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Character List
Hamlet
The son of Old Hamlet and Gertrude, thus Prince of Denmark
...

Hamlet is a moody, theatrical, witty, brilliant young man, perpetually fascinated and tormented by
doubts and introspection
...
The variety of his moods, from
manic to somber, seems to cover much of the range of human possibility
...
Old Hamlet appears as a ghost and exhorts his son to kill Claudius,
whom he claims has killed him in order to secure the throne and the queen of Denmark
...

Old Hamlet's ghost reappears in Act Three of the play when Hamlet goes too far in berating his
mother
...

Claudius
Old Hamlet's brother, Hamlet's uncle, and Gertrude's newlywed husband
...
Claudius
appears to be a rather dull man who is fond of the pleasures of the flesh, sex and drinking
...
Claudius
is the only character aside from Hamlet to have a soliloquy in the play
...

Gertrude
Old Hamlet's widow and Claudius' wife
...

Gertrude loves Hamlet tremendously, while Hamlet has very mixed feelings about her for marrying
the (in his eyes) inferior Claudius after her first husband's death
...
Gertrude figures prominently in many of the major scenes in the play,
including the killing of Polonius and the death of Ophelia
...
They know each other from the University of Wittenberg, where they are
both students
...
In a
moving tribute just before the play-within-the-play begins, in Act Two scene two, Hamlet praises
Horatio as his soul's choice and declares that he loves Horatio because he is "not passion's slave"
but is rather good-humored and philosophical through all of life's buffets
...

Polonius
The father of Ophelia and Laertes and the chief adviser to the throne of Denmark
...

Polonius is forever fomenting intrigue and hiding behind tapestries to spy
...
Polonius' demise is fitting to his flaws
...

Polonius' death causes his daughter to go mad
...
Ophelia has received several tributes of love from
Hamlet but rejects him after her father orders her to do so
...
Moreover,
Ophelia is regularly mocked by Hamlet and lectured by her father and brother about her sexuality
...
She later drowns
...
Laertes is an impetuous young man who lives primarily in Paris,
France
...
He then returns to Paris, only to return in Act Four with an angry entourage after his
father's death at Hamlet's hands
...


Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Friends of Hamlet's from the University of Wittenberg
...
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are often treated as comic relief; they are sycophantic,
vaguely absurd fellows
...
They carry a letter from Claudius asking the English king to kill
Hamlet upon his arrival
...
We learn that they have indeed been executed at the very
close of the play
...
In many ways his story is parallel to Hamlet's: he too has lost his father by
violence (Old Hamlet killed Old Fortinbras in single combat); he too is impeded from ascending the
throne by an interfering uncle
...
Where Hamlet is pensive and mercurial, Fortinbras is all action
...
At the end of the play, and
with Hamlet's dying assent, Fortinbras assumes the crown of Denmark
...

The gravediggers
Two "clowns" (roles played by comic actors), a principal gravedigger and his assistant
...
The primary gravedigger is a very witty man, macabre and intelligent, who is
the only character in the play capable of trading barbs with Hamlet
...

The players
A group of (presumably English) actors who arrive in Denmark
...
Hamlet uses the players to stage an adaptation of "The Death of Gonzago"
which he calls "The Mousetrap" -- a play that reprises almost perfectly the account of Old Hamlet's
death as told by the ghost -- in order to be sure of Claudius' guilt
...
Because of the doubtful circumstances of
Ophelia's death, the priest refuses to do more than the bare minimum as she is interred
...
He receives absurdly detailed instructions in
espionage from his master
...

Marcellus
A soldier who is among the first to see the ghost of Old Hamlet
...

Voltemand
A courtier
...

A Captain
A captain in Fortinbras' army who speaks briefly with Hamlet
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Major Themes
Death
Death has been considered the primary theme of Hamlet by many eminent critics through the years
...
Wilson Knight, for instance, writes at length about death in the play: "Death is over the whole
play
...
Hamlet
arranges the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
...
" And so on and so forth
...
As as A
...
Bradley has pointed out, in his very
first long speech of the play, "Oh that this too solid flesh," Hamlet seems on the verge of total
despair, kept from suicide by the simple fact of spiritual awe
...

