Listen to Peter as he takes a deep dive into the play, discussing everything you need to know about Hamlet as a Leaving Cert student and giving you loads of interesting ideas to use in your essays.

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Below is a transcript of this full podcast packed full of top tips and H1 notes. Make sure to copy these into your notebook to use on the day of your exams!

Hamlet

Hello and welcome to this Studyclix explains podcast looking at Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  We’re taking a look at some background to the play, going through the plot, looking at the characters and themes as well as some examples of the sort of language and imagery you can write about in the exam.

So, let’s start by taking a look at some of the background to the play and the author. As with so many of Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet is based on an earlier story and has been repurposed for the stage by Shakespeare. Our Hamlet is based in Denmark and the original version, or one of them at least, is a pagan story common in Norway and Iceland. The original text is long lost but a Latin translation survives and in it a son, Amlethus, takes revenge on his uncle for killing his father and marrying his mother. There are many other parallels with our Hamlet: 

The original story is set roughly in the 12th century but Shakespeare modernises it and sets it in the Elizabethan era. There are a few indicators of the time period, the main one being the use of poison, the presence of clowns or court jesters as well as mentions of university training that allow us to presume a setting around the 16thcentury – the same time that Shakespeare lived.

Another play called The Spanish Tragedy written by Thomas Kyd, who was writing at the same time as Shakespeare, is similar in points to Hamlet. In that play, a Spanish general is driven mad by the murder of his son. In order to seek revenge, he organises a performance, a play, and during it, uses a real sword to kill the person who murdered his son.

Again, the parallels with Shakespeare’s Hamlet are clear. It’s worth pointing out here that this borrowing and repurposing would have been totally accepted in Shakespeare’s day. The idea of ownership over his plays or his ideas would have seemed odd to him – his was a joint enterprise with the other actors in his company as well as the other owners of the theatre. It wasn’t until later in his life he began to receive attention as an author in his own right and it wasn’t until after his death that his plays were collected and published under his own name.

So why are we looking at the source material for this play? What does it matter where the ideas for Hamlet came from? Well, what this does mean is that we can see the source material and then identify the parts that are truly Shakespeare, the parts that he added in. For example, the use of the ghost is entirely original. The use of the fencing bout at the end as well as the play within a play are both absent from the original story and the device of the play within a play may have been borrowed from Thomas Kyd.

There are some other interesting features in the background of Hamlet. Shakespeare’s own son was named Hamnet and died, aged 11, five years or so before the play was written. Some critics have attempted to draw a connection between Shakespeare’s reaction to his son’s death and the play that he wrote. Whether it’s useful or not is up for debate. In fact, he was writing comedies mostly around the time his son died and for a few years after. One thing that we know for certain is that Shakespeare was writing Hamlet, the version that we have, during the mourning period after his own father’s death.  

The Shakespeare critic and biographer, Peter Ackroyd, maintains that this part, that of the ghost, is one that Shakespeare himself played during performances of the play. Ghosts too are associated closely with the Catholic faith – ideas of purgatory and unfinished business before eternal rest are ideas from Catholicism. In Shakespeare’s England, many Catholics were forced to convert to Protestantism after the Reformation. There are many critics, Ackroyd included, who maintain that John Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s father, remained a catholic and refused to attend Church of England or protestant services. So, we have a play where the hero is named very close to the author’s dead son where there is also the ghost of a dead father, originally played by the playwright himself. 

And, again according to Ackroyd, “Many of Shakespeare’s later plays [Hamlet included] have the pervasive theme of families reunited and love restored”.

As we’ve already mentioned, the idea of authorship, especially for plays in English at this time, was not a common one. But it was beginning to change. English theatre or theatre written in the vernacular [which means written in English as opposed to Latin] was looked down upon and although many acting companies and theatres were sponsored by the nobility, Shakespeare’s was sponsored by the King himself, the whole business was not totally respectable.

But Hamlet was the only Shakespeare play performed both at Cambridge and Oxford universities during Shakespeare’s lifetime and it also began to prompt the examination of characters in more detail. Previously, characters were just archetypes – representations of things or ideas – good/evil/revenge redemption but it is with Shakespeare and particularly Hamlet that critics really began to talk about character. In the broader sense, it is around this time too that writing begins to be seen as a tool of reflection and introspection – something in evidence in what Hamlet is doing. And the Elizabethan theatre was the art of the character. There was very little else in terms of staging or special effects to convey the whole array of moods and emotions that Hamlet goes through so it meant the performance had to be everything.

