Hamlet Summary and Analysis

Author: William Shakespeare
Setting: Elsinore, Denmark in the royal castle. It was around the late medieval period.

Significant Characters:

• Hamlet- the prince of Denmark and the protagonist of the play. He is the son of Gertrude, the queen, and the Late King Hamlet. He is the nephew of Claudius, the current King of Denmark. He studied at the University of Wittenberg. He is very thoughtful and reflective, but also very hesitant and indecisive at the same time. He is focused on getting revenge on his uncle for the death of his father throughout the whole play. 
• Claudius- The King and Elsinore, and Hamlet's uncle. He is the plays antagonist and is responsible for the death of Hamlet's father. He is very focused on keeping the throne and getting rid of Hamlet for good. 
• Gertrude- The Queen of Denmark and Hamlet's mother. She married Claudius soon after the death of the Late King Hamlet. She seems to sincerely love Hamlet, but seems weak and unable to see the truth in things. 
• Polonius- He is the Lord Chamberlain of Claudius's court. He is also the father of Laertes and Ophelia. He is very against Ophelia and Hamlet's relationship, and will stop at nothing to stop it. In this sense, he is very much in agreement with Claudius about Hamlet. 
• Horatio- Hamlet's very close friend. He is very trustworthy and loyal to Hamlet, and will help him with anything. He is often looked at as the voice of reason, or the moral compass in the play. 
• Ophelia- Polonius's daughter, and Hamlet's lover. She is put in an position between her father and Hamlet when Hamlet goes crazy. She is forced to go along with her father's plans and schemes. Eventually, she goes mad herself after going through all of this, and she drowns in the river. Some speculate it was suicide because she was pregnant. 
• Laertes- Polonius's son and Ophelia's brother. He spends most of his time in the play in France. He is very quick to take action, and when his father was killed by Hamlet, he was quick to plan revenge on Hamlet with Claudius.
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern- two of Hamlet's good friends from school. They grew up together, and used to be close until they seemed to have turned their backs on him when they started working for the King and Queen. Hamlet is very suspicious of them throughout the play and eventually has them killed. 
• Fortinbras- The prince of Norway. His father was killed by Hamlet's father and he wants to attack Denmark to get revenge for his father. 

Plot:
This story begins with a few of the guards of the castle, and Horatio, keeping watch one night. They see the ghost of the late king of Denmark, otherwise known as the Old Hamlet, Hamlet's father. The ghost would not speak to them, so Horatio decides to tell Hamlet about what they saw, and see if the ghost would talk to Hamlet. The ghost talks to Hamlet and tells him that his uncle Claudius, the one who is now the king of Denmark and married Gertrude, Hamlet's mother, murdered him with poison. He wants Hamlet to get revenge on Claudius for this. This is where Hamlet begins to go mad. He decides that he will pretend to be crazy, and makes Horatio and the guards swear not to tell a soul. While all of this is going on, Polonius is sending Laertes off to France again, while telling Ophelia that she should stay away from Hamlet as best she can. He does not approve of their relationship, and she obeys. She is stuck between trying to figure out what is going on with Hamlet and why is he mad, and also her father who is set on her staying away from him. Polonius goes to the King and Queen and alerts them that Hamlet has gone mad, and he thinks it's because Ophelia has been avoiding him lately. He reads the letters that Hamlet has written to Ophelia to the entire court. At this point, the King and Queen are very concerned about why Hamlet is acting this way, so they ask his close friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on him and figure out what is really going on.
While everyone is becoming suspicious of his behavior, Hamlet thinks that he needs to make sure that the ghost is really telling the truth about his father being murdered, so he decides to put on a play where the actors will act out the murder exactly like the ghost described it, and see the King's reaction to it. During the play, the King gets very upset and leaves abruptly, making Hamlet quite confident that he did kill his father. After everyone follows the king out, Hamlet is told that the queen would like a word with him in her room. On his way there, he sees Claudius and thinks about killing him, but he decides that if he kills him while he is praying, then he would go to Heaven and he does not want that. When he gets to his mother's room, he tries to make her see how corrupt everything is, but he sees someone move behind the curtain, and thinking it was Claudius, he stabs and kills him. He finds out though, that it was really Polonius. Just as Hamlet and his mother were finishing up their talk, Hamlet sees the ghost again, but Gertrude cannot, and this shows how mad Hamlet really was.
Since Claudius sees Hamlet as a threat now, he decides the best hitting to do is to have Hamlet shipping off the England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to be killed. While this is happening, an angry Laertes arrives back in Elsinore after finding out his father is dead. He also sees Ophelia one last time, who has gone mad at this point as well, before she drowns in the river. Laertes plans to get revenge on Hamlet with Claudius, and Hamlet has returned back to Elsinore, unharmed, while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are still on the way there.
At the end of the play, Hamlet and Laertes fence together, while Claudius has planned that Laertes kill Hamlet with his poisoned sword, and if that doesn't work, Claudius was going to try to get Hamlet to drink the poison wine. Hamlet apologizes to Laertes before the fight, and during it, the queen drinks the poison wine and dies. Hamlet is then cut by the poison sword, but Laertes is cut too. While dying, Laertes confesses the plan to Hamlet, who then kills the king. Horatio, upset that everyone especially Hamlet, is dying, threatens to kill himself as well, but Hamlet wouldn't let him. Hamlet wanted Horatio to live to truthfully tell his story.

