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Hamlet by William Shakespeare
SETTING OF THE PLAY
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Being an Englishman, Shakespeare, however, kept the whole set of plays in Denmark in the twelfth century. But he gives several hints about England through the process of sending a sealed letter. Claudius has ordered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to reach out to the king of England. Similarly, in the play, the reference to Germany also appears through Hamlet's schooling.
SIMPLE & SHORT PLOT
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Act I, Scene I
Marcellus and Bernard are two officers who are guarding the palace. One day, they see a ghost. Then they narrate to Horatio about ghosts, but Horatio disagrees with the soldiers. But the ghost reappears at midnight, and they persuade Horatio to talk with the ghost. Horatio tries to stop the ghost, but the ghost flees. Actually, they find similarities in the ghost's appearance with that of the dead king of Denmark. The ghost again appears to Horatio, and Horatio tries to talk to it. The ghost again disappears as it dawns. Then, seeing a ghost of Hamlet's father, Horatio decides to narrate Hamlet.
Scene II
Actually, after the death of Hamlet's father, Claudius married Hamlet's mother, Queen Gertrude. So, Hamlet seems to be sad. He wears black-mourning clothes. His uncle and mother try to persuade him not to wear such clothes, but Hamlet refuses. Later, Queen Gertrude tells him not to go back to school in Wittenberg and stay in Denmark. Hamlet accepts her proposal. Hamlet doubts that Claudius and his mother killed his father because, within 2 months of his father's death, they got married.
As Hamlet is alone, Horatio, Marcellus, and Bernardo come and narrate about the ghost that had appeared at midnight dressed in armour from head to foot and looked like the old king. But Hamlet's philosophical mind does not allow him to believe in ghosts.
Scene III
Polonius and Ophelia are father and daughter. In the past, Hamlet had a close relationship with Ophelia. Laertes was Ophelia's brother, and he extremely loved his sister, Ophelia. But her father suggests that Ophelia not show her deep affection towards Hamlet because if she did, she would be the cheapest for Hamlet. So, if she wants to make Hamlet crazy with her love, she should be cold.
Scene IV
"Hamlet, Horatio, and Marcellus at midnight meet a father ghost. As Hamlet asks the ghost questions, the ghost starts escaping. But Hamlet follows it.
Scene V
Finally, the ghost tells him that he is his father's ghost and that he was killed by Claudius. But Hamlet was told that his father died due to the poisonous snake's biting. The ghost tells Hamlet to take revenge for killing Claudius, but he should not kill his mother, Gertrude. The old king's spirit has vanished. Hamlet, knowing the reality, decides to pretend to be a madman.
Act II, Scene 1
Hamlet pretends as a madman. Polonius thinks that Ophelia's cold behaviour made him so.
Scene II
To please Hamlet, the king and queen called Hamlet's two childhood school friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They tell them to find out the actual cause of his sadness and madness. Now, Polonius appears to the king and queen to inform them that Ophelia's coldness towards Hamlet has made him crazy.
He adds that to make him normal, Hamlet and his daughter should get married. To support his claim, he also showed Hamlet's written love letter to his daughter, Ophelia.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern also come to meet Hamlet, but Hamlet soon realises that they come to watch his every activity. Later, they confess that they were called by the king and queen to make him happy. Rosencrantz informs Hamlet that, to please him, he has invited a wandering actor company to perform a play.
Then Hamlet meets the actors' company and orders them to perform a play based on a Duke, Gonzago, who was poisoned in his garden by a relative, and the relative later gets married to the Duchess. Actually, Hamlet wants to frame the play as his father's murder. Hamlet thinks that if the king and queen watched the play and were really involved in his father's death, their facial expressions would change, and he would be sure of his father's murder by his uncle Claudius and his mother Gertrude.
Act III, Scene 1
King and Queen ask Rosencrantz and Guildenstern if they found any causes of Hamlet's problem. They reply that they found nothing. They inform the king and queen that they have called the Actors Company to please him.
In this scene, Claudius and Polonius deliberately leave Hamlet and Ophelia alone to know whether Hamlet's sadness is due to Ophelia's coldness.