One of the aspects of death which Hamlet finds most fascinating is its bodily facticity
...
This strange intellectual being, which Hamlet values so highly and
possesses so mightily, is but tenuously connected to an unruly and decomposing machine
...
How can Yorick's
skull be Yorick's skull? Does a piece of dead earth, a skull, really have a connection to a person, a
personality?
Hamlet is unprecedented for the depth and variety of its meditations on death
...
Not that the play resolves anything, or settles any of
our species-old doubts and anxieties
...

Intrigue
Elsinore is full of political intrigue
...
Polonius, especially, spends nearly every waking
moment (it seems) spying on this or that person, checking up on his son in Paris, instructing Ophelia
in every detail of her behavior, hiding behind tapestries to eavesdrop
...
This
is never clearer than in his appearances in Act Two
...

Claudius, too, is quite the inept Machiavellian
...
He is little better than Polonius
...

He is not a natural king, to be sure; he is more interested in drinking and sex than in war,
reconnaissance, or political plotting
...
He has somehow done away with much the better ruler, the
Hyperion to his satyr (as Hamlet puts it)
...
He is
always on top of everyone's motives, everyone's doings and goings
...
He sniffs out
Claudius' plot to have him killed in England and sends his erstwhile friends off to die instead
...
He certainly wouldn't have been as warlike as his father,
but had he gotten the chance he might have been his father's equal as a ruler, simply due to his
penetration and acumen
...
" Of course every book is made of words, every play is a world of words, so to speak,
and Hamlet is no different
...
Not only does it contain extremely rich language, not only did the play greatly expand the
English vocabulary,Hamlet also contains several characters who show an interest in language and
meaning in themselves
...
In Act Two scene two,
for example, he says, "Madam, I swear I use no art at all
...
A foolish figure, / But farewell to it, for I will use no art
...
Just as he is extremely windy

in recommending brevity, here he is fussy and "artful" (or affectedly artificial) in declaring that he is
neither of those things
...

Another angle from which to consider language in the play -- Hamlet explores the traditional
dichotomy between words and deeds
...
The passage resonates well beyond its immediate context
...
For him, reality seems to exist more in thoughts and sentences than in
acts
...
"
Hamlet is the man of language, of words, of the magic of thought
...
But then, the action itself is contained within words,
formed and contained by Shakespeare's pen
...
Hamlet invites us to consider whether this isn't the case more often than we might
think, whether the world of words doesn't enjoy a great deal of power in framing and describing the
world of actions, on stage or not
...
The most popular revenge tragedy of the Elizabethan period, The Spanish Tragedy, also
features a main character, Hieronymo, who goes mad in the build-up to his revenge, as does the
title character in Shakespeare's first revenge tragedy, Titus Andronicus
...

Whereas previous revenge tragedy protagonists are unambiguously insane, Hamlet plays with the
idea of insanity, putting on "an antic disposition," as he says, for some not-perfectly-clear reason
...
In Shakespeare's source for the plot
of Hamlet, "Amneth" (as the legendary hero is known) feigns madness in order to avoid the
suspicion of the fratricidal king as he plots his revenge
...
His performance of madness, rather than aiding his revenge, almost distracts him
from it, as he spends the great majority of the play exhibiting very little interest in pursuing the
ghost's mission even after he has proven, via "The Mouse Trap," that Claudius is indeed guilty as sin
...
The traditional question is perhaps the least interesting one to ask of his
madness -- is he really insane or is he faking it? It seems clear from the text that he is, indeed,
playing the role of the madman (he says he will do just that) and using his veneer of lunacy to have
a great deal of fun with the many fools who populate Elsinore, especially Polonius, Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern
...
When he is alone, or with Horatio, and free
from the need to act the lunatic, Hamlet is incredibly lucid and self-aware, perhaps a bit manic but
hardly insane
...
He knows that he is expected to act mad, because he thinks that that is what one
does when seeking revenge -- perhaps because he has seen The Spanish Tragedy
...
He knows his role, or what his role should be, even as he is unable to play it
satisfactorily
...
Perhaps Hamlet himself, if we could ask
him, would not know why he chooses to feign madness any more than we do
...
Ophelia's madness
serves as a clear foil to his own strange antics
...


