Hamlet

In brief

The King of Denmark is dead, and his widow Gertrude has quickly married his brother Claudius, who now wears the crown. On the castle walls a ghost in the dead king’s armour appears to the sentries and then to his son, Prince Hamlet, home from university at Wittenberg. It says Claudius poured poison in its ear, and it demands revenge. Hamlet feigns madness, stages a play that copies the murder, and watches his uncle break. Then he spares Claudius at prayer, stabs the old counsellor Polonius through a curtain by mistake, and is shipped to England to be killed. He escapes and comes home to find that Polonius’s daughter Ophelia has gone mad and drowned, and that her brother Laertes wants his blood. A rigged fencing match, with a poisoned blade and a poisoned cup, kills Gertrude, Laertes, Claudius and Hamlet within minutes. A Norwegian prince, Fortinbras, walks in and takes the kingdom.

Two facts make it a stranger object than that summary. There is no single Hamlet: the play survives in three early printings that disagree. And the most inventive thing ever said about it, that Shakespeare is the ghost and not the prince, comes from a novel, in the library chapter of Ulysses.

The argument

The old question is why Hamlet delays. Olivier’s film of 1948 answers it in a voice-over at the start: “This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.” I think that is the wrong question, because it takes Hamlet’s self-reproach at face value. The play’s first line is “Who’s there?” (1.1), and its real subject is how anyone can know anything.

The only witness to the crime is a ghost, and Hamlet has good reason to doubt it. It says it is “Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night” (1.5), which is Catholic purgatory, and he studies at Luther’s Wittenberg. So he says, “The spirit that I have seen / May be the devil”, and builds an experiment: “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King” (2.2).

Everyone else is running experiments too. Polonius pays Reynaldo to spy on Laertes in Paris. Claudius sends for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet. Polonius and Claudius hide to watch Ophelia used as bait. Polonius hides again behind the arras in Gertrude’s room, and dies there. The court is what Hamlet says it is: “Denmark’s a prison” (2.2). The one decisive blow Hamlet strikes before the last scene is struck blind: “Nay, I know not. Is it the King?” (3.4).

The man who returns from the sea has stopped investigating. “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow,” he says; “The readiness is all” (5.2). This is no simple peace. In the same scene he reports sending two old schoolfellows to their deaths, and shrugs: “They are not near my conscience.” The thinker has learned to act, and the price of acting shows.

The shape of the play

The five acts are not Shakespeare’s. None of the early texts divides the play that way; the division comes from a quarto of 1676, and it falls awkwardly, breaking the action straight after Hamlet drags Polonius out. The real structure is a set of mirrored sons. Hamlet, Laertes and Fortinbras have each lost a father, and each answers differently. Fortinbras raises an army. Laertes, asked what he would do to prove himself his father’s son, says “To cut his throat i’ th’ church” (4.7), which is the exact opposite of Hamlet sparing Claudius at prayer (3.3). The Player’s speech adds a fourth, Pyrrhus, whose sword hangs in the air before he kills Priam.

The centre is three scenes in a row: the play, the prayer and the killing of Polonius. Hamlet’s father is “But two months dead” in Act 1, and by the play Ophelia corrects him: “Nay, ’tis twice two months” (3.2). And the longest of Shakespeare’s plays stops for jokes at the worst moment: the gravediggers argue law over Ophelia’s grave before Hamlet picks up the skull of “poor Yorick” (5.1).

The voices

Hamlet’s first words are a pun spoken aside: “A little more than kin, and less than kind” (1.2). He quibbles for the rest of the play, because wordplay is how a man under watch says what he means. The soliloquies give the other half. They are a mind arguing with itself in public, and they end up disgusted at their own fluency: he “Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words” (2.2).

Some of the most famous lines are prose. “What a piece of work is man” is said to two spies, and it ends with “this quintessence of dust” (2.2). Other voices are set against his: Polonius’s maxims, which run on until he loses his thread, Osric’s fashionable fog, and the Player’s deliberately old-fashioned bombast. Only Claudius is allowed a comparable inwardness, alone and failing to pray: “O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven” (3.3).

