Hamlet

The Prince of Denmark is told by his father’s ghost to revenge a murder. He delays, performs madness, stages a play, destroys the court, and dies in the wreckage. Hamlet is a revenge tragedy that keeps asking what thinking is for.

Why it is set. The central A Level tragedy. Reward comes from close work on soliloquy, metatheatre, and the ethics of revenge — not from calling Hamlet indecisive and moving on.

Plot

1. 1

   The ghost

   Old Hamlet’s ghost walks the battlements. Claudius has married Gertrude and taken the throne. The ghost names Claudius as murderer and demands revenge, but also warns Hamlet not to taint his mind against his mother.

2. 2

   Antic disposition

   Hamlet puts on an ‘antic disposition’. Polonius decides he is mad for Ophelia’s love. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are hired to spy. Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ sits beside the nunnery scene, where love curdles into cruelty.

3. 3

   The Mousetrap

   Travelling players perform The Murder of Gonzago with Hamlet’s additions. Claudius rises. Hamlet has his proof — and still does not kill the king at prayer, unwilling to send him to heaven.

4. 4

   The closet and England

   In Gertrude’s closet Hamlet kills Polonius through the arras. The ghost returns. Hamlet is packed to England with secret orders for his death; he turns the letter on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Ophelia goes mad and drowns. Laertes returns, rioting.

5. 5

   The duel

   Claudius and Laertes plot a poisoned rapier and cup. Gertrude drinks the cup. Laertes and Hamlet are both wounded. Hamlet kills Claudius at last. Fortinbras enters to a court of bodies and inherits Denmark.

Characters

• Hamlet

  Prince; tragic centre

  Scholar, satirist, son, revenger. His intelligence is the play’s engine and its delay. Watch how he uses theatre, wordplay and philosophy to postpone the irreversible act.

• Claudius

  King; usurper

  A competent politician and a man who can pray without being able to repent (‘My words fly up, my thoughts remain below’). Not a pantomime villain.

• Gertrude

  Queen; Hamlet’s mother

  How much she knows is a genuine critical question. Sexuality, loyalty and self-preservation are tangled; the closet scene is where Hamlet tries to write her conscience for her.

• Ophelia

  Polonius’s daughter

  Obedient in a house of surveillance, then broken into song and flowers. Her madness is gendered public spectacle; Hamlet’s is (partly) a strategy.

• Polonius / Laertes

  Court and revenge foil

  Polonius is comic bureaucracy with a knife in it. Laertes is the revenger who does not hesitate — and is easily bought by Claudius. He shows what Hamlet is not.

• Horatio / the Ghost

  Witnesses

  Horatio survives to tell the story — the scholar as remaining voice. The Ghost may be a Catholic soul, a devil, or a projection; the play never settles it.

Themes

• Revenge and delay

  The revenge-tragedy template (ghost, delay, play-within-play, bloodbath) is present so Shakespeare can interrogate it. Hamlet’s delay is moral, intellectual, psychological and theatrical all at once.

• Appearance, acting, truth

  ‘Seems, madam? Nay, it is.’ Yet Hamlet himself acts. The Mousetrap treats theatre as a lie detector. Elsinore is a place where everyone is performing for someone.

• Death and the body

  From ‘too too solid flesh’ to Yorick’s skull, the play will not let thought float free of corpses. Ophelia’s drowning, the graveyard, and the poisoned cup all insist that philosophy ends in flesh.

• Women and sexuality

  Hamlet’s disgust at Gertrude’s remarriage spills onto Ophelia. Feminist readings ask how a court that polices women’s bodies produces both the nunnery scene and the mad songs.

• Politics and succession

  Denmark is an elective monarchy under surveillance. Fortinbras, Laertes and Hamlet are three models of action. The ending is a foreign takeover dressed as funeral oration.

Key quotations

Learn speaker, location, and what the line is doing — not the words alone.

• A little more than kin, and less than kind.

  Hamlet · I.2

  First line, already punning. Kinship has been made unnatural; language is how Hamlet resists the new family.

• This above all: to thine own self be true.

  Polonius · I.3

  Often quoted as wisdom; in context it is a busybody’s cliché. The play ironises sententious advice.

• The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.

  Hamlet · II.2

  Metatheatre as detective work. Art is not escape; it is a trap.

• To be, or not to be, that is the question.

  Hamlet · III.1

  Not simply suicide. It is about action versus endurance, and about how fear of the unknown ‘puzzles the will’. The most famous speech is a theory of delay.

• Get thee to a nunnery.

  Hamlet · III.1

  Nunnery can mean convent or brothel — another double tongue. Hamlet’s misogyny and his knowledge of being watched collide.

• My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.

  Claudius · III.3

  The usurper’s own soliloquy. Prayer without repentance: a useful pair with Hamlet’s refusal to kill him in this scene.

• Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio.

  Hamlet · V.1

  Comedy and mortality in one skull. The prince who intellectualised death now holds it. Tone is everything in performance.

• The rest is silence.

  Hamlet · V.2

  After so many words, an ending that refuses metaphysics. Horatio’s ‘flights of angels’ tries to fill the gap Hamlet leaves.

Exam notes

• Treat soliloquies as developing arguments, not mood music. Track how imagery changes from I.2 to III.1 to V.2.
• Always consider staging: the ghost’s armour, the arras, the open grave, the poisoned cup.
• Have a position on delay — moral, political, Oedipal, theatrical — and test it against a scene, not a theory.
• Context: Reformation debates about purgatory, revenge-tragedy conventions, and succession anxiety under Elizabeth.

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