As they are watching them, Hamlet does not show any love for her, and he even refuses to take any tokens from Ophelia. Seeing the activities of Hamlet, Polonius requests that Claudius manage an environment to talk between Hamlet and Gertrude, and he will hear their secret conversation. The king accepts his proposal.
Scene II
According to Hamlet's instructions, the play is ready. Everybody has come to watch the play. The play starts, and Hamlet is observing King Claudius' face.
In company acting, initially, Duke Gonzago and his wife are talking. In the next scene, Duke Gonzago is sleeping in his orchard, and an evil man taking advantage of sleeping pours poison into Duke's ear.
Now, King Claudius, finding a resemblance to his own past crimes, becomes horrified. Then, in the next scene, the very evil man marries the duke's wife. Seeing his own past evil actions repeated, he started crying out. Then he hurriedly left the court (where the play had been performed). Now, through Claudius' activities, Hamlet and Horatio are sure that the ghost has spoken the truth.
Scene III
King Claudius thinks that Hamlet knows his past plot. So, he plans to send Hamlet to England with his two friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In the meantime, Polonius comes and informs the king that Hamlet is going to meet his mother alone. Then Polonius departs for her mother's and son's conversation. Claudius starts praying to God to save his fortune. As Claudius is praying, Hamlet sees him, but he does not prefer killing him at the moment because he thinks that if he kills him at this time, he will go to heaven.
Hamlet gives his best opportunity to escape, thinking that he should kill him at the time of drinking or in his rage condition. so that Claudius will go to hell.
Scene IV
Queen Gertrude and Hamlet start talking. Polonius, hiding behind a curtain, overhears their conversation. Hamlet shows his rage towards his guilty mother, and Polonius thinks that he will kill the queen. So he cries aloud for help. But Hamlet thinks of Polonius as Claudius kills mistakenly Polonius.
Act IV, Scene I
Queen meets the king and tells him that Hamlet is mad, and he even killed Polonius. Later, the king calls Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and tells them to go with Hamlet to England as soon as possible. But before that, he orders them to search for the corpse of Polonius.
Scene II
They do not find Polonius's dead body. They also ask their friend, Hamlet, about it, but he does not tell them.
Scene III
The King forces Hamlet to say where the dead body is, but Hamlet does not reveal it. Claudius here reveals that he is sending Hamlet to England to murder him. For that, he will send a letter to the king of England ordering him to kill Hamlet as soon as he reaches English soil. So, in such a written letter, he hands Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to the king of England.
Scene IV
Hamlet does not want to leave his native land, but Claudius forces him to leave for England, saying he is insecure in Denmark.
Scene V
Ophelia and her brother Laertes hear their father's Polonius death from Hamlet's sword.
Scene VI
Hamlet has left for England. Later, Horatio gets a message that Hamlet was robbed by pirates, and later pirates freed him as they knew Hamlet as the prince of Denmark.
Scene VII
Claudius consoles Polonius' son, Laertes. He says that he did not kill his father, but Hamlet killed him. Meanwhile, the king receives a letter from Hamlet stating that he has returned safely to Denmark. Now evil Claudius again makes a plot to kill Hamlet, inviting a fencing game between Laertes and Hamlet.
Scene VIII
In this act, Ophelia kills herself (drowning) due to the great shock of her father's death by her lover, Hamlet.
Act V, Scene I
Hamlet and Horatio meet again. They watch secretly Ophelia's funeral procession, which the king, the queen, and Laertes attend. Knowing his beloved death, Hamlet mourns. Laertes shows his great anger towards Hamlet, but he does not see Hamlet there. Hamlet says to Horatio that he loves Ophelia more than his brother, Laertes. Then Hamlet and Horatio secretly depart from there.
Scene II
Hamlet tells Horatio of his uncle Claudius' evil plot to kill him by sending him to England. He adds that he knew that plot after reading Claudius' letter. He further informs Horatio that when his two friends slept, he opened the sealed letter and found that he should be killed by the English King as he would arrive in England. Then Hamlet robbed his name and wrote his two friends' names, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. When he is narrating his adventures, a messenger comes and tells him that Hamlet was challenged by Laertes for fencing. Hamlet thinks that it is just a friendly match.