Even today, with all of his soliloquies and moods, playing the character of Hamlet is seen as a major challenge to any actor. Similarly, the play is Shakespeare’s longest – a huge challenge to stage today, let alone during Elizabethan times when all of Shakespeare’s plays staged in the Globe would have been on in the afternoon while there was daylight. Some critics maintain that its length suggests it was never written to be performed, just to be read. While this is highly unlikely, perhaps the full version with all of Shakespeare’s character development, scenes and soliloquies may have been written to be read while performances of it cut certain aspects as needed.

Hamlet, then, is a play of character, of depth and of feeling. It’s associated closely with the author’s sense of loss surrounding his father and perhaps partly even his son. It comes at a time when Shakespeare’s reputation was on the rise and his work was helping to transform how theatre was seen in London and further afield. It’s one of his most well-known works and immensely challenging for the audience and actors alike. But what’s it actually all about?

The play opens and the King of Denmark, also named Hamlet, has died mysteriously after victory over Fortinbras, the king of Norway. Within a very short time, King Hamlet’s widow, Gertrude, has married his brother Claudius who has become king. The dead king’s son, Prince Hamlet, returns from University in Germany to attend his father’s funeral and is stunned at his mother’s marriage to Claudius. It is both illegal and immoderately soon. It is illegal as it is seen as incestuous. In Shakespeare’s time, the idea of incest didn’t just apply to sexual relations between blood relatives – in the Old Testament it says that once a woman marries a man, his siblings become her siblings and in effect, Gertrude is now marrying her brother. Claudius says as much with the line;

Prince Hamlet is visited by the ghost of his father who tells him Claudius is the murderer and asks him to take revenge but also asks him to take no action against Gertrude, his mother. Hamlet is at first suspicious of the ghost’s origins – at that time there were a few explanations given for the presence of ghosts. Either it was a soul, released from purgatory for a special purpose – to convey a message or warning or it was a representation of evil in the form of a dead person sent by the devil to entrap the souls of the living. Or another option was that they were hallucinations, usually stemming from madness. This is what the Queen believes when she says,

Shakespeare works hard to make the Ghost dignified and credible – it’s not simply thrown in as a way to frighten people in the audience. It has been seen four times by people other than Hamlet, including the sceptical Horatio. The reality of the ghost, the acceptance by Hamlet and the other characters that the ghost really exists, goes some way to explain why Hamlet spends so long trying to judge the ghost’s intentions. It’s not until the end of the mousetrap, or the play within a play, that Hamlet has determined that the ghost is reliable.

Laertes, son of Polonius, the Lord Chamberlain, has received permission from Claudius to leave Denmark for France. Before leaving, he warns his sister, Ophelia, that Hamlet’s intentions in relation to her are not honourable or genuine. Her father too, doubts Hamlet’s sincerity and forbids her to associate with him. Later she tells Polonius that Hamlet has visited her and has been acting very strangely. Polonius decides that Hamlet is mad with love of Ophelia.

When Claudius learns that Hamlet is behaving strangely, he sets about getting Hamlet’s friends to spy on him. Claudius sends for Hamlet’s old school friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as well employing Ophelia to spy and act as bait in a trap for Hamlet.

Hamlet is concerned for large parts of the play with the actions of his mother and he agonises over her behaviour. He is more concerned at times with his mother’s supposed wrongs than the message he received from the ghost of his dead father. It is only with the coincidental arrival of a group of travelling actors that he devises a scheme to test Claudius’s guilt. He contrives, with the actors, to put on a performance that replicates the manner in which the ghost tells Hamlet that Claudius killed him. When He sees Claudius’s reaction, Hamlet knows that the ghost is telling the truth.

Hamlet seeks out his mother to confront her and ask her not to behave as a wife to Claudius. She concludes that he is mad.  Polonius is hiding in a closet trying to eavesdrop. Hamlet discovers him and kills him. Ophelia, meanwhile, distraught at the death of her father at the hands of the one she loves, goes mad and drowns herself.

Hamlet pretends at various stages to be mad to disguise his true intentions. Claudius now knows that Hamlet is aware of the murder and so plots to send him to England and have him murdered. Hamlet, by a stroke of good fortune, learns of the plot, escapes and returns to Denmark to avenge his father’s death.

Laertes and Hamlet have a fencing contest at the end of the play. Hamlet is unaware that the tip of Laertes sword has been poisoned as has the wine that he is to be given during the contest. Gertrude drinks some of the wine and dies. Laertes then admits that the sword too, with which Hamlet has just been wounded, has been poisoned. Hamlet then stabs Claudius before he himself dies, paying the ultimate price for his retribution.

So that’s the play in a nutshell but of course the beauty of Shakespeare in general and Hamlet in particular is the complexity and depth of the characters. 

Let’s take a look at Hamlet himself first.

