Hamlet

Hamlet is easiest to follow as a revenge play that keeps refusing to behave like one: the Ghost demands revenge in Act 1, and Hamlet does not kill Claudius until the final scene. This study guide maps the five acts, explains the main themes and characters, and gives you a reading plan built around the soliloquies, where Hamlet thinks out loud.

William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet around 1599 to 1601, and it is the longest of his plays. It is a revenge tragedy, a popular form on the London stage, set in the Danish royal castle of Elsinore. Prince Hamlet, home from university at Wittenberg after his father's sudden death, finds his uncle Claudius on the throne and married to his mother, Gertrude. A ghost in his father's shape tells him Claudius poisoned him and demands revenge.

The story is older than Shakespeare: a version appears in the medieval Danish history of Saxo Grammaticus, and an earlier English Hamlet play, now lost, was staged in the 1590s. What Shakespeare's version is remembered for is the inner life, a hero who argues with himself in some of the most quoted speeches in English. That is why it is still read: it asks how anyone can act with certainty when the evidence is doubtful, grief is raw and someone may be listening behind the curtain.