Now the fencing match starts. At first, Prince seemed to be winning. Then they stop for a while to take a rest. Then King tells Hamlet to drink energy-giving wine (actually, it was poison). Hamlet refuses to drink until he finishes the match. Match restarts; the Queen feels thirsty and drinks the same wine that has been given to Hamlet by Claudius. Drinking that wine, Queen suddenly cries that she has been poisoned. At that time, Hamlet is terribly wounded by the poisoned sword, and when they exchange their weapons, Hamlet also wounds Laertes with the same poisoned sword. (Actually, that poisoned sword was given by the king to Laertes.) So, they have to die.
As Hamlet sees the Queen dying, he orders them to shut the door. At that time, Laertes is lying on the ground due to the wound made by the poisoned sword, and he tells Hamlet that he will also die very soon due to the poisoned sword. He further reveals to Hamlet that the poisoned sword was the king's evil plan to kill him in the duel. Then Hamlet attacks the king and stabs him with the poisoned weapon. He also forces the king to drink the poisoned wine. Claudius died, and Laertes, asking forgiveness from Hamlet, also died. Hamlet summons Horatio and asks him to inform the Danish people of the truth. Finally, Hamlet dies.
Throughout the play, six major characters die from two families. From Hamlet's family, there are three people, and others from Polonius` family. From Hamlet’s family: Claudius, Gertrude, and Hamlet; from Polonius: Ophelia, Laertes, and Polonius.
CHARACTERIZATION
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Hamlet:
Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, was at school in Germany when his father, King Hamlet, died. After his father's death, he comes home to Elsinore Castle to meet his mother, Queen Gertrude. But she had already married his uncle, Claudius, after two months of his father's death. So he finds his uncle Claudius as the king of Denmark.
One day, the ghost of Hamlet's dead father appears to him in the castle of Elsinore and tells him that Claudius killed him by pouring poison into his ear as he was sleeping in Orchard. Hamlet then decides to take revenge, but his philosophical mind does not allow him to take revenge until he finds proper evidence. So, he begins to think too much and hesitates to make a split-second decision. He doubts—did the ghost tell the truth? Hamlet starts searching for this answer. Finally, in Act III, he got enough proof after studying Claudius' face in a theatrical performance. But Hamlet still hesitates to finish Claudius.
Actually, Hamlet's tragic weakness is hesitation, the inability to act when action is needed. He is too much of a thinker, which causes his own death.
Gertrude:
She is Hamlet's mother, the queen of Denmark. Actually, she did not participate in King Hamlet's murder, but she was a criminal in the sense that she got married after two months of her husband's death. She also does not think that it is immoral to marry her husband's brother, Claudius. She is a tragic character who dies at last, unknowingly, after drinking poisonous wine.
The very sorry thing is that, without knowing Claudius's past evil plot against her ex-husband, she dies.
Claudius:
Claudius is the brother of the former Danish king. He became king by killing his own brother and marrying his own sister-in-law. He later, realising that his past crime was known to Hamlet, makes several plots to kill Hamlet, but at the end of the play, Hamlet kills Claudius.
The Ghost:
In Act I, Scene I, he appears to two officers, Marcellus and Bernardo. Later, Horatio also sees it. It is actually the ghost of the dead king (Hamlet's father). Later, Hamlet has a conversation with his father's ghost and knows the reality of his father's murder. Actually, Shakespeare uses the ghost to make the drama a revenge tragedy because the use of the ghost is part of the tradition of such plays.
Polonius:
He is a moral old man, and he is very loyal to the royal family. He is the father of Laertes and Ophelia. Later on, he is mistakenly stabbed by Hamlet, who thinks of him as Claudius.
Laertes:
He is the son of Polonius and the elder brother of Ophelia. Laertes knows that the cause of the destruction of his family is Hamlet. So, he wants to take revenge on Hamlet. He accepts Claudius' proposal for a fence competition between him and Hamlet. He had a great passion for killing Hamlet in that dual competition. Later, Laertes and Hamlet wounded each other with a poisoned sword. So, Laertes has to pass away. Before his death, he reveals to Hamlet that the poisonous sword was to blame for Claudius but not for him.
Ophelia:
She is the daughter of Polonius and the younger sister of Laertes. She loves Hamlet too much. As she knows the death of her father by her lover, Hamlet, she becomes mad, and on her mad stage, she sings "St. Valentine's Day Song." Later on, in her madness, she drowns and dies. Actually, in her madness and death, Hamlet has to be blamed.
