Prince Hamlet

• 1. Introduction

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  Prince Hamlet of Denmark stands at the center of what is likely the most analyzed character in the English literary tradition. Written by William Shakespeare between 1599 and 1601, the tragedy bearing his name opens with a young prince already broken by grief. His father, King Hamlet, is freshly dead. His uncle Claudius has seized the throne. His mother Gertrude has married the man who murdered her first husband. And then, on the battlements of Elsinore, a ghost appears.

  Before the play is finished, Hamlet will have caused the deaths of Polonius, Laertes, Claudius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern. He will have played a role in the fates of Ophelia and his own mother. Yet for centuries, critics, actors, and audiences have argued over a single question: why does it take him so long to act? The answer, it turns out, depends entirely on who you ask.

• 2. The Ghost and the Test

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  When the ghost of King Hamlet commands his son to avenge his murder, he gives the prince a charge that is nearly impossible to verify. A ghost that claims to be the spirit of a murdered king is not the same as proof. Hamlet's response is to devise an experiment. He arranges for a troupe of actors to perform a play depicting the murder of a king, and stations his friend Horatio to watch Claudius's face.

  Claudius demands the performance be stopped partway through. His distress, visible to the entire court, confirms in Hamlet's mind that the ghost told the truth. Yet even this confirmation does not produce immediate action. When Hamlet follows Claudius to his chambers intent on killing him, he stops at the sight of his uncle at prayer. Hamlet's reasoning is specific: a man killed in the act of confession would go to heaven, while King Hamlet died without foreknowledge of his death and is now in purgatory doing penance. Hamlet decides he would rather catch his uncle during some sin, so that Claudius would be condemned rather than saved.

  This moment, one of the most debated pauses in all of drama, leads directly to catastrophe. Hamlet's second attempt on Claudius's life kills Polonius instead, who was hiding behind a curtain.

• 3. Reformation and Purgatory

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  Scholars have pointed out that Hamlet's hesitation is not simply personal. It sits inside a specific theological controversy. The Protestant Reformation had made the Catholic doctrine of purgatory a contested idea in Shakespeare's England. King Hamlet's ghost explicitly identifies himself as residing in purgatory, doing penance for sins he had no chance to confess at death.

  For a Protestant audience, this ghost would have been immediately suspect. Purgatory was frowned upon, even denied, in Protestant England. The very concept the ghost invokes to explain its suffering was one that many of Shakespeare's contemporaries rejected. Hamlet, then, is not merely uncertain about whether to kill a man. He is uncertain whether to trust a supernatural entity whose theology is already marked as questionable by his culture.

  This religious context also governs Hamlet's calculation at the prayer scene. His concern is not mercy toward Claudius. His stated goal is damnation rather than mercy, which is, by the logic he inherits from both traditions, a deeply troubling motivation. The Reformation had put religious certainty itself in doubt, and the ghost at the center of the play embodies that doubt.

• 4. A Name's Buried Roots

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  The name Hamlet does not originate with Shakespeare. It appears in an earlier form, Amleth, in a book of Danish history written in the 13th century by the scholar Saxo Grammaticus. From there, the story was popularized by the French writer Francois de Belleforest as L'histoire tragique d'Hamlet, and arrived in English as Hamblet.

  Saxo rendered the name as Amlethus, the Latin form of the old Jutish Amlethae. Tracing further back, the Old Icelandic name Amlodi derives from the Icelandic noun amlodi, meaning fool, which resonates directly with the way Hamlet performs madness as a strategic disguise in the play. The name also entered Irish as Amlodhe, and through phonetic change arrived at Amlaidhe, a name given to a hero in Irish folk tradition. The deeper root of all these forms carries the meaning furious, raging, wild.

  Belleforest's version is significant for another reason. In his telling, Amleth has not yet attained man's estate, which is one piece of evidence in a long-running debate about how old Shakespeare's prince actually is.

• 5. The Question of Hamlet's Age

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  In the fifth act, a gravedigger reveals that he has been in his profession since the very day that young Hamlet was born, the day Old Hamlet defeated Old Fortinbras, and that he has been at his post for thirty years. By this arithmetic, Hamlet is 30. The skull of the jester Yorick, which Hamlet holds in that same scene, is said to have been in the earth three-and-twenty years, which would make Hamlet no older than seven when he last rode on Yorick's back. Richard Burbage, who is assumed to have originated the role, was 32 at the time of the play's premiere.