Whereas Hamlet's madness seems to increase his self-awareness, Ophelia loses every vestige of
composure and self-knowledge, just as the truly insane tend to do
...
All that matters is Hamlet's
consciousness of his own consciousness, infinite, unlimited, and at war with itself
...
" Bloom is not the only reader ofHamlet to see such an emphasis on the self
...

Hamlet, fascinated by his own character, his turmoil, his inconsistency, spends line after line
wondering at himself
...

Aside from these massive speeches, Hamlet shows a sustained interest in philosophical problems of
the subject
...
"For there is
nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so," he says
...
Certainty is not
an option
...

Suicide
Like madness, suicide is a theme that links Hamlet and Ophelia and shapes the concerns of the play
more generally
...
In both cases, the major upshot of suicide is religious
...
" And Ophelia's burial is greatly limited by the clergy's suspicions that she might have
taken her own life
...
In a play so obsessed with the self, and the nature of the self, it's only natural to see this
emphasis on self-murder
...
However, some have suggested that Gertrude's long story may be a fabrication invented
to protect the young woman from the social stigma of suicide
...
One might ask oneself -- why does it
make such a difference to us whether she died by her own hand or not? Shakespeare seems, in fact,
to inspire this very sort of self-interrogation
...
S
...
" In effect, Hamlet is a play about plays, about theater
...
"
But what is the point of this constant metatheatrical winking? Hamlet, among other things, is an
extended meditation on the nature of acting and the relationship between acting and "genuine" life
...

Most specifically, Hamlet is an exploration of a specific genre and its specific generic conventions
...
Modern audiences are quite comfortable with this sort of "meta-

generic" approach
...
All of these
genres have become almost obligatorily self-aware; they contain references to past milestones in
their respective genres, they gleefully and ironically embrace (or alternatively reject) the
conventions that past films treated with sincerity
...

To put it cutely, Hamlet itself is the main character of the play, and Hamlet merely the means by
which it explores its own place in the history of theater
...
And who's to say that we aren't all merely actors in our own lives? Surely, from
a philosophical perspective, this is one of the basic truths of modern human life
...
The
guards bring Horatio, a learned scholar and friend of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, to witness this
apparition
...

Meanwhile, a new king of Denmark has been crowned: Claudius, Old Hamlet's brother
...
We watch their marriage celebration and hear
about a threat from the Prince of Norway,Fortinbras, which Claudius manages to avoid by diplomacy
...
He is
disgusted by his mother's decision to marry Claudius so soon after his father's demise
...

Meanwhile, the court adviser, Polonius, sends his son, Laertes, back to Paris, where he is living
...
Ophelia admits that Hamlet has been wooing her
...
Ophelia agrees
to cut off contact
...
The ghost appears once more
...
When they are alone, the ghost reveals that
Claudius murdered him in order to steal his crown and his wife
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Hamlet appears to concur excitedly
...

Act Two finds us some indefinite time in the future
...
Claudius summons two of Hamlet's school friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, in
order to discover the meaning of this strange behavior
...
Meanwhile, Polonius
hatches a theory of his own: he thinks that Hamlet is insane due to Ophelia's rejection of his love
...

Hamlet's only consolation appears to be the coming of a troupe of players from England
...
We realize that
Hamlet plans to put on a play that depicts the death of his father, to see whether Claudius is really
guilty, and the ghost is really to be trusted
...
Hamlet behaves extremely cruelly toward Ophelia
...

