpent stung him as he slept in his orchard. The truth is different: “The serpent that did sting thy father’s life / Now wears his crown.” “O my prophetic soul! / My uncle!” Hamlet cries.
The ghost tells the whole story. Claudius seduced his “most seeming-virtuous queen,” then crept up while the king slept in the orchard and poured poison into his ear. He died without a chance to confess his sins, and so suffers now. He asks Hamlet not to let Denmark’s royal bed become a place of incest, but not to harm his mother: “leave her to heaven.” As dawn approaches he fades, with a last command: “remember me.”
“Remember thee!” Hamlet repeats. He vows to wipe everything else “from the table of my memory,” so that the ghost’s command alone will live in his brain. Then he takes out his writing tablets and notes down a lesson: “one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.”
Horatio and Marcellus find him. Hamlet will not tell them what the ghost said, and makes them swear on his sword never to reveal what they have seen, while the ghost’s voice echoes from under the ground, “Swear.” When Horatio calls it strange, Hamlet answers: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” He warns them that he may choose “To put an antic disposition on,” acting strangely or madly, and that they must never hint that they know why. As they leave, he feels the weight of what he has been asked to do: “The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!”
A Closer Reading: “Remember Me”
The ghost asks for revenge, but his last words are not “revenge me.” They are “remember me,” and in Act 1 remembering is exactly what everyone except Hamlet has stopped doing.
Listen to how Claudius opens his court. The memory of his brother’s death is still “green,” he admits, but wisdom has taught them to think of the dead king “Together with remembrance of ourselves.” It is a polished way of saying: time to move on. The whole court has moved on with him. The widow has remarried within a month. The food cooked for the funeral was served cold at the wedding. Even Gertrude asks her son to stop seeking his “noble father in the dust.”
Hamlet is the only one who has not moved on, and it hurts him. In his first soliloquy he cries out against his own memory: “Heaven and earth! / Must I remember?” He wishes he could forget how his mother once clung to his father. Yet he keeps seeing his father “In my mind’s eye,” and tells Horatio, “I shall not look upon his like again.”
So when the ghost says “remember me,” he is asking Hamlet to do the one thing the rest of Denmark refused to do. Hamlet promises more than that. He will wipe his memory clean of everything else, every book and every lesson, so that only this command remains. It is a promise to become nothing but a memory of his father. The rest of the play tests what that promise costs. A man who has cleared his mind of everything but one command still has to find a way to act on it, and remembering, as Hamlet will discover, is much easier than revenge. Our guide to the themes in Hamlet follows memory, grief, and revenge through the whole play.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about Act 1 of Hamlet, answered briefly.
What Happens in Act 1 of Hamlet?
Guards at Elsinore see the ghost of the dead King Hamlet. Prince Hamlet, grieving his father and disgusted that his mother has married his uncle, King Claudius, hears about the ghost and meets it. The ghost tells him that Claudius murdered him and demands revenge, and Hamlet swears to carry it out.
How Did Claudius Kill King Hamlet?
According to the ghost, Claudius crept up while the king was asleep in his orchard and poured poison into his ear. The official story was that a serpent had stung him.
Who Says “Something Is Rotten in the State of Denmark”?
Marcellus, one of the guards, in Act 1, scene 4, just after Hamlet follows the ghost. It is not Hamlet, though the line is often credited to him.
What Is Hamlet’s “Antic Disposition”?
“Antic” means strange or grotesque. At the end of Act 1, Hamlet warns his friends that he may choose to act oddly, as if mad, and makes them swear not to reveal that it is deliberate.
Why Does Polonius Tell Ophelia to Avoid Hamlet?
He believes Hamlet’s declarations of love are not to be trusted and fears for her honor. Laertes gives the same warning, adding that as a prince, Hamlet is not free to choose his own wife.
Related Reading
Three pages that take Hamlet further.