  Yet a strong case exists that an earlier version of Hamlet was a teenager. A 30-year-old prince who attended the University of Wittenberg would be unusual; members of royalty and nobility in either Elizabethan England or medieval Denmark did not typically attend university at that age. A 30-year-old heir, well-liked by the populace as Claudius himself acknowledges, would also have been of age to assume the throne and would have been a natural successor. His uncle's election over him would require explanation the play does not offer.

  The gravedigger's line does not appear in the First Quarto, where Yorick is said to have been in the ground only twelve years. And the First Folio text contains an ambiguity: the word rendered as "sexton" by modern editors may originally have read "sixteene", suggesting the gravedigger has been in Denmark thirty years but a grave digger for only sixteen. Under that reading, it is the gravedigger who is 30, and Hamlet who is 16.

• 6. Mirror and Double

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  Ophelia describes Hamlet as the glass of fashion and the mould of form, the expectancy and rose of the fair state. This description turns out to be structurally accurate in ways that go beyond flattery. Every major character in the play projects their own preoccupations onto Hamlet, and nearly every character has a formal parallel with him.

  Polonius repeatedly misreads his own expectations into Hamlet's behavior. Gertrude interprets all her son's distress as resulting from her hasty remarriage alone. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern find in their old schoolmate the frustration of stalled courtly ambition. Claudius tracks Hamlet only insofar as he represents a threat to the throne. The First Gravedigger believes Hamlet is simply insane, no different from that whoreson mad fellow Yorick.

  Hamlet also mirrors other characters structurally. Hamlet, Laertes, Fortinbras, and Pyrrhus are all sons seeking revenge for their fathers. Hamlet and Fortinbras both have plans obstructed by uncles who are kings. The play within the play deepens these reflections further: Lucianus, the murderer in The Murder of Gonzago (which Hamlet tauntingly calls The Mousetrap), is a nephew killing a king, just as Hamlet intends to be, but also a poisoner, just as Claudius is. Both Hamlet and Ophelia are rebuked by a surviving parent of the opposite gender. Both are seen entering scenes carrying books.

• 7. Four Centuries of Performance

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  Richard Burbage is assumed to have created the role at the Globe Theatre, and the line of notable performers since is long enough to serve as a partial map of theatrical history. David Garrick made Hamlet a centerpiece of his work in the 18th century. Sir Henry Irving, the first actor ever to be knighted, performed the role for 200 consecutive nights at the Lyceum Theatre in London in 1874, a record at the time. John Gielgud played Hamlet more than 500 times between 1930 and 1945.

  The role has attracted actors whose off-stage lives became entangled with it. Richard Burton played Hamlet on Broadway in 1964 during an out-of-town tryout that became notorious when he married Elizabeth Taylor during the run. Daniel Day-Lewis broke down on stage at the Royal National Theatre in 1989 during the scene where the ghost of Hamlet's father appears, and was replaced first by Jeremy Northam and then formally by Ian Charleson. Ralph Fiennes won the Best Actor Tony Award for his 1995 portrayal.

  The role has also crossed boundaries of gender and national tradition. Mrs Powell was the first woman to play Hamlet in London in 1796. Danish actress Asta Nielsen played a version in a 1921 film that reimagined the character as a woman. Maxine Peake played the role at the Royal Exchange Manchester in 2014, and Ruth Negga played it at the 2018 Dublin Theatre Festival. Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film remains the only full-length version of the play on film. The 2025 Royal Shakespeare Company production, directed by Rupert Goold and designed by Es Devlin, was set aboard the Titanic.

• 8. What Hamlet Cannot Do

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  T. S. Eliot, in his essay Hamlet and His Problems, collected in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, wrote that Shakespeare's Hamlet is located not in the action, not in any quotations that we might select, but in an unmistakable tone. The 1948 film starring Laurence Olivier opened with a voice-over calling it the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.

  Ernest Jones, following Sigmund Freud, argued that Hamlet suffered from the Oedipus complex. In his essay The Oedipus-Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet's Mystery: A Study in Motive, Jones wrote that Hamlet's moral fate is bound up with his uncle's for good or ill, and that the call of duty to kill his uncle cannot be obeyed because it links itself with the call of his nature to slay his mother's husband. Harold Bloom later offered a Shakespearean Criticism of Freud's work in response.

  Hamlet himself delivers what may be the clearest diagnosis. After watching an actor weep over a fictional character named Hecuba, Hamlet asks what Hecuba is to him, or he to Hecuba, that the player should weep for her. He calls himself a rogue and peasant slave for failing to match even a professional performer's capacity for feeling. His grief is real. His duty is clear. His paralysis remains. Critics Stephen Booth and William Empson have both written extensively on the relationship between Hamlet's unresolvable nature and the audience's own.