The characters of Hamlet are built in mirrors: nearly everyone in the play is either spying on someone, pretending to be something, or trying to avenge a father, and each one shows us a different side of the prince at the center.
This guide covers every major character in the play, grouped by the circles they move in: the royal family, Polonius and his children, Hamlet’s friends and false friends, and the prince of Norway, followed by the minor characters. For the plot, themes, and famous lines, see our full guide to Hamlet.
At a Glance
Here are the main characters of Hamlet for quick reference.
The Royal Family
A murdered king, his murderer, the widow who married him, and the son caught between them.
Hamlet
The prince of Denmark, a university student called home by his father’s sudden death. When the play opens, he is already in deep grief, and disgusted that his mother has married his uncle within a month. Then his father’s ghost tells him that the uncle is a murderer, and Hamlet is given the one task he seems unable to perform: revenge.
Hamlet is the most complex character Shakespeare created, and much of his power comes from how many things he is at once. He is brilliant and funny, the sharpest wit in the play, running rings around Polonius and the court. He is bitter and cruel, especially to Ophelia and his mother. He is deeply self-critical: after watching an actor weep over an imaginary grief, he turns on himself with “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” And he is always thinking, about death, about action, about whether anything can be known for certain.
His pretended madness adds another layer. He tells his friends he may act strangely, and much of his wild talk is plainly an act; he even tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, “I am but mad north-north-west.” Yet his grief and rage are real, and readers still argue about whether the performance sometimes becomes the truth. By the last act he has changed: calmer, readier to accept what comes, and willing to act when the moment arrives. Our main guide explores why Hamlet waits so long.
Claudius
Hamlet’s uncle, who poisoned his brother, took his crown, and married his widow. In public, he is a capable and smooth-spoken king, handling a threat from Norway with diplomacy and treating Hamlet with apparent patience.
What makes Claudius more than a simple villain is his conscience. The audience learns he is guilty before Hamlet does, in a short aside in Act 3: “How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience.” Alone later, he tries to pray and cannot: “O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven.” He sees his problem clearly. He cannot be forgiven while he keeps what he gained by the murder, “My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen,” and he will not give them up. So he goes on plotting, first sending Hamlet to his death in England, then arranging the poisoned duel.
Gertrude
Hamlet’s mother, the queen, who married her dead husband’s brother with what Hamlet sees as indecent haste. She loves her son and worries about him, and she herself suspects the cause of his distress: “His father’s death and our o’erhasty marriage.”
Gertrude is one of the play’s great puzzles, because Shakespeare never tells us what she knew. Did she have any part in the murder, or suspect it? When Hamlet confronts her in her room, she cannot see the Ghost that he sees. In the final scene she drinks from the poisoned cup, even after Claudius tells her not to, and her dying words are a warning to her son: “O, my dear Hamlet! / The drink, the drink! I am poisoned.” Whether she drank knowingly, to save Hamlet, is left for each reader and each production to decide.
The Ghost
The spirit of King Hamlet, Hamlet’s father, who appears on the castle battlements in full armor. He tells Hamlet that Claudius murdered him, demands revenge, and asks his son to remember him. He appears once more, in Gertrude’s room, to remind Hamlet of his purpose.
The Ghost drives the whole plot, but he is never fully trusted. From the first meeting, Hamlet wonders whether he is “a spirit of health or goblin damned,” and later he fears that “The spirit that I have seen / May be a devil” sent to lead him into sin. That doubt is what makes Hamlet test Claudius with the play before he acts. The Ghost was also a great warrior in life: years before the play begins, he killed the king of Norway in single combat.
Polonius and His Children
A second family, whose destruction runs alongside the royal family’s.
Polonius
The king’s chief adviser, a long-winded, self-satisfied old courtier who is certain he understands everything. He is often played for comedy: announcing that “brevity is the soul of wit” in the middle of a rambling speech, or boasting that he has never been wrong just before being wrong about Hamlet. He is sure the prince is mad for love of Ophelia.
Beneath the comedy, Polonius is a spy. He sends a servant to check up on his own son in Paris, uses his daughter as bait to observe Hamlet, and hides behind a tapestry to eavesdrop on the queen. That last piece of spying kills him: Hamlet, hearing a voice behind the tapestry, stabs through it. His death sets off everything that follows, Ophelia’s madness, Laertes’s revenge, and the final duel.
Ophelia
Polonius’s daughter, who loves Hamlet and has received his letters and gifts. Her brother and father both warn her against him, and her father orders her to stop seeing him. She obeys. Later, she is used as bait while her father and the king listen in hiding, and Hamlet turns on her with “I did love you once,” then “I loved you not,” and tells her to go to a nunnery.
Ophelia has very little power in the play; others decide almost everything for her. Her one soliloquy is not about herself but about Hamlet: “O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!” After Hamlet kills her father, she goes mad, singing fragments of songs about death and betrayal, and later drowns. Gertrude reports her death, and the gravediggers debate whether she deserves a Christian burial. She is the play’s most complete victim, destroyed by men who each claimed to be acting for her good.
Laertes
Polonius’s son, a young courtier who spends most of the play in France. When he learns his father has been killed, he returns at once, bursts in on the king, and demands revenge. Everything Hamlet hesitates to do, Laertes does immediately.
But speed makes Laertes easy to use. Claudius turns his anger into a plot: a fencing match with a poisoned blade. Laertes goes along, though in the final scene he admits that “it is almost against my conscience.” The trick turns on him when the swords are exchanged, and dying, he tells the truth: “I am justly killed with mine own treachery.” His last act is to ask Hamlet’s forgiveness, and offer his own.