Three Hamlets

The First Quarto of 1603 has about 16,000 words and was lost until 1823; two copies survive. Polonius is Corambis and Reynaldo is Montano. The great soliloquy comes earlier and goes “To be, or not to be, I there’s the point”. Yet it has things the others lack: the stage direction “Enter Ofelia playing on a Lute, and her haire downe singing”, a short scene between Horatio and the Queen, and a Gertrude who swears “I neuer knew of this most horride murder” and pledges to help her son. It may be an actor’s memory of a performance, an abridgement for touring, or an early draft.

The Second Quarto of 1604–05 claims on its title page to be enlarged to almost twice the length, and at about 28,600 words it is the longest. It alone has Hamlet’s last soliloquy, “How all occasions do inform against me” (4.4). It reads “too too sallied flesh” and has the famous crux “The dram of eale”.

The First Folio of 1623 leaves out about 230 of those lines, the soliloquy among them, and adds about 70, including the “Denmark’s a Prison” exchange and the talk of child actors, the “little Yases”. It reads “too too solid Flesh”, and after “The rest is silence” it gives the dying Hamlet a final “O, o, o, o.” Scarcely 200 lines are identical in Q2 and F. Take away one speech and the Folio’s Hamlet no longer stops on his way to England to berate himself, which is to say the procrastinator of tradition owes something to a passage the Folio did not print.

The free text linked here is none of these. Project Gutenberg’s #1524 names no editor, and it is a modern-spelling conflation in the tradition begun by Rowe in 1709 and Theobald in 1733. It takes “solid” from the Folio, the fourth-act soliloquy from Q2 and the prison passage from the Folio, prints “The dram of evil” for Q2’s obscure word, and drops the groan. It is a good text to start with, but no one in Shakespeare’s time saw this play. The early texts themselves are free at the Internet Shakespeare Editions: Q1, Q2 and F1. Gutenberg also has the Folio in old spelling as #2265.

Stephen’s theory

Episode 9 of Ulysses (1922), “Scylla and Charybdis”, takes place in the National Library of Ireland on 16 June 1904. Stephen Dedalus holds forth to the “quaker librarian” Lyster, John Eglinton, Russell and Best, while Buck Mulligan heckles. Mulligan has already advertised the performance in the first episode: “He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father” (episode 1).

The librarian opens with Goethe’s Hamlet, “The beautiful ineffectual dreamer who comes to grief against hard facts”. Stephen will have none of it, and counts the corpses: “Nine lives are taken off for his father’s one.” Then he starts from the tradition, recorded by Nicholas Rowe in 1709, that Shakespeare acted the Ghost. Picture the author on stage, speaking to Burbage: “To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince, young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has died in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever.” Hamnet died in 1596, aged eleven. So the usual identification is backwards. Shakespeare is not the prince but the murdered king, and the conclusion he must have foreseen is “you are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty queen, Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway”.

The rest is biography by accusation. Ann, older, seduced him: “He was overborne in a cornfield first (ryefield, I should say)”. She was unfaithful with his brothers; Stephen lists “Gilbert, Edmund, Richard” and finds the last two as villains in the plays. The “secondbest bed” of the will is her punishment. None of this is evidence. The Ghost role rests on Rowe, a century late; most scholars reject any link with Hamnet, though Stephen Greenblatt has argued for one, noting that the two names were virtually interchangeable; and Ann’s adultery is Stephen’s invention. Then Eglinton asks: “Do you believe your own theory?” And: “No, Stephen said promptly.”

That answer is the point. The theory is really about Stephen, who has refused to pray at his mother’s deathbed, goes about in black, and has just given up his tower to Mulligan, whom he calls “Usurper”. He is the “dispossessed son”, walking the strand “hearing Elsinore’s tempting flood” (episode 3). And while he talks, Leopold Bloom, a father who has buried an infant son and whose wife is about to betray him, passes through the library and out between Stephen and Mulligan at the door. The theory describes the novel’s plot before the novel’s characters know it. In Nighttown the two finally look in a mirror together, and “The face of William Shakespeare, beardless, appears there” (episode 15). Joyce himself gave twelve lectures on Hamlet in Trieste in 1912–13, now lost.

