Hamlet, by Shakespeare: summary and analysis

For four centuries Hamlet has been explained by saying that he is indecisive. But Shakespeare's play says something else, and it is there, in the text, for anyone who reads carefully: Hamlet does not hesitate out of weakness. He is the only character on the scene who stops to calculate the price before acting, in a castle full of people who act without thinking.

Elsinore, the dead king and the order that no one can obey

The play takes place in Elsinore, Denmark. A king died. His brother took the throne and married the widow in less than a month. And the son of the dead king, a student who rushed back for the funeral, watched it all.

On the first night, a sentry already says that his soul is sick, before any crime has been revealed. This is how Shakespeare opens the play: with unease, not with murder. And then the specter of the dead king appears, speaking from a specific place: under the stage, in the basement that the Elizabethan theater reserved, by convention, for hell.

The ghost tells what happened to him after his death:

"I am thy father's spirit, doom'd for a certain term to walk the night, and for the day confin'd to fast in fires, till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purg'd away." (Hamlet, Act I, scene 5)

Fire that purges and ends, not eternal fire: this is purgatory, not hell. And it is a request for revenge against his own brother who is still alive, the new king, Claudius.

Therein lies the dilemma that sustains the entire play. If the specter is indeed the father, the order is legitimate and Hamlet's delay is flawed. But if it is a spirit that only uses the voice of the father, to obey is to fall into a trap, because revenge is precisely what God's law reserves for itself. The play never decides which of the two things is true. And not deciding is itself an answer.

The test before revenge

Hamlet does not act on the ghost's word. He demands proof. When a group of actors arrives at the castle, he sets a trap: he stages a murder in front of the court like the one the specter described, a king poisoned in his ear while he sleeps, and watches his uncle's face during the scene. When the king asks the name of the play, Hamlet gives it Shakespeare's own title: "The Mousetrap." Worth noting for readers who cross into Portuguese-language editions of the play: the reference translation this cluster relies on, D. Luís I's nineteenth-century version, renders the title as "O Laço" ("The Snare") instead of the more common Portuguese "A Ratoeira." It works: Claudius gets up in the middle of the performance, orders everything to stop and leaves. There is no longer any doubt about the crime.

A mouse behind the curtain

The next scene returns the trap to Hamlet himself, in a cruel way. In his mother's room, he hears someone moving behind a curtain and stabs the rapier into the cloth without looking, shouting:

"How now? A rat?" (Hamlet, Act III, scene 4)

Behind the curtain was Polonius, the old counselor, Ophelia's father. Nosy, yes, but unarmed and innocent of the king's death. He is the only man that Hamlet kills without a second's hesitation, without making any calculations about souls and purgatory, and he is precisely the one who should not die.

The prayer scene

Just before, Hamlet had the murderer kneeling and unarmed right in front of him, praying, and put away his sword. The reason was not cowardice: it was a religious calculation about where Claudius's soul would go if he died at that moment. It's the most discussed scene in the play, and it deserves its own article: why Hamlet doesn't kill Claudius while praying explains the entire reasoning, and the irony that the audience sees and the hero doesn't.

Ophelia, the only one who truly goes crazy

As Hamlet calculates, someone pays the price. Ophelia is used as bait by her own father, is rejected by the man she loves and sees that same man kill her father behind a curtain. She goes crazy, gives out flowers and says the most lucid sentence in the entire text:

"We know what we are, but know not what we may be." (Ophelia, Hamlet, Act IV, scene 5)

Shortly afterwards she drowns, and the priest refuses to give a full funeral because the circumstances are suspicious. The same doubt about the afterlife that stopped Hamlet's hand before his uncle now shortens her funeral.

The end: almost everyone dies

In the last act, Hamlet, Laertes, Queen Gertrude and Claudius himself die, in an outcome that the entire delay of the play only postponed. The one who arrives at the empty castle is Fortinbras, prince of Norway, who has marched through the entire play for a patch of land that he himself admits is worthless. He orders Hamlet's body to be lifted like a soldier's, and says:

"He was likely, had he been put on, to have proved most royal." (Fortinbras, Hamlet, Act V, scene 2)

It's worth noting who says this phrase: the man who got everything, and who acted without hesitation for almost nothing.

Hamlet is not the indecisive one, he is the only one who calculated the price

Put the pieces together and the current reading splits. Hamlet demands proof before acting, when he could have blindly trusted a voice from beyond the grave, as Macbeth trusted the witches. He keeps his sword before a kneeling man for a precise theological reason, not out of fear. And he is the only character in the play who stops, when everyone else, from his uncle to Laertes himself, acts first and thinks later, or never thinks at all.

The price he calculated was real. But, like all delays, it had a cost, and he wasn't the one who paid a large part of it.

Continue: Why Hamlet doesn't kill Claudius by praying · Why Hamlet didn't inherit the throne · Existential anguish and loneliness in Pequeno Príncipe · Mark Antony's speech
Source class (YouTube): Hamlet, de William Shakespeare (NousCast)