Summary
Analysis
HORATIO - Horatio is a scholar from Saxony and a friend of Hamlet. He is Hamlet's main confidant throughout the play.
MARCELLUS AND BERNARDO - Marcellus and Bernardo are friends of Horatio and they are both officers in the army.
FRANCISCO - Francisco is the sentry. He is the first to see the ghost and warn Hamlet.
GHOST - The ghost is the spirit of the late King Hamlet. He tells Hamlet to revenge his death through the murder of Claudius.
HAMLET - Hamlet is introduced bitter and upset because his mother is remarrying his uncle so quickly after is father's death. Hamlet is the main character in the play and the Prince of Denmark. Hamlet is very intelligent and his intelligence could be confused with madness throughout the play. Hamlet struggles throughout the play to come to terms with his father's death and determine how and if he should seek revenge. This struggle expands throughout as the ghost reappears to tell Hamlet to seek revenge and Hamlet's conscious convinces him not to kill Claudius.
FORTINBRAS - Fortinbras is the Prince of Norway and a foil character to Hamlet. Fortinbras' father has recently died and Fortinbras wants to follow in his father's footsteps by recovering some of the territory his country lost in the war.
CLAUDIUS - Claudius is Hamlet's uncle and has taken over as King of Denmark. He poisoned Hamlet's father and has remarried Hamlet's mother, Queen Gertrude. Claudius plans to kill Hamlet several times in the play because he fears Hamlet could uncover the truth about the late King Hamlet's death and lead the country in a rebellion against him.
GERTRUDE - Gertrude is Hamlet's mother and the Queen of Denmark. She remarried Claudius shortly after the death of Hamlet's father. Since she did not allow for a full mourning period before she remarried, Hamlet suspects that she might have been having an affair with Claudius all along and she might have taken part in the plot to kill King Hamlet.
POLONIUS - Polonius is Claudius' advisor. He is very self-centered and uses his children as pawns to get what he wants. Hamlet is constantly making fun of him, but Polonius is too dense to catch on. This makes him a foil character to Hamlet because it shows that Hamlet is much smarter than everyone around him. Hamlet kills Polonius "by accident" when Polonius is spying on Gertrude and Hamlet.
OPHELIA - Ophelia is Polonius' daughter. She is young and very attractive, but she is dependent on the men in her life; namely Hamlet, Polonius, and Laertes. This is shown when Ophelia turns insane after the Hamlet rejects her, Polonius dies, and Laertes goes away to school.
LAERTES - Laertes is Polonius' son and Ophelia's older brother. He is sent off to school early in the play, but returns when he hears about the death of his father. He becomes a foil character to Hamlet by vowing to avenge his father's death.
ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are childhood friends of Hamlet. Claudius asks them to come to the castle to find out what Hamlet knows about the murder of King Hamlet. Hamlet warns them that Claudius will use them and then leave them, but they don't pay attention and end up getting killed.
THE ACTORS - Hamlet has a group of traveling performers put on a play at the castle. The play that Hamlet wants them to put on is parallel to the murder and marriage that has just occured in the castle. The purpose of this is so that Hamlet can see Claudius' reaction to determine whether or not Claudius is the murderer.
THE CLOWNS - The "clowns", or gravediggers as they are commonly known, are used in act V scene i to provide some comic relief before the climax of the play.
YORICK - In the gravedigger scene, the gravediggers pull out a skull. This skull belonged to a man named Yorick and is used to represent the idea that it doesn't matter who you are when you are living, everyone is the same in death.
REYNALDO - Reynaldo is the messanger Polonius sends to spy on Laertes while he is away at school.