Narrative Voice:

There is no narrator here because of the fact that it's a play. We get information about what is going on through the characters and switching back and forth between them. We are able to see a lot about the character through their tone, and we can also see their true motives, especially from all of the asides that we read in the play. A lot of the important information is learned from the asides that Hamlet makes to the audience, and from his lengthy speeches. One really important thing in the play would be the language, and the double meaning that is there. In a lot of the things Hamlet says, it can be interpreted in two ways, and this is very important to the play and to the characterization of Hamlet. There was also  some symbols in this play, such as flowers, which represent innocence and beauty, often associated with Ophelia.

Quotes:
1. Marcellus: "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark." (Act 1, Scene 4)

• Marcellus says this when he and Horatio are talking about whether they should go with Hamlet and the ghost into the night. This quote is important because it shows the ghost as a symbol of something rotten in Denmark as a result of Clauduis's crime. This also foreshadows something bad to come in the rest of the play. This connects with the state as a whole too because it can be referring to the health of the state and it's ruler, and how corrupt things are becoming

2. Claudius: "The Queen, his mother, Lives almost by his looks, and for myself--my virtue or my plague, be it either which--She's so conjunctive to my life and soul that, as the star moves not but in his sphere, I could not but by her." (Act 4, Scene 7)

• Claudius says this to Laertes when they are talking about getting revenge on Hamlet. Here we see a different side to Claudius. He seems very genuine with expressing his love for Gertrude, that it might almost be true. Claudius is a very corrupt character for doing what he did, but this quote makes the reader look at whether his love for Gertrude is real or not. We also see from this quote that Gertrude loves Hamlet very much, even though she is a very complex character to get.

Theme: A person cannot get revenge without taking action first. 

 Throughout the whole play, we see Hamlet's struggle of how or when he is going to take revenge on Claudius for killing his father. Most of the time, he over thinks everything and tries to reason with himself and doesn't follow through with what he was about to do. His tone ties into this piece because he often has a thoughtful tone. When he does take action, it is very rash and unplanned.We don't see any action really until the last scene in the play, where everyone except Horatio dies. Laertes is said to be a foil to Hamlet because of this very point as well. Laertes finds out that his father is dead, and he is very quick to make a plan with Claudius and try to kill Hamlet, no questions asked. Hamlet on the other hand took a long time to get revenge, and ultimately ends up dying.

Prompt Revision #1

1991. Many plays and novels use contrasting places (for example, two countries, two cities or towns, two houses, or the land and the sea) to represent opposed forces or ideas that are central to the meaning of the work. Choose a novel or play that contrasts two such places. Write an essay explaining how the places differ, what each place represents, and how their contrast contributes to the meaning of the work.

One very famous novel that comes to mind when thinking about contrasting places is The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald put two contrasting cities in this story: the West Egg, and the East Egg. There are some key differences between these two cities. Fiztgerald shows the differences in these two contrasting cities in many ways, the main one being that the East Egg represents old aristocracy, and the decay of morals in society, and the West Egg represents the newly rich, where the traditional values and old beliefs are kept alive. 

The fact that the West Egg represents the newly rich is very important to the novel. In the novel, people from the West Egg are portrayed as loud, and lacking in social graces. For example, Gatsby throws many parties with hundreds of people, who by the end of the night, aren't acting very polite. His house is also very flashy and everything about him seems to shout out that he has a lot of money. Those are two of the ways that Fitzgerald shows that the people from the West Egg haven't had their money for too long and they don't really know how to use it. Aside from the money aspect of it though, the only reason Gatsby is living this lifestyle is for Daisy Buchanan, the one he loves. He is trying to get her attention, and that was how he had planned to do it. The fact that he would do all of that for Daisy shows how loyal he is to her. This ties into another characteristic of the people who live on the West Egg; they are more loyal, and care more about people than money, unlike the East Egg.

The East Egg is portrayed much differently. Daisy and Tom Buchanan live on the East Egg, and they represent old aristocracy, or "old money". It seems as though the people who come from the East Egg are much more put together, and possess some social graces. But although the people from East Egg seem polite, they are also shallow and fake. As the novel goes on, you continue to see how Daisy and Tom only really care about their money, and not about hurting the people who care about them the most. For example, at the end of the novel, after Gatsby died, Daisy and Tom just move away without even attending his funeral. That just shows how heartless they can be. They care more about being rich, than they do about caring for the people who love them the most. 

The West and the East Egg are completely different when it comes to social graces, but there is also a deeper meaning that is very important to the novel as a whole. The East Egg is associated with people who care more about money than loyalty to their family and friends, and the West Egg is associated with kind-hearted people who care more about the people in their life, instead of the money. The two main characters are perfect examples of this also. Gatsby waited his whole life for Daisy, and he would have done anything for her, but Daisy betrayed him by marrying Tom and shutting him out of her life. