Hamlet

The Central Work of English Literature

Hamlet was written around 1600-1601, in the middle of Shakespeare’s creative life, and it is the work that separates his early period — the histories, the comedies, the early tragedies — from the great tragedies that followed: Othello, King Lear, Macbeth. It is as if, writing Hamlet, Shakespeare discovered a new kind of interiority, a new way of rendering consciousness on the stage, that changed what he — and what the theatre — could do.

Prince Hamlet of Denmark returns from university at Wittenberg to find his father dead and his mother married to his uncle Claudius, who has assumed the throne. A ghost in his father’s shape reveals that Claudius murdered him. Hamlet is commanded to revenge — and then does almost everything except revenge, for the length of the longest play in the canon.

”To Be or Not to Be”

The most famous soliloquy in English — and arguably in world literature — is Hamlet’s meditation on suicide and endurance, delivered in Act 3. “To be or not to be, that is the question” — the question is not merely whether to kill himself but whether to act at all, whether consciousness itself is a burden that makes action impossible. The “undiscovered country” from whose bourn no traveller returns is not just death but the unknown consequences of action: you cannot know what you are doing until it is too late to undo it.

This paralysis is not weakness but a form of philosophical honesty. Hamlet knows too much to act blindly. He requires certainty that is not available. His problem is a version of every thinking person’s problem: that reflection and action are in tension, that consciousness creates complexity where decisiveness requires simplicity.

The Language

Shakespeare gave Hamlet the most extraordinary language he ever wrote for a single character. “What a piece of work is a man!” “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” “This above all: to thine own self be true.” “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” “The rest is silence.” These phrases are not decorative but structurally essential — each one advances Hamlet’s thinking and the play’s argument simultaneously.

The density and speed of Hamlet’s mind — the puns, the digressions, the sudden lurches from comedy to philosophy to cruelty — is the best evidence for the claim that Shakespeare invented, or at least first fully rendered, modern psychological interiority.

Claudius and the State

The play’s political dimension — the rotten state of Denmark, the corruption that flows from a usurped throne — is sometimes overshadowed by its psychological richness, but it is equally important. Claudius is a more interesting villain than his reputation suggests: intelligent, genuinely in love with Gertrude, capable of remorse (his prayer scene is one of the play’s most complex passages), and ultimately unable to give up what his crime purchased.

Our rating: 4.9/5 — The central work of English literature; every reading reveals new dimensions, every production offers new possibilities.

The Three Texts

Hamlet exists in three early printed versions: the First Quarto (Q1, 1603), the Second Quarto (Q2, 1604-5), and the First Folio (F, 1623). The three texts differ substantially. Q1 — known as the “Bad Quarto,” long thought to be a memorial reconstruction by an actor or actors — is shorter than the others and contains significantly different versions of several key passages; the famous soliloquy begins “To be or not to be, aye there’s the point,” not “that is the question.” Q2 is the longest text, probably close to Shakespeare’s manuscript. The Folio omits some 230 lines present in Q2 while adding passages not in Q2. Modern editions typically conflate Q2 and F, producing a play longer than either text that Shakespeare may never have intended to exist.

The textual instability matters because Hamlet is the most textually analysed play in the canon, and many famous readings depend on specific word choices that differ between texts. The Q1 version, whatever its origin, is a real Hamlet — probably reflecting an early performing version — and reading it alongside Q2/F reveals how much the play could accommodate different emphases while remaining recognizably itself.

The Sources

The story of Hamlet derives from a Scandinavian legend recorded in Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum (c. 1200), in which a prince named Amleth feigns madness to survive his father’s murder by his uncle and eventually takes revenge. This story was further developed in François de Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques (1570), which Shakespeare probably used directly. There was also likely a pre-Shakespearean English play on the subject — referred to by scholars as the Ur-Hamlet, possibly by Thomas Kyd — which has not survived. Shakespeare’s transformation of these sources is total: the Amleth of Saxo is a strategist whose feigned madness is a tactical choice; Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a philosopher whose madness, real or performed, is inseparable from genuine crisis.

The Ghost

The ghost of Hamlet’s father is among the most carefully ambiguous supernatural elements in the canon. It may be what it claims to be: the spirit of a murdered king, denied the sacraments and therefore unable to rest, demanding justice. It may be a devil in his father’s shape, exploiting Hamlet’s grief to drive him to damnation. The play does not resolve this ambiguity — Hamlet himself cannot resolve it, which is partly why he cannot act. His “The spirit that I have seen / May be the devil” is not mere excuse; it is a genuine epistemological problem. And the device of the play-within-the-play is his attempt to generate evidence that does not depend on the ghost’s credibility.

This ambiguity is theologically precise for an Elizabethan audience: Catholic theology held that the dead could return from Purgatory to seek prayers or resolution; Protestant theology denied this, and held that any apparent ghost must be either illusion or devil. Hamlet’s uncertainty about the ghost maps onto the religious uncertainty of a culture in the middle of a Reformation that had destabilized the most fundamental categories of the afterlife.

Performances and Interpretations

The interpretive freedom that Hamlet permits has generated a performance tradition of extraordinary variety. The nineteenth century produced heroic, melancholic Hamlets — Kean, Kemble, Garrick before them — in which the prince’s delay was read as tragic paralysis in a noble soul. The twentieth century complicated this: Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film read Hamlet through a Freudian lens; Jonathan Pryce’s 1980 RSC production had the ghost emerge from inside Hamlet himself, delivered in Hamlet’s own voice. John Gielgud, Alec Guinness, Peter O’Toole, Nicol Williamson, Ian Charleson, Mark Rylance, David Tennant, and Benedict Cumberbatch are among the actors who have defined the role in their generations. Each production reveals something different because the play is genuinely capacious: it contains more than any single interpretation can hold.