The people

Prince Hamlet is witty, cruel, tender, and the only person at Elsinore who says what he sees. Critics who love him tend to look away from what he does to Ophelia in the nunnery scene (3.1), and from his line over Polonius’s body: “I’ll lug the guts into the neighbour room.”

Claudius and Gertrude

Claudius is a capable ruler who handles Norway by diplomacy and who knows exactly what he has done. Gertrude is the play’s great blank. The Ghost says to “leave her to heaven”, and in the two longer texts she never says what she knew. Carolyn Heilbrun’s essay of 1957 defended her against centuries of assumption.

Polonius, Laertes and Ophelia

Polonius is more dangerous than his comedy suggests; he is the state’s intelligence service, and he gives his daughter orders. Laertes is the easy avenger, and he comes close to joining the villain. Ophelia obeys everyone and is heard only when mad, when she hands out flowers and speaks most sharply: “Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be” (4.5).

Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Horatio is the witness, begged by the dying prince “To tell my story” (5.2). Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are the friends who take the job, and the play barely tells them apart.

How it was made

The story of Amleth, who feigns madness to kill his uncle, comes from Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum, written around 1200. François de Belleforest retold it in French in his Histoires tragiques in 1570 and added the hero’s melancholy. A lost English play, known as the Ur-Hamlet, existed by 1589 and had a ghost; it is often attributed to Thomas Kyd, whose The Spanish Tragedy set the fashion for revenge on stage. Shakespeare’s version dates from between 1599 and 1601; it was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 26 July 1602 as lately acted by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The lead was almost certainly written for Richard Burbage.

Readers and critics

Voltaire in 1768 thought it the work of a drunken savage with flashes of genius. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1795–96) gave the Romantics a delicate soul crushed by a duty too great for him, and Coleridge made the excess of thought the whole problem. A. C. Bradley in 1904 preferred a sickness: melancholy brought on by his mother’s conduct. Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams, set him beside Oedipus, and Ernest Jones extended the argument. T. S. Eliot in 1919 called the play “most certainly an artistic failure”, since Hamlet’s disgust exceeds its cause, and popularised “objective correlative” in making the charge.

Later readings moved outward. Elaine Showalter traced what the culture has done with Ophelia. Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory (2001) reads the Ghost through the abolished Catholic afterlife. Margreta de Grazia’s “Hamlet” without Hamlet (2007) argues that the post-1800 fixation on inwardness hid a plot about a dispossessed prince and land.

Afterlives

Olivier’s 1948 film won the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Actor, cutting Fortinbras, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to do it; Kozintsev’s Soviet film of 1964, in Pasternak’s translation with a Shostakovich score, restored the politics. Branagh’s of 1996 runs 242 minutes and uses the full text. Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well (1960) moves it to corporate Japan, and Haider (2014) to Kashmir. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) watches the action from the wings. David Foster Wallace took Infinite Jest (1996) from Hamlet’s words over the skull, and Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020) tells the story of the dead son that Stephen Dedalus imagined.

How to read it

Get an edition that shows its seams. The Arden Third Series (Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, 2006) prints Q2, with Q1 and the Folio in a companion volume. Harold Jenkins’s older Arden is built on Q2, and G. R. Hibbard’s Oxford (1987) on the Folio. The Folger text is free online.
Keep count of who is listening. Before any big speech, ask who is hiding, and who Hamlet thinks is hiding.
Read the fourth-act soliloquy twice. Then read the play again without it, as the Folio has it.
Then read the library chapter. It needs Hamlet fresh in your mind, and a good annotated Ulysses helps.

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922). A dispossessed son and a sonless father, with this play running under the Homer.
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (about 429 BC). The other great tragedy of an inquiry that ends at home, and Freud’s partner text.
Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy (about 1587). The revenge play Shakespeare’s audience knew, with its own ghost and play within a play.
Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet (2020). A novel of the Stratford family, built on the death that Stephen uses as evidence.