Hamlet prepares to put on his play, which he calls "The Mouse Trap
...
In the course of the play, both Gertrude and Claudius become
extremely upset, though for different reasons
...
Claudius decides that he must get rid of Hamlet
by sending him to England
...
Hamlet turns the tables on her, accusing her of a most grotesque lust and claiming that
she has insulted her father and herself by stooping to marry Claudius
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Hamlet stabs Polonius through the tapestry, thinking he has killed
Claudius
...
Just as Gertrude appears convinced by Hamlet's
excoriation, the ghost of Old Hamlet reappears and tells Hamlet not to behave so cruelly to his
mother, and to remember to carry out revenge on Claudius
...
Hamlet exits her room, dragging
the body of Polonius behind him
...
He
then makes arrangements for Hamlet to go to England immediately, accompanied by Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern
...
On their way to the ship,
Hamlet and his entourage pass Fortinbras' Norwegian army en route to a Polish campaign
...
She sings
childish and bawdy songs and speaks nonsensically
...
Claudius gingerly calms the young man and
convinces him that Hamlet was the guilty party
...
Hamlet's ship to England was
attacked by pirates, who captured Hamlet and arranged to return him to Denmark for a ransom
...
Claudius and Laertes
decide that Hamlet must be killed
...
As backup,
Claudius decides to poison a cup of wine and offer it to Hamlet during the contest
...
Gertrude says that Ophelia has
drowned while playing in a willow tree by the river
...
Two gravediggers joke about their morbid occupation
...
Soon, Ophelia's funeral begins
...
Laertes bombastically dramatizes his grief, prompting Hamlet to reveal
himself and declare his equal grief at the loss of his erstwhile beloved
...

Later, Hamlet explains to Horatio that he discovered Claudius' plot to have him killed in England and
forged a new letter arranging for the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
...
Hamlet eventually accepts this challenge
...
Hamlet wins the first two passes, prompting Claudius to resort
to the poisoned drink
...
In his stead, Gertrude drinks a toast to her son
from the poisoned cup
...
A scuffle ensues in which Hamlet ends up with Laertes' sword
...
Just
then Gertrude collapses
...
Laertes, also dying, confesses
the whole plot to Hamlet, who finally attacks Claudius, stabbing him with the poisoned sword and
then forcing the poisoned drink down his throat
...
He asks Horatio to explain the
carnage to all onlookers and tell his story
...

Just then, Fortinbras arrives at the court, accompanying some English ambassadors who bring word
of the death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
...
He arranges for Hamlet to receive a soldier's burial
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O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
/ Or that the Everlasting had not fixed / His canon 'gainst self-slaughter
...
129-34

Hamlet's first soliloquy finds him more melancholic, more desperate, than at any other point in
the play
...
Hamlet is simply disgusted that his mother, who had appeared to
be so much in love with his father, has married Claudius, her vastly inferior former brother-inlaw
...
Although sometimes his rhetoric in the
ensuing Acts resonates with this first declaration of misery, Hamlet's sincerity becomes much
more difficult to judge once he has received his supernatural charge
...
Here, though, freed from the need to act on his thoughts and feelings (he even says,
at the end of the speech, "But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue"), he is truly in his
miserable element
...
Some editors
follow the second quarto and admit "sallied flesh" (or even "sullied flesh")
...
" The emphasis is either on the flesh's innate depravity or on its
frustrating solidity
...

2
...
Give thy thoughts no tongue, / Nor any unproportioned thought
his act
...
/ Those friends thou hast,
and their adoption tried, / Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel, /
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment / Of each new-hatched, unfledged
courage
...
/ This 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
...
55-80
Beloved of refrigerator magnet and bumper sticker companies everywhere, Polonius' advice to
Laertes puts the critic in a double bind
...
On the other, the
speech must be read in context, and when done so it becomes deeply ironic
...
" Polonius is, of course, the
quintessential false man
...

That he nevertheless feels comfortable positing that one should be true to oneself (whatever
that means) and thereby never false to any man is a testament to his shallow disregard for the
deeper import and meaning of his language
...
He
is windy and empty
...

3
...
What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason; how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving; how express and admirable in action;

how like an angel in apprehension; how like a god: the beauty of the world, the
paragon of animals
...
282-92
Speaking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet here sums up the central paradox of the
"quintessence of dust," mankind -- at once the most sublime of creatures, and no better than
the lowest
...
He at once places his species in a standard Renaissance cosmos, rising
hierarchically from the earth to the heavens, and denies this hierarchy
...
His melancholy is metaphysical
in nature and cosmic in scope
...

