Hamlet: Shakespeare’s Tragedy of a Ghost, a Murdered King and a Prince’s Revenge
Hamlet is the story of how the ghost of a murdered king haunts the living, with tragic consequences. A vengeful ghost and a brother’s murder dominate the bleak landscape of Hamlet’s Denmark. The play opens with an encounter between young Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, and the ghost of his father.
Author: William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
Title: Hamlet (written c. 1600)
Format: English paperback (The Oxford Shakespeare), 416 pages
Scope: Tragedy in five acts
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0199535817 (ASIN 0199535817)
The Ghost
The ghost tells Hamlet that he was murdered by his brother Claudius, who then quickly married his widowed queen, Gertrude. The ghost urges Hamlet to take revenge on the man who stole his throne and his queen, and Hamlet swears to do so.
Meanwhile, Claudius and Gertrude worry about the prince’s erratic behaviour and employ a pair of Hamlet’s friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to watch him. When Polonius suggests that Hamlet may be mad with love for his daughter, Ophelia, Claudius agrees to spy on Hamlet in conversation with the girl. But although Hamlet certainly seems mad, he does not seem to love Ophelia: he orders her to go to a nunnery.
The Play Within the Play
Hamlet hits on an idea to test his uncle’s guilt: a play in which one scene closely resembles the way Hamlet imagines his uncle murdered his father. When the moment of the murder arrives on stage, Claudius leaps up and leaves the room. Hamlet goes to kill Claudius but finds him praying, and decides to wait.
Hamlet goes to confront his mother, in whose chamber Polonius is hiding. He stabs through the curtain, killing Polonius, thinking it is the king. He is immediately sent to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who carry sealed orders for the King of England demanding that Hamlet be killed. Ophelia goes mad with grief at her father’s death and drowns in the river. Polonius’s son, Laertes, returns from France in a fury, and Claudius convinces him that Hamlet is to blame for the deaths of his father and sister.
Which Hamlet?
Hamlet survives in three early versions: a short and garbled quarto of 1603, a much fuller quarto of 1604–05 and the text in the First Folio of 1623, collected after Shakespeare’s death. They differ in hundreds of places, and modern editors must choose between them. The Oxford Shakespeare edition, edited by G.R. Hibbard, bases its text on the Folio and explains the choices in its introduction and notes, which makes it a good guide for readers who want to understand both the play and how it has come down to us. The longest of Shakespeare’s plays, it is rarely performed uncut. Some critics have connected its preoccupation with fathers, sons and mourning to the death of Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, in 1596, at the age of eleven, though nothing in the play proves the link.
The Duel
News arrives that Hamlet has returned to Denmark after pirates attacked his ship to England. Claudius devises a plan to use Laertes’s desire for revenge to ensure Hamlet’s death: a fencing match. Laertes’s sword will be poisoned so that, if it draws blood, Hamlet will die; as a back-up, the king poisons a cup of wine to give Hamlet if he scores the first or second hit.
The duel begins. Hamlet scores the first hit but refuses to drink from the cup. Instead Gertrude drinks, and the poison kills her quickly. Laertes wounds Hamlet, although the poison does not kill him at once. Hamlet then stabs Claudius with the poisoned sword and forces him to drink the rest of the poisoned wine. Claudius dies, and Hamlet dies immediately after achieving his revenge.
Hamlet is perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest play: complex, psychologically gripping and morally ambivalent, it will haunt you long after its final scene. As in Romeo and Juliet, the hero dies. It explores betrayal, revenge, life and death, reason and its weakness, and madness.
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