Hamlet is a play written in about sixteen hundred by William Shakespeare, and is one of the most
popular and influential stories ever. Hamlet is set in Denmark, at a time when Norway
is about to attack, and some dodgy stuff is happening in the royal castle of Elsinore.
Prince Hamlet is the son of King Hamlet and Queen Gertrude. At the start of the play,
King Hamlet has died, and the king’s brother Claudius has married Gertrude and taken over
as king. Prince Hamlet is very upset by all this, moping around, saying he wants to die
and that everything sucks. He’s especially angry that Gertrude married Claudius so soon
after the King’s death. So Claudius and Gertrude are concerned by
Hamlet’s behaviour. They try to cheer Hamlet up, and when that doesn’t work they get
a couple of his old friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to spy on him, though Hamlet
sees through the deception. Then a ghost appears to Prince Hamlet, claiming
to be his dead father. King Hamlet’s ghost says that he was murdered by Claudius with
poison, and demands that Prince Hamlet avenge him by killing Claudius. Hamlet isn’t entirely
sure that the ghost really is his dead father, but he agrees to kill Claudius. He tells his
friends Horatio and Marcellus that he will act as though he’s mad, to prevent drawing
suspicion. Hamlet meets with Ophelia, who he has a romantic
relationship with. Hamlet acts crazy and awful to her, telling her he never loved her and
to get to a nunnery. Ophelia’s father, Polonius, says he thinks Hamlet is mad with love, though
earlier he was saying that Hamlet doesn’t love her at all.
So Hamlet has a plan to work out for sure whether Claudius killed King Hamlet. He gets
a group of actors to perform a play in which a king is murdered with poison. Claudius leaves
the room in the middle of the play, which Hamlet sees as proof that his uncle killed
his father. Later, Hamlet comes across Claudius, wrestling with his guilt in prayer. Hamlet
almost kills Claudius there and then, but he decides not to, saying that Claudius might
go to heaven if he’s killed while praying. So then Hamlet is talking with his mother
Gertrude, when he hears a noise behind a tapestry in the room. He thinks it’s Claudius, so
he stabs the tapestry but out falls Polonius, who was spying on the conversation. Having
killed Polonius, Hamlet berates his mother a bit more, telling her not to have sex with
Claudius, until the ghost of King Hamlet pops up again and tells his son to stop mucking
around and kill Claudius already. Claudius is not feeling terribly safe at this
point, so he sends Hamlet with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to England, with a letter
to the King of England saying to kill Hamlet. Hamlet finds the letter and changes it so
it says to kill Rosencrantz and Guildenstern instead. Meanwhile, Ophelia has gone mad from
the death of her dad and her rejection by Hamlet, and her brother Laertes, Polonius’
other child, has returned from France furious. He and Claudius make a plan of their own – they’ll
challenge Hamlet to a fencing match, but Laertes will have a poisoned sword, and Claudius will
offer Hamlet poisoned wine. So Hamlet comes home to Denmark, talks with
a gravedigger, contemplates death, and finds out that Ophelia has drowned, apparently in
a suicidal fit of madness. He has a fistfight with Laertes over who loved Ophelia more.
And then the fencing match begins. Laertes cuts Hamlet with his poisoned sword, then
they accidentally switch swords and Hamlet cuts Laertes with the poisoned sword. Gertrude
drinks the poisoned wine (seemingly unknowingly), and Hamlet finally kills Claudius. So almost
everyone dies, leaving only Horatio to tell the tale to Fortinbras, a Norwegian prince who
turns up at the end to take over the Danish throne.
So that’s Hamlet. There are lots of interesting questions to be asked about why the characters
do what they do. Like, what’s motivating Hamlet? What exactly is he so upset about,
and why does it take him so long to do anything? Is Hamlet really pretending to be mad, or
does he actually go a bit crazy? What about his relationship with Ophelia? Did Hamlet
ever love her? And what’s going on with Gertrude – how much does she
know? There’s lots of stuff going on in Hamlet about justice and identity and action
and uncertainty and power and gender, and that’s part of why Hamlet is so popular
four hundred years after it was written. It’s also full of really cool lines, really poetic
stuff, and funny stuff. You can easily read it online if you wanna check it out.
Anyway thanks for watching. Let me know if you’d like to see more summaries like this.
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