A young man comes home from university to find his father dead, his mother remarried to his uncle, and a ghost on the battlements claiming murder. He does not immediately act. That, in a sentence, is why Hamlet has outlasted nearly every other play ever written. The story looks like a revenge thriller, and it is, yet the hero spends most of it thinking, doubting, performing and talking to himself. Readers have been arguing over why for more than four hundred years.
Where the story came from
Shakespeare did not invent the plot. A Danish prince who feigns madness to avenge his murdered father appears in the Latin history of Saxo Grammaticus, written around 1200, as Amleth, and was retold in French by Belleforest in the sixteenth century. An earlier English play about Hamlet, now lost, was probably on stage in the 1590s. What Shakespeare did, around 1599 to 1601, was take a straightforward revenge tale and make the delay itself the subject.
There is a personal note too. Shakespeare’s only son was named Hamnet, a name interchangeable with Hamlet in Elizabethan records, and he died in 1596 at the age of eleven. Scholars are cautious about drawing straight lines from biography to art, and nobody can prove a link. But the fact that a play about a dead father and a living son was written a few years after a father lost his son is difficult to ignore.
The text we read is a negotiated one
Hamlet survives in three early versions: a short and garbled first quarto of 1603, a fuller second quarto of 1604 or 1605, and the version in the First Folio of 1623. Editors combine these in different ways. The result is the longest of Shakespeare’s plays, at around four thousand lines. A full uncut performance runs over four hours, which is why most productions cut it. No single “correct” Hamlet exists, and that fits a character who is always changing his mind.
Why does Hamlet wait?
This is the oldest question about the play, and the answers have shifted with each era. Some nineteenth-century critics saw a man too thoughtful to act. Others pointed out practical problems: he cannot be sure the ghost is honest, and Claudius is the king, protected by guards. Hamlet himself worries about this, and his plan is to test the ghost’s story with a trap:
The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.
He arranges for visiting actors to perform a scene resembling the murder in front of the court. When Claudius leaves in distress, Hamlet is satisfied. And still he does not strike, because the moment he finds Claudius alone, the king is at prayer, and Hamlet decides it would send him to heaven. Delay is the engine of the drama, not an accident in it.
A play full of plays
Hamlet is relentlessly theatrical. The prince instructs the actors on how to speak. He pretends to be mad, and the court spies on him, so almost every scene has someone watching someone else. Polonius places Ophelia where he can eavesdrop. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are sent to report on their old friend. The Mousetrap is a play within the play. The result is a world where nobody is quite sure who is sincere, and it makes the audience complicit, because we too are watching and judging performances.
- The soliloquies take us inside Hamlet’s head, and in them he often argues against himself.
- Ophelia’s tragedy is often rushed past: she loses her father to Hamlet’s sword and her sanity to grief, and the court barely notices.
- Fortinbras, the Norwegian prince, acts decisively and inherits Denmark in the end, a pointed contrast.
To be, or not to be
The most famous speech in English begins:
To be, or not to be, that is the question
People often treat it as a speech about suicide alone, and that is part of it. But it is also a reflection on what we endure and why we endure it: the fear of what comes after death makes us “bear those ills we have.” Its power lies in the way it reasons, rather than declares. Hamlet argues his way into a corner and out again, and the audience is invited to follow the logic as if it were their own.
Grief, and what comes after
One reason the play resonates with ordinary readers is that it is, among other things, a portrait of mourning. Hamlet’s first appearance finds him in black, resisting the court’s pressure to move on. His mother tells him that death is common. He answers that for him it is not a matter of seeming at all. The gravedigger scene in the fifth act turns that grief into something close to calm. Hamlet holds the skull of Yorick, a court jester he remembered from childhood, and contemplates how even great men end in dust. He emerges from the graveyard changed, more accepting, ready to say that “the readiness is all.”
The final scene is a chaos of poisoned swords, a poisoned cup, and a pile of bodies. Hamlet, Gertrude, Claudius and Laertes all die. Horatio, the friend who has been steady throughout, is asked to stay alive and tell the story. That request is the play’s quiet last gesture: to be understood after death, someone must survive to explain.
Why it lasts
Hamlet endures because it does not settle. Directors cast him as a man of action, a depressive, a political schemer, a woman, or a child. Each version finds something real, and none exhausts it. It is a play about uncertainty that stays uncertain. If you have only seen the skull-and-speech cliché, read the whole thing once, preferably aloud. The ordinary conversations are as sharp as the famous lines.