And this is because of the ambiguity and uncertainty in the role. Is Hamlet the hero of the play? Or the villain? Why does he wait so long, delaying vengeance and constantly going over it in his mind? Is his behaviour towards his mother and Ophelia excusable based on the circumstances or is he a mysoginist who despises women?

The Shakespeare biographer, Peter Ackroyd, says that, “in turn, Hamlet displays himself as ironic, sincere, obedient, despairing, disgusted, welcoming, questioning, disgusted, speculative, impetuous, angry, scholarly, antic, jocular, actorish, despairing, of mimic disposition, sarcastic, welcoming, speculative, despairing, exuberant, self-punishing, changeable, confused, contemptuous, actorish, courteous, playful, threatening, hesitant, fierce, scornful, rhetorical, bewildered, soul-searching, macabre, furious, mocking, stoical, parodic and resigned.”

That’s an impressive list and goes to show how enigmatic Hamlet is – he even tells his mother as well as his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that they don’t fully know him – in fact it seems that he doesn’t fully know himself either.

More than a hundred years ago, the critic WF Trench said about Hamlet “We find it hard, with Shakespeare’s help, to understand Hamlet: even Shakespeare himself, perhaps, found it hard to understand him: Hamlet himself finds it impossible to understand himself. Better able than other men to read the hearts and motives of others, he is yet quite unable to read his own.”

At the heart of the character of Hamlet is a conflict between passion and reason. In his soliloquies, he is driven by passion, by emotion, but at the end, is it reason that dominates? It is this conflict that drives much of the drama in the play. His father’s ghost tasks him with taking revenge and killing Claudius and yet he spends the majority of the play humming and hawing over whether he should, talking about it non-stop instead of doing it.

We also have the impression that Hamlet is well-loved and respected by others. Horatio, the character who knows him best, is devoted to him. Ophelia praises his character. He is loved by the people of Denmark to the point that Claudius, as the new king, is worried about losing to throne to him. But he also behaves terribly towards the female characters, kills without remorse, and leads his supposed friends to their deaths without a second thought.

Can we reconcile this Hamlet with the good and virtuous Hamlet, the Hamlet that critics and commentators in the past have declared as the most noble and sympathetic of all Shakespeare’s characters?

We can also explain, if not justify, his behaviour when we consider what he was like before we meet him. We learn enough about Hamlet through his philosophical pronouncements in monlogues and soliloquies to paint a picture of the sort of character he is before the action of the play begins. He has had a happy childhood, he loves and is loved by his parents. He has had a university education where he has learnt about beauty and art and the great achievements of man. He has close friends from his youth and also his closest companion, Horatio, who is devoted to him. He has an idealised and optimistic view of the world which is brought into stark relief when he returns to Denmark to find his father murdered, his mother remarried to the murderer, his close friends plotting against him after bending to the enticements of Claudius.

Is it any wonder that the Hamlet we actually see on the stage is an emotional mess? His worldview, his way of being, has been totally destroyed and he must scrabble around in the dark trying to find some pieces of himself to put back together. If he isn’t really mad and only pretending as a piece of cunning trickery, then we could easily excuse him.

Let’s take a look at some of the more complicated aspects of his character. So we know that the Hamlet we see is in distress. He is not the perfect courtier that Ophelia refers to as,

He is shocked by his father’s murder and doubly so that his father’s ghost has returned to encourage him to commit murder. Hamlet himself has some very unfavourable comments to make about himself. He tells Ophelia at one point that,

He would agree then, with many of the things that critics have said about him and why he's such a complicated character. When we look at Hamlet’s dealings with others, we see that often they are marked with bitterness, cynicism and hatred. He’s cruel beyond justification to Gertrude and Ophelia and he thoroughly enjoys the torment he dishes out to Claudius in the play within a play.

Further to this, his interaction with Gertrude in Act 3 is a low point for Hamlet with his obsessive insistence on lust and the corruption of human relationships. And when he kills Polonius, he is dismissive and petty, doing himself little credit.

He does, however, show another side of his complex character to those whom he loves and respects. As we’ve already mentioned, Horatio is devoted to him and gives him the epitaph;

He also forgives Laertes, prevents Horation’s suicide, and shows devotion and honour to his father’s memory.

In this light, we can see that the tragedy in the play is the descent of a good and noble young man, through facing family tragedy and disaster, into cynicism and bitterness. Despite the fact that the ghost focuses on Claudius’ action and implores Hamlet to ignore Gertrude’s actions, Hamlet focuses just as much on his mother’s incestuous relationship with his uncle as he does on his uncle’s murder of his father. This does much to explain Hamlet’s subsequent revulsion with the ideas of love and marriage. The tragic events that have befallen him and his family have not just taken his father from him but also his innocence, his disposition and his future happiness.