4
...
506-14 ff
...
How can it be, he asks, that this player
can summon up such apparently genuine feeling for a fiction, for a dream, while I (Hamlet)
cannot manage to rally my spirits to action in a just cause? Hamlet's speech is very carefully
constructed, with reason prevailing for the first long stretch of rhetoric until Hamlet's passion
ironically overwhelms him and he explodes, "Fie upon't! foh! / About, my brains
...
) Notice how questions dominate the soliloquy
...
Again, his apprehension is god-like, but what good does it do him?
5
...
To die, to sleep -- / No more
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'Tis a consummation / Devoutly to be wished
...
Ay, there's the rub
...

Act Three scene one, ll
...

Here are the most famous words in the play, and likely in all of western literature
...
"To be or not to be" -- that is, "to live or to
kill myself
...
The
speech does suggest that death is a highly attractive destination, and that the only thing that
keeps us miserable mortals from seeking it out is the fear of "what dreams may come" in the
hereafter
...
If he is thinking about
suicide, he is most definitely contemplating it in the abstract, as a topic of interest more than as
an actual option for his own life
...
To take one example, the
eighteenth-century critic Samuel Johnson suggested that the soliloquy is more generally about
death, and about the risk of death in a moment of decisive action, than about suicide
...
"
In other words, Johnson thinks that the speech is really very consistent with the mounting
action in the play
...
The linchpin of
this question is -- after we die, do we continue to exist, or do we stop existing? To be, or not to
be
...
But if, in the
hereafter, we retain our minds, our sensibilities, we must pause before leaping into so uncertain,
so potentially horrific a fate
...
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the
tongue; but if you mouth it as many of our players do, I had as lief the towncrier spoke my lines
...
] Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this
special observance that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature; for anything so
o'erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end both at the first, and now,
was and is, to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own
feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form
and pressure
...
1-20 ff
...

Indeed, Hamlet is filled with such metatheatrical moments, from the play-within-a-play to the
gossip about the London stage; it's not a stretch at all to here the bard's voice behind Hamlet's
...
" Hamlet reveals the primeval roots of
theater as he understands them -- to act as a mirror on both the universal and the particular
levels, reflecting both human nature across centuries and the peculiar habits of a given time in
history
...
Indeed, they run counter to the deepest nature
of theater, which is to depict humanity not in a grotesque form, but as it actually is
...
Oh, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven; / It hath the primal eldest curse
upon't, / A brother's murder
...
/ My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent, / And like a man to double
business bound, / I stand in pause where I shall first begin, / And both neglect
...
36-46 ff
...
In it we finally
learn for certain that Claudius is guilty of the murder charged to him
...
He is, briefly at least, capable
of looking into his soul with the same questioning, searching self-examination that Hamlet
displays elsewhere
...
He cannot truly
repent while he still possesses the fruits of his sin, his brother's crown and wife
...

Hamlet, in this scene, is not nearly so sympathetic
...
Speaking of his cruel reasoning in this moment, Samuel Johnson wrote, "This
speech, in which Hamlet, represented as a virtuous character, is not content with taking blood
for blood, but contrives damnation for the man that he would punish, is too horrible to be read
or to be uttered
...
How all occasions do inform against me, / And spur my dull revenge! What is a
man, / If his chief good and market of his time / Be but to sleep and feed? A