Friends and False Friends
The one friend Hamlet can trust, and the two he cannot.
Horatio
Hamlet’s friend and fellow student from Wittenberg, calm, loyal, and honest. He keeps watch for the Ghost with the guards, and he is the one who brings Hamlet the news. In a court full of spies, he is the only person Hamlet trusts completely, and the one he asks to watch Claudius during the play.
At the end, Horatio tries to drink the last of the poison and die with his friend: “I am more an antique Roman than a Dane.” Hamlet stops him and gives him a harder task, to go on living and tell the story: “Absent thee from felicity awhile / And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain / To tell my story.” Horatio’s farewell, “Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince,” is the play’s tenderest moment.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Two of Hamlet’s school friends, summoned by Claudius and Gertrude to spy on him. They are so alike that even the king and queen seem to mix them up: “Thanks, Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstern,” says Claudius, and Gertrude replies, “Thanks, Guildenstern and gentle Rosencrantz.” Hamlet sees through them at once and makes them admit it: “My lord, we were sent for.”
They escort Hamlet toward England carrying the king’s order for his death. Hamlet discovers it, rewrites the letter, and sends them to be executed in his place. He feels no guilt: “They are not near my conscience.” Whether they deserved it, or even knew what they carried, the play never makes clear. Their fate inspired Tom Stoppard’s comedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which tells the story from their bewildered point of view.
Fortinbras and Norway
The outsider who ends the play as king.
Fortinbras
The young prince of Norway, whose father was killed in single combat by Hamlet’s father, and who lost his lands to Denmark as a result. As the play opens, Fortinbras has raised an army to win them back. His uncle, the king of Norway, stops him, and he redirects his soldiers against Poland instead.
Fortinbras is seen only briefly, but he matters. Watching his army march to fight over a scrap of land, Hamlet is shamed into resolving on action. In the final scene, Fortinbras arrives to find the Danish royal family dead, and claims the throne; Hamlet, dying, gives him his “dying voice.” His last order is for Hamlet to be carried off “like a soldier,” for he was likely “To have proved most royal.”
Minor Characters
Smaller roles that still leave their mark.
The Gravediggers and Yorick
Two clowns digging Ophelia’s grave, singing as they work and joking about death. Their scene brings comedy into the darkest part of the play, and gives Hamlet the skull of Yorick, the old king’s jester, who carried Hamlet on his back when he was a child. Holding it, Hamlet says, “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio,” one of the most famous images in all of Shakespeare.
The Players
A company of traveling actors whom Hamlet knew in the city. The lead player’s tearful speech about the fall of Troy shames Hamlet into action, and the company performs The Murder of Gonzago, the play Hamlet uses to test Claudius.
Osric
An affected young courtier who brings Hamlet the challenge to fence with Laertes. Hamlet mocks him as a “waterfly.” He serves as judge of the match, and his call, “A hit, a very palpable hit,” is still quoted today.
The Others
Marcellus and Barnardo are the guards who first see the Ghost; Marcellus speaks the famous line “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” Reynaldo is Polonius’s servant, sent to spy on Laertes in Paris. Voltemand and Cornelius are the ambassadors Claudius sends to Norway.
A Closer Reading: Three Sons, Three Fathers
Shakespeare gives Hamlet two mirror images, Laertes and Fortinbras, each a son with a father to avenge, and the fates of all three suggest that the play’s real question is not how to take revenge but whether to.
Laertes is revenge without thought. He returns from France and confronts the king at once, and he is willing to cheat to win. That speed makes him Claudius’s instrument, and he dies of his own poison, admitting he was “justly killed with mine own treachery.” Hamlet is revenge with too much thought, testing and doubting and delaying through four acts. Fortinbras, the third son, is the one who gives revenge up. Stopped by his uncle, he turns his army elsewhere, and he is the only one of the three still standing at the end, walking into Denmark to find its throne empty and waiting for him.
There is even a fourth son, inside the play. The speech Hamlet asks the player to recite tells of Pyrrhus, who comes to kill King Priam to avenge his father, Achilles. At the crucial moment, Pyrrhus freezes, sword raised: he “stood / And, like a neutral to his will and matter, / Did nothing.” Then “Arousèd vengeance sets him new a-work,” and he strikes. It is a picture of Hamlet himself, drawn before Hamlet has even begun to hesitate. Seen together, the four sons form a gallery of choices, and the play leaves us to notice that the one who let go of revenge is the one who lives.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about the characters in Hamlet, answered briefly.
Who Is the Villain of Hamlet?
Claudius, who murdered his brother to take the throne and marry the queen, and who later plots Hamlet’s death. But he is a villain with a conscience, who tries and fails to pray for forgiveness.
Does Hamlet Love Ophelia?
He tells her both “I did love you once” and “I loved you not,” in the same scene. His letters to her were loving, and at her funeral he fights Laertes in her grave, insisting on his own love and grief. Most readers conclude that he did love her, and that his grief, anger, and suspicion of everyone around him turned that love cruel.
Did Gertrude Know About the Murder?
The play never says. The Ghost blames Claudius, not her, and nothing she says or does clearly shows she knew. Productions differ in how much guilt they give her.
Who Are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?
Two of Hamlet’s school friends whom Claudius summons to spy on him. They escort Hamlet toward England carrying an order for his execution, and Hamlet switches the order so that they are executed instead.
Who Survives at the End of Hamlet?
Of the major characters, only Horatio, who lives to tell Hamlet’s story, and Fortinbras, who becomes king. Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, and Laertes all die in the final scene; Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern have died earlier.
Related Reading
Three pages that take the characters of Hamlet further.