Hamlet does, of course, delay his revenge. Events only really come to a head when they have to when the issue is forced by other characters – Claudius and Laertes in particular. Does this reflect badly on Hamlet? That he is in incapable or unwilling to take revenge on Claudius for murdering his father? Well, again, it depends on how you look at it. One could say that Hamlet doesn’t exactly cover himself in glory in delaying constantly, talking about the facts of the case over and over again, indulging in self-obsession and melancholic thinking and treating everyone around him poorly while he’s doing it. In this light, there’s something of the moody teenager in him, rebelling against a task that should be a duty because he lacks courage and conviction.

Alternatively, we could view the same chain of events as a positive for Hamlet’s character. He has shown that he is capable of killing – either first hand in the case of Polonius or indirectly, sending Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths – but he doubts the motives of the ghost until Claudius’ guilt is revealed through the play within a play. This is admirable – he surely can’t go around killing people at the behest of a ghost. Similarly, even though he is able to kill, he can’t kill Claudius at prayer, when he is vulnerable. He says it’s because he doesn’t want him to go to heaven with a cleansed soul but we may suspect that the idea of murdering someone when they are vulnerable seems ignoble to him. He waits then, confident that Claudius will reveal himself, trap himself and Hamlet will be able to carry out his vengeance in a way that maintains the audience’s sympathy for him. 

If we were to see him murder Claudius while he prayed, it’s unlikely we would be able to view him in the same way as we do at the end. Through this, Hamlet is able to maintain the moral high ground and occupy an elevated position in comparison to his enemies.

Just as Hamlet’s character is complex and multi-faceted, Claudius, the villain of the play, is too. It’s often suggested that he could be the tragic hero of the play in his own right. If we were to judge him solely on what Hamlet and his father’s Ghost say about him, we would take Claudius to be an:

a monster. But, as is often said of Shakespeare, the characters he creates are men, not monsters and that’s what makes them so interesting – we have more in common with them than we might like to think.

Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle, kills his brother and marries his brother’s widow, Hamlet’s mother. These crimes are obviously reprehensible – murder and incest. Hamlet sums up his attitude to his uncle by calling him an:

and in other parts of the play, he calls him; 

who has murdered his father, stolen the kingdom, induced his mother into an incestuous marriage, tricked his friends into betraying him and tried to kill him through treacherous means.

How then could we feel anything but revulsion for him? Well, Shakespeare works hard to establish Claudius as a good king. Not good in the sense of being kind and gentle, but a good operator. He is a shrewd politician. He manages to transform Laertes from a significant threat to the security of his throne to a useful tool in his scheming against Hamlet. He cajoles and flatters both Laertes and Hamlet with words about them succeeding him to the throne. He handles the threat from Norway in a capable and peaceful manner.

When we examine Claudius in contrast to Hamlet, we see him as a thoroughly practical character. As king, he has decisions to make, decisions of consequence, and he makes them. This is a stark contrast to Hamlet who, while more of a philosopher, a deeper thinker, seems paralysed by indecision at every turn. He rails against his uncle but then, perhaps in an unguarded moment, refers to himself and Claudius as

which clarifies his position in relation to Hamlet. Neither of these characters are all one thing, either all good or all bad. They are blends of both. But while Hamlet examines every potential decision from every potential side (unless it’s a rash, emotional response like when he kills Polonius or jumps into Ophelia’s grave), Claudius makes decisions, follows them through and maintains a (relatively) dignified position throughout. While Hamlet feigns madness and engages in dramatic displays, Claudius keeps his cards close to his chest, only revealing his true thoughts and feelings in the most private of spaces. Even watching the play within a play and realising that he has been found out, he maintains composure as best he can, performing, as some critics have pointed out, better than the actors themselves!

Claudius’ character is also fleshed out in other ways by Shakespeare. Despite his crimes, Claudius appears to show genuine remorse in his private moments – just like us, he is reluctant to publicly admit to his sins, his flaws and yet is aware of what he has done, that there can be no forgiveness from heaven for his crimes. He has stained his soul for earthly reward. He says

These words are very reminiscent of another of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes – Macbeth – who commits a murder, wishes he could undo what he has done – and is ultimately destroyed by his own actions. Is Claudius so very different? And yet in Hamlet, he occupies the role of villain.

 He professes his love for Gertrude to Laertes, saying that 

but later, watches her drink poison without uttering a word to save her, thinking only of himself and his own position.

Gertrude

The character of Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother and Claudius’s new wife, is interesting in a number of ways. Many have questioned, like her son does, why she remarries so soon after her husband is murdered, in fact, why she remarries his brother at all. While Hamlet and his father’s ghost view the marriage as incestuous, it does make sense from a self-preservation point of view. Gertrude, when married to Hamlet’s father, enjoyed a position of power, that of Queen. But that power depends on the position of her husband as king. Once her husband is no longer King (because he’s been murdered) she becomes vulnerable.

