Hamlet
Mourner, satirist, and delayed avenger whose consciousness is the play.
Renaissance · Play · c. 1601
Hamlet
William Shakespeare
A Danish prince is charged by a ghost to avenge a murder and spends five acts thinking, acting, and failing to keep thought and action apart. The court becomes a stage of surveillance.
Tragedy
The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.
Characters
Claudius
Usurper-king whose competence makes the crime politically successful.
Ophelia
The casualty of other people’s plots, her madness a lyric leftover.
Themes
Action and thought
Conscience does not simply delay revenge; it becomes a world.
Seeming
Denmark is a place where every surface may be a performance.
Motifs
Theater is used to catch a king and to question reality.
Something is rotten, and the imagery never lets the body rest.