Horatio:
Horatio is a good gentleman and a scholar whom Hamlet extremely believes. Actually, he does not have any position in court. From Horatio, Hamlet knows the appearance of the father's ghost in Act I, scene I. He is the one whom, at last, Hamlet requests to tell the truth to people about Claudius' evil plot.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:
They are Hamlet’s two childhood friends or schoolmates from Wittenberg, Germany. They are called by Claudius in Denmark to please Hamlet and to find out the causes of his sadness. There are hints that they may be killed on English soil, as Hamlet has written their name, robbing his own name, on the sealed letter on which Claudius has requested to kill Hamlet as he lands in England. Marcellus, Bernardo: They are two officers who guard Elsinore's palace. While guarding the palace at midnight, they see the appearance of the ghost; later, they narrate it to Horatio.
Hamlet as a revenge tragedy
Revenge tragedy was fully developed in the Elizabethan age, especially by Thomas Kyd and John Marston. Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and John Marston's Antonio's Revenge are two examples of successful Elizabethan revenge tragedies. After that, Shakespeare also wrote a revenge play, Hamlet. But it is true that the play Hamlet has many similarities with Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. In Kyd's play, a son ghost appears to the father and demands revenge for his murder, but in Hamlet, a father ghost appears to the son Hamlet. As in Kyd's play, a mad girl and a man with the name Horatio also appear in the play Hamlet. Many critics claim that Kyd once wrote a play based on the Hamlet story, but it was not published. Later, Shakespeare found Kyd's writing and copied it.
Some Features of the Revenge Tragedy:
a) The revenge of a relative's murder or rape
b) The revenge of a father by a son (as in Hamlet) or the revenge of a son by a father (as in The Spanish Tragedy).
c) The appearance of a ghost
d) The hesitancy of the hero to take a split-second decision
e) The use of real or pretended insanity (in Hamlet, Hamlet pretends to be mad, but in The Spanish Tragedy, a girl is really mad).
f) Suicide, blood, or violence on the stage
g) Philosophical soliloquies, as in the play Hamlet. Hamlet's famous philosophical soliloquie, "To be or not to be, that is the question,"
h) Sensational use of horror murder scenes on stage.
All those above features of revenge drama can be found in Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Sigmund Freud and Shakespeare's Hamlet Sigmund Freud and Sophocles' Oedipus Rex
Freud was especially interested in Greek myth. However, in the play Hamlet, we find Oedipus's complex relationship. So, for him, “Hamlet was another play that applies the Oedipus myth'. He finds here a slight application of the Oedipus complex. He tells Sophocles Oedipus Rex that Oedipus's childhood sexual desire for his mother was suppressed in the presence of his father, Laious, and that suppressed desire was stored in the unconscious layer of his mind and later manifested as he killed his own father and slept with his own mother.
Freud claims that each individual is influenced by sex. Each son's child makes an ego claim of that mother's body, but as he grows up, he finds the presence of another man, i.e., his father, to claim that body. Then his sexual desire for his mother is suppressed and restored in his unconscious mind.
But that desire, according to Freud, should come from outside. To come out, such suppressed desires take indirect channels like masturbation, sleep of the tongue, works of art, jokes, and so on.
In terms of Hamlet, Freud asserts that baby Hamlet was also not free from sexual desire towards his mother, as Oedipus faced the same reality. Like Oedipus, baby Hamlet saw his father as a hindrance to fully possessing his mother's body. Then his desire remains in his unconscious mind. But later, his father was killed by Claudius, and Claudius slept with his mother. According to Freud, what the older Hamlet is doing is all due to his suppressed desire for his mother. Freud asserts that older Hamlet does not want to take revenge upon his father's murderer; rather, he wants to win the mother's body from Claudius because his sexual desire was suppressed two times, i.e., first from his father and later from Claudius.
To sum up, for Freud, a child named Hamlet Oedipus wanted to possess his mother's body, but he could not due to his father being present. Then the suppressed sexual desire remains in the unconscious mind. Later, even after his father's death, his unconscious sexual desire was again suppressed when he found Claudius with his mother. So, his suppressed desire to come out chooses the revenge motif towards Claudius.
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