Gertrude’s position as a woman in the world of the play restricts the choices she can make. She attempts to protect herself by, unknowingly, marrying her husband’s murderer. It’s important that we’re clear that she has no suspicions of Claudius as a murderer to maintain her innocence or naivete in the eyes of the audience. She certainly feels some shame for her “o’er hasty marriage” a

s she calls it and she refers to her “sick soul” in Act 4 suggeting that there is something that she is guilty of but again, there’s no suggestion that she is complicit in Hamlet’s father’s murder or committed adultery before his death.

Shakespeare appears to pay little attention to Gertrude in terms of fleshing out her character or developing her worldview. For the most part, she is happy not to rock the boat. However, the sense that she is guilty of something, that she has done something wrong, pervades the whole play and, as other critics have pointed out, influences Hamlet and all his actions.

The idea that his mother is guilty of something colours his every action and interaction. His disgust at her and ultimately, by extension, all women, marks his character and his interactions with the other main female character – Ophelia.

Gertrude then plays a role in representing the fallibility of women in the play but, with a more sympathetic contemporary view, we might see her today as a woman with very few options who tries to make the best of a bad situation.

Ophelia

Alongside Gertrude, Ophelia is the only other female character in the play. Her love for Hamlet is sincere and deep and she ends up paying the penalty for the crimes of others. In that sense, she is a truly sympathetic character. She is motherless and so entirely cowed by her father and brother that she is subservient and obedient, happy to do the bidding of others and dreams only of homely duties.

She is badly used by both Hamlet and her father, bearing the brunt of each of their machinations. There’s some irony in the fact Hamlet, we suspect, is pretending to be mad while Ophelia really does go mad at the treatment she receives.

She is in love with Hamlet but he rejects her because his mother’s actions have sullied all womenkind in his eyes. She is a symbol of victimhood, of rejected love but also of constancy. Her true love for Hamlet, even her compassion for him when she believes him to be mad, paints her as a caring, obedient woman, true to gender stereotypes of the time. Today we might see how she is at the centre of machinations and plots from the male characters, used as a trap and then dies for the crimes of others – a voiceless victim.

Polonius

Polonius, seen through the eyes of Hamlet is a; 

 and one of those

It’s worth remembering, however, that Hamlet is certainly not his biggest fan.

For Polonius to achieve the position he has within the Danish court, means he could not be a total fool. And we also see a real division between his public face and his much darker private one.

Polonius is officious and dedicated to protocol. Whether that be of the state or running his children’s lives. He has no qualms about spying for the state or spying on his own children. He sets Reynaldo to spy on his son while he spies on Ophelia himself. Similarly, there does not seem to be anything off-limits in terms of personal privacy. He spies on Hamlet and his mother in their discussion and even encourages Gertrude to provoke her son, relishing the expected outcome.

In contrast to Hamlet, who can’t seem to express the depths of his thinking publicly, saving up his speeches for his soliloquies, Polonius shows us how shallow he is through his pompous nature and long-winded remarks. This makes him the fool of the play but he is a fool not totally without sense.

What he lacks is conscience. He pries in other people’s business without apology. He spies, eavesdrops, and interferes in everything. He treats his own daughter as a prop in his plots and is less concerned with his son’s actions than with any scandal that should come from it. His death is often used as a stick to beat Hamlet with – his total lack of regard for Polonius as his corpse lays unattended. But perhaps it’s just reciprocal. Polonius cares little for others and so he dies, in the act of eavesdropping and lays on stage, eavesdropping still after death.

Laertes

Laertes is Polonius’s son, Ophelia’s brother and a character who, a little like Hamlet, is forced by circumstances outside of his control into the actions that he takes. 

Laertes’ father like Hamlet’s, is murdered however Laertes does not show indecision or uncertainty in his quest for revenge. He acts, rousing the people around the idea of rebellion against the king. He has no qualms about facing down Claudius and it is only Claudius’s clever handling of the situation that prevents him from facing a fight for the throne.

When we meet him in Act 1, he is trying to go back to France to continue his studies. Our main impression of him early in the play is kindly, caring, if a little foolish. He is prone, like his father, to talk too much. He offers advice to his sister that she is quick to call hypocritical but it’s clear that he does care for her.

When we see Laertes again, however, in Act 4, we see that his overriding character trait is one of immorality. The ease with which Claudius manipulates Laertes to focus his vengeance on Hamlet points to the moral weakness in Laertes himself. Again, using him as a foil we can see that although Hamlet prevaricates, hesitates and is uncertain, he is morally stable throughout. Laertes agrees to things that are wrong – poisoning the tip of his sword for the duel with Hamlet – in his quest to avenge his father and sister. Another point of contrast is when Laertes says that he would cut Hamlet’s throat in church if he needed to which is a stark contrast with Hamlet’s reluctance to kill Claudius while he is at prayer.