beast, no more
...
Now whether it be / Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple / Of
thinking too precisely on th' event -- / A thought which, quartered, hath but
one part wisdom / And ever three parts coward -- I do not know / Why yet I
live to say 'This thing's to do', / Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and
means, / To do't
...
32-46 ff
...
" It is
another meditation on the inscrutability of his failure to act when he has so much reason to do
so
...
With Hecuba, the
emphasis is on feeling; with Fortinbras, the emphasis is on honor
...
Of course, as always, he is not sure why this is the case (and nor are
we, not really), but he shows the uncertain searching of modern subjectivity in his attempt to
formulate this very confusion
...
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio -- a fellow of infinite jest, of most
excellent fancy
...
Here hung those lips that
I have kissed I know now how oft
...
Make her laugh at that
...
159-67
Harold Bloom has suggested that despite his protestations of his dead father's greatness,
Hamlet did not really have a very happy household growing up
...
Bloom suggests that the closest
thing Hamlet had to an affectionate father was likely Yorick, the court jester, from whom he
likely learned his excellent wit, his macabre sense of humor, and many more of his most
Hamlet-esque characteristics
...
This is a moment of pure and deep
contemplation of death
...
Yorick's
skull is a very powerful memento mori, a reminder of death -- no matter how much you try to
stave off aging, Hamlet says, you're inevitably doomed to be like Yorick, a dirty and lipless skull
buried in the ground, forgotten by all but the gravediggers
...
Death was much
more familiar to them than it is to us
...

10
...
If your mind dislike anything, obey it
...

HAM
...
We defy augury
...
If it be now, 'tis not to come
...
If it
be not now, yet it will come
...
Since no man of aught he
leaves knows, what is't to leave betimes? Let be
...
192-8
This exchange seems to capture in its essence the changed Hamlet that we see in Act Five scene
two
...
Now he has
almost a zen-like acceptance of things as they are
...
All the world, at this
point, seems to exist within a greater order -- perhaps an unknowable order, but an order
nonetheless
...
First, Hamlet claims that
there is rhyme and reason to the slightest events of the universe -- there is "special providence

in the fall of the sparrow
...
" So all things are rich with meaning, yet we know not what
such meaning might be
...
He no longer attempts to understand the unknowable, but accepts it as such; indeed,
he accepts unknowability as an inescapable condition of all existence
...


Suggested Essay Questions
1
...
Which
characteristics of its central character might account for this label?
Hamlet is considered the first modern play partly because of the psychological depth of its main
character -- Hamlet suffers from melancholy, self-doubt, and even delusions
...
In fact, Hamlet himself declares
again and again that he doesn't understand his doubts either ("I have of late, but wherefore I
know not, lost all my mirth
...
Death is a constant presence in this play
...

Infant mortality was high and plagues swept whole nations
...
Hamlet uses the occasion for
a more general examination of mortality
...

3
...
Freud's
reading of the play may have influenced his sexual theories—but it is important to remember
the order of events, especially because scholars tend to label Hamlet "Freudian
...

4
...

Explore this speech
...
He is perhaps contemplating suicide, perhaps thinking about the risks he must run
in order to fulfill the task of revenge
...

5
...
By showing the trappings of theater and non-reality, does
Shakespeare make Hamlet's suffering seem more acute or more distant? How?
"Life's but a stage," another Shakespearean character proclaims, and the playwright recognized
quite well the dramatic trappings of life and the life-like elements of staged productions
...
Although the whole
atmosphere seems patently false and theatrical, this serves to draw Hamlet somehow closer
...

6
...
By this measure, Hamlet is a tragedy
...
Choose and discuss two comical or farcical elements in
Hamlet
...
The work is
morbid, but the workers joke and sing as they go about their business
...
On a smaller level, Yorick's
skull embodies the tragicomic dichotomy; it is a gruesome, deathly object that once belonged to
a joker
...
This gruesome
mixture of pathos and humor is the essence of Shakespearean theater
...
Define revenge
...
Revenge is usually violent
...
Melancholy and uncertainty play just as large a role in Hamlet's
character as the desire for revenge
...
Discuss the setting of Hamlet
...

Not much else is known: there were no sets in Shakespeare's time
...

9
...
Are we meant to believe
that this is really Hamlet's father, or is he a figment of Hamlet's imagination? If he is
imagined, is the rest of the play imagined as well?
Hamlet struggles with the question of whether the ghost is his father and decides that he must
be who he says he is
...
One of the moral questions of the
play is resolved, however, when it becomes clear that Claudius is a murderer
...

10
...
Is
Denmark's monarchy responsible for the demise of the state in this play?
At the end of the tragedy, it is not only Hamlet and most of the characters who die
...
This accords with the medieval idea of the "body
politic" with the leader making up the head, literally, and the people the body of a personified
state

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