Hamlet is baisically about one man's choice whether or not he should seek revenge for his father's murder. It starts off in medias res with Hamlet learning of the ghost of his father. Hamlet follows this ghost until the ghost stops to warn him that Claudius is the murderer. Meanwhile, not even two months have gone by and Hamlet's mother, Queen Gertrude, is remarrying Claudius. This completely enrages Hamlet and he wonders why his mother can't wait for the full mourning period. Meanwhile, Ophelia is completely in love with Hamlet and when Hamlet sends her a love letter, she goes to Polonius for advice. Polonius tells her to deny Hamlet and Ophelia obeys. Laertes is about to leave for school and Polonius gives him a speech on how to behave while he is away. In order to figure out how much Hamlet knows about the murderand if Hamlet is sane or insane, Claudius sets up several meetings between Hamlet and other characters. Polonius claims that Hamlet went crazy after Ophelia rejected him, so they set up a meeting between Ophelia and Hamlet. Claudius also sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to see if they can find out how much Hamlet knows about the murder. Meanwhile, a group of travelling actors come to the castle and perform The Murder of Gonzago, a play that parallels the current situation in the castle. Hamlet watches the King's reaction and what he sees confirms Hamlet's hypothesis: Claudius murdered King Hamlet. Gertrude and Hamlet meet in her chambers and Polonius hides behind a curtain to listen. While Hamlet is trying to make Gertrude realize what she has given up in murdering King Hamlet, he hears Polonius behind the curtain and stabs at the curtain, hoping that Claudius was behind it. Polonius falls dead on the floor. In an evil plot to kill Hamlet, Claudius orders Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to take Hamlet to England. Claudius plans to have Hamlet killed on the way, but Hamlet figures out the plan, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern die instead. Meanwhile, back at the castle, the young, vulnerable Ophelia has gone crazy. She ends up committing suicide by drowning herself. When Laertes returns from school to find his father dead, he immediatly seeks revenge. He talks with Claudius and together they devise a plan to kill Hamlet. Laertes challenges Hamlet to a duel and Claudius puts poison on the tip of Laertes sword. As a back-up plan, Claudius prepares a poisoned drink for Hamlet to drink. The attempt to kill Hamlet works, however, Laertes, Gertrude, and Clausius also die. As Hamlet is dying, he tells Horatio that Fortinbras should succeed him as King of Denmark.
THE GHOST - The ghost in the beginning is Hamlet's father, King of Denmark. The purpose of the ghost is for foreshadowing purposes. The ghost immediatly lets the reader know that things aren't right. If the play had started with the second scene, the reader would have no clue that anything was wrong or unusual. The audience would think that Hamlet's reaction to his mother's marriage with his uncle is the usual response of a child when one of his parents remarries. By putting the ghost in right away, it helps get the audience interested and involved in the play sooner. This is partially due to the ghost and partially because the play starts in Medias Res. The audience wants to figure out what is going on and why the ghost is there.
"TO BE OR NOT TO BE . . ." - In Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy, Hamlet is debating whether or not to commit suicide or kill his uncle. He says "whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them" (lines 65-68, act III sc.i). He seems to be contemplating whether it would be better for him not to do anything to Claudius and suffer mentally of kill Claudius and seemingly "end" his troubles. I believe that by killing Claudius, his problems wouldn't have ended. Denmark loves the new king because they don't know what he has done. If Hamlet were to kill him, the people of Denmark would be upset and probably murder Hamlet in revenge. Plus, how does Hamlet know that his mother won't go off and seduce someone else right away? After he discussed the possibility of killing Claudius, he contemplates his own suicide. He says that "sleep" will end his heartache. But then he says that if he "dreams", he'll have nightmares. He's using sleep/dreams as an analogie for death and the afterlife. This can be compared to Dante's Inferno, because Dante always slept when he had a sensory overload. Obviously, Hamlet has had quite a sensory overload with all that has happened to him. It seems that in this entire speech, Hamlet is not afraid of death, but is afraid of what would happen to him in the afterlife. To sum it up, he is saying that killing himself would relieve a lot of his pain, but the catch is that he could be miserable in the afterlife.
OPHELIA'S DEATH - It's really pathetic that Hamlet and Laertes fight over Ophelia's grave at her funeral. It's symbolic that they fight because she was completely manipulated by all of the males in this story. She was the innocence caught in the madness. Everybody else in the play was busy playing games and manipulating others and Ophelia is caught in the middle of it. She is obedient and follows her father's, Laertes', and Hamlet's instructions, even though their ideas were far different than their own. Ophelia was completely destroyed after Laertes moved away, Polonius was killed, and Hamlet rejected her. Like so many teenage girls, she was lost and had no one to turn to. Ophelia is the stereotype of a typical teenage girl. She is young, innocent, and pretty. She feels she has no self worth unless someone is telling her what to do. She is a palm tree lost in a hurricane of madness. I know this is completely random, but I suggest reading the book Reviving Ophelia. It tells about teenage girls and why they suffer so much during adolescence. I read it and I have talked to others who have read it as well and all of us found it very interesting.