If Hamlet’s hesitation and drawn-out thought process around avenging his father is frustrating for the audience and ultimately detrimental to himself, Laertes' quick decision-making and blind vengeance results in an equally disastrous outcome.

There is some redemption for Laertes at the end. He understands, belatedly, that he was wrong and in his final words, points the finger of blame at Claudius.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

These two are Hamlet’s oldest school friends but we do not really learn much about them or their personalities. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s usefulness lies in what they represent.

Despite being Hamlet’s friends, their loyalty does not lie with him. They are loyal to power – in this case Claudius, the King, for whom they have agreed to spy. In this sense, they represent the destructive nature of corruption. They have been corrupted by power, and are servants to it, and it has destroyed their relationship, the established friendship they had with Hamlet.

Hamlet recognises their intentions immediately and is able to confuse and outwit them easily. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are no match for Hamlet and it’s clear that Hamlet no longer has any respect for them. Foolish men, Shakespeare seems to be telling us, follow power blindly, obey without condition and, as such, are worth nothing.

This is emphasised at the end when Hamlet essentially sends these two to their deaths without even being given time to pray for their souls. He rationalises this by saying that they brought about their own deaths through their willingness to be props in Claudius’s plots. No one mourns the deaths of these too and Hamlet doesn’t spare them a second thought. This sometimes is used as evidence of Hamlet’s heartlessness, his callousness, but if we consider Hamlet’s moral compass, the fact that these two were willing to be in the employ of such a 

as Claudius, is enough to condemn them.

Fortinbras

Fortinbras acts as another foil to Hamlet in the play. 

Fortinbras is the son of a dead father whose uncle is king of Norway. He is a threat to Denmark as he is gathering forces to prepare for an attack. It is his uncle, the King of Norway, who tells him not to attack Denmark, but to attack Poland instead. He follows his uncle’s orders dutifully.

He is aware of stately protocol and asks Claudius’s permission to cross Denmark on his way to Poland. He does everything correctly and carries himself as a prince should. Hamlet considers himself cowardly and unworthy in comparison to Fortinbras and is inspired by Fortinbras’s actions.

In the end, Hamlet tells Horatio that he wishes for Fortinbras to take over the Danish throne and Fortinbras’s actions throughout the play lead us to believe that he will be a good and effective ruler.

The Ghost

One of the key additions of Shakespeare to the pre-existing story of Hamlet is the ghost. The story existed in different guises previously but the addition of the ghost is entirely Shakespeare’s own. The ghost is not a character, it is a dramatic tool to crank the engine on the plot and events of the play.

Without the Ghost, Claudius’s actions would have gone unknown and unpunished. It is the Ghost’s revelations that set the events of the play in motion. Hamlet however feels that while the ghost has burdened him with an unbearable weight, he can’t be fully sure that the ghost is telling the truth. This then adds tension – he is unsure of his uncle’s guilt for the first half of the play and brings real jeopardy to the play within a play as it’s the moment when Claudius’s guilt is confirmed – to Hamlet at least.

Horatio

Horatio serves a couple of different functions in the play. He is both a commentator – filling in the audience on important background information – and a confidant of Hamlet, acting as a sounding board and being much less impulsive than Hamlet.

He appears little but is used to great effect when he does take the stage. At the beginning of the play, it is suggested that he is a native of Denmark and recognises the ghost as the late King. He explains some of the history of the rivalry between Norway and Denmark, setting the scene for the events that follow. He is also a sceptic, uncertain of the ghost’s existence and taking some convincing. This all works to situate the audience within the world of the play. Horatio is trustworthy and sensible. He lends a sense of credibility to the seemingly unbelievable – namely a ghost wandering the ramparts of the castle.

Hamlet confides in Horatio his misgivings about his mother’s marriage. Horatio also balances out Hamlet’s anxieties and excitement around the visit of the ghost.

Another useful aspect of Horatio’s character is that he is totally loyal to Hamlet. Whenever we may have misgivings about Hamlet’s actions – his treatment of his mother, or Ophelia, or his philosophical ramblings – Horatio’s unwavering belief in his friend’s nobility and good character brings us back. He also confirms Claudius’s guilt in the play within a play.

Finally, we see that Horatio supports Hamlet throughout without ever becoming an active part of his plots. In this way, we see his true role as that of the commentator. His final words on Hamlet praising his noble spirit and his good character do much to raise the levels of sympathy for our tragic hero.

Revenge

Revenge is the driving force of the play. It’s ironic that it is actually vengeance delayed over five acts that cause this to be Shakespeare’s longest play. The twin actions of Hamlet being charged by his father’s ghost with taking revenge upon Claudius and his inability to take revenge on him form the central structure. There are other characters who are seeking revenge throughout the play and these characters both highlight Hamlet’s reticence but also forms of revenge that are justified and some that are not.

Hamlet, Laertes and Fortinbras all have dead fathers who they set out to avenge. Fortinbras’s father has died in the most legitimate way of the three – in a duel that he agreed to. Fortinbras’s desire for revenge then is unlawful. Claudius approaches Fortinbras’s uncle, the King of Norway, and the uncle tells his nephew to give up his desire to invade Denmark. This is a great contrast to both Laertes and Hamlet – their causes for revenge are justified.

Laertes attempts to claim his vengeance immediately in contrast to Hamlet. We see Hamlet agonise over his decision. He’s unsure whether the ghost is really acting with good intentions – even after confirming his worst suspicions by seeing his uncle’s reaction to the play within a play, he still prevaricates, philosophises and debates the idea of killing Claudius. Once he’s decided to do it, he still waits. The scene where Claudius is at prayer is quite informative. Hamlet is unable or unwilling to kill his uncle because Claudius has just prayed and, as such, would die with a clear conscience and not go to purgatory. Hamlet reasons that this would not be adequate revenge. This highlights both Hamlet’s cruelty and also what the quest for revenge can do to the person seeking it.

Laertes' revenge is much more of an instantaneous but less thought-out type. He is seeking to act out his vengeance in a violent way on whoever he can. It is Claudius’s cunning and cleverness that allows him to refocus Laertes’s desire for revenge onto Hamlet and away from himself. The contrast is between one who acts but in an unstructured, unexamined way and one who doesn’t act, who delays, because it is thought through to the Nth degree.

Appearance and reality

As with many of Shakespeare’s plays, the theme of appearance versus reality is prevalent throughout. So what does it mean? Why does Shakespeare endow his work with this idea? Well, part of it is because it creates dramatic tension. 

But it’s not just this deliberate dramatic tension where appearance and reality don’t match. It is all over the play. In the beginning, the appearance of the ghost is in darkness which emphasises the confusion of the situation, Claudius appears to be a good and competent ruler but conceals the fact that he is the cause of the current woe in the kingdom. Hamlet later feigns madness (or perhaps is mad in a sense?). Claudius and Polonius both employ spies to conceal their intentions and report back on Hamlet and Laertes. Even the play within a play is an elaborate deception as well as the final scene when the plot to murder Hamlet with the poisoned sword tip is hatched.

The end result of all of this deception is two-fold – there’s the general sense of tension that we’ve already mentioned but also a sense of fragility or balance – nothing in the world of the play is what it seems and so it makes sense that the characters are often on edge – none more so than Hamlet himself. He can’t trust anyone, bar possibly Horatio. His childhood friends have turned into spies, his uncle has murdered his father, his mother has desecrated her husband’s memory and jumped into bed with his murderer and he’s been given quests by a ghost that he is unsure is that of his father or a malevolent spirit.

Death

Death is ever-present in Hamlet. The play opens under its shadow – the death of the king – and ends with the stage littered with corpses. Even Fortinbras remarks that the closing scene would be better suited to a battlefield. Throughout the play, there are constant references to death from multiple characters as well as philosophical deliberations on death from Hamlet himself.

So what’s the purpose?

Some critics have focused on the fact that the unknowable nature of what comes after death fascinated Shakespeare, and by extension Hamlet himself.

What that next world looked like was a matter of speculation and fascination. As with many writers, poets, painters and others, trying to establish what happens after one dies is both impossible and enticing. This could be partly why the theme of death is so prevalent in the play. It feeds Shakespeare’s fascination and wonder.

There’s also the idea of class and social position. Death is the great leveller. As is pointed out in the play, after death, we are all the same. All bodies are feasted upon by worms and other creatures, regardless of whether one is a king or a beggar. This levelling is interesting because we see such stratification in society in all of Shakespeare’s plays -Hamlet being no different. Shakespeare, in his work, reaffirms the worldview of Kings at the top and beggars at the bottom with the rest of society’s roles and functions ordered in between. In death however, there is no longer any structure, everyone is equal. Death then is like a release from the overriding structure and responsibility of the social chain.

Hamlet struggles with this throughout the play, meditating on the meaning of life, whether or not people are actually happy to live or just afraid of death, and whether suicide should be an option.

Ultimately Hamlet becomes resigned to the fact that death is inevitable. It is the death of all the main characters that allows order to be restored in the Danish court. So we see that equality is achieved through death but, in an interesting ironic twist, the system, the way society is organised is reborn through those deaths – a new king takes the throne.

Madness

One of the key questions in Hamlet is whether or not Hamlet’s madness is put on or real. Madness or characters going or pretending to go insane was a fairly regular feature of Shakespeare’s works – especially the tragedies. It was often used as a way of deceiving or fooling other characters into certain actions or revelations. In Hamlet then we see that Madness serves a similar function.

Hamlet, according to himself and what he says many times to different characters, is pretending to be mad to sow confusion amongst the many spies and watchers who are reporting back to Claudius on his actions and condition. This ‘antic disposition’ however, strays into believable territory at times further confusing the audience.

At the beginning of the play, Hamlet appears to be in such a heightened emotional state that Horatio and the other men refuse to follow his orders, despite his position as the Prince. He is deeply affected by, first, the death of his father and the remarriage of his mother, added to this, the appearance of a ghost that burdens him with a task so horrid that he can barely bring himself to consider it, it’s no wonder that his mental state is strained. This is also before the adoption of the antic disposition.

We can see then that Hamlet is predisposed towards madness, based on all that he endures. He is unable, however, to fool Claudius who, throughout the play, is not convinced that Hamlet is indeed mad. Similarly, when speaking to Horatio or the actors of the play within the play, he is clever, witty and totally rational. There is no suggestion that he is mad.

His behaviour with Gertrude and Ophelia, the rash, impulsive and cruel taunts and comments could be very easily explained away if we were to say that he was mad but, unfortunately, it’s too easy an out. These are aspects of his character that we must deal with and come to terms with without the explanation of madness.

Ultimately, the aspect of madness when it comes to Hamlet himself is a disguise, a ruse that is used for protection and keeping vulnerable aspects of himself hidden. He may be very persuasive as a madman because he’s a bit closer to it than others but he is very certain in his explanations to other characters that it is something he is putting on.

Unfortunately for Ophelia, her madness is quite the opposite. She suffers throughout the play. She is subservient to her father and her brother and obeys their commands. Hamlet, the one she loves, turns on her viciously in, to make matters worse, the suggestion that she has lost her virginity to Hamlet means that his rejection of her is a double blow – her reputation is now destroyed as well as her love lost. This is enough to prompt her madness. Whether she dies by accident or takes her own life, it’s an obvious counterpoint to Hamlet’s own feigned madness and total indecision.

Shakespeare’s plays are full of imagery and symbolism. It allows him to capture an idea, a concept, a mood or a feeling in a much more in-depth way and transmit them to an audience through patterns of images and or symbols to great effect.

We should always pay attention to images and symbols that reoccur and see what work they are doing. Many of the images that Shakespeare uses are taken from or refer to everyday things such as nature, disease, war and clothing. What’s immediately obvious in Hamlet is the use of imagery linked to sickness and disease, reflecting both the interior lives of some of the characters and the exterior world of Denmark.

Sickness and disease

Hamlet’s own viewpoint in the play is one dominated by sickness and disease. We see this mainly in Hamlet’s speeches. Many of his descriptions of other characters include images of rottenness and corruption. He refers to Claudius as a 

he talks to his mother of 

Hamlet believes that her marriage to her dead husband’s brother 

Other characters too use the same imagery. Claudius, when he hears of the death of Polonius, uses the image of someone concealing a disease they have to illustrate the idea that he should have dealt with Hamlet sooner. This disease, he says, feeds 

This idea of disease feeding on or consuming life, whether secretly or openly, is continued when Claudius talks of sending Hamlet to his death in England. He reflects that 

And similarly, Claudius compares the dangers of Hamlet’s return to Denmark as that of an ulcer.

Laertes too uses similar imagery when he talks about his sister’s danger from Hamlet. 

and both Hamlet and Gertrude use disease imagery in reference to Gertrude’s sin. Hamlet says

and Gertrude says

Contrasting the imagery of sickness, disease and corruption, is that of flowers. This imagery is particularly connected with Ophelia. In Act 4 Scene 5, Ophelia hands out flowers to those around her. Each of the flowers has symbolic significance. While Ophelia herself is

she hands out 

The ones most likely given to Claudius, Fennel and coumbines, represent flattery, deceit and disloyalty. All of these representations and symbols are important and Ophelia, probably the only innocent in the whole play, is deliberately linked to flowers almost as an antidote to the sickness and disease that inhabits the thoughts of the other characters and Denmark as a whole.

 There are of course other images that reoccur throughout the play – there are images that refer to the idea of appearance vs reality, and these are closely associated with clothing images that appear also. We have war imagery too which closely relates to the atmosphere of the time – the campaigns fought by Hamlet’s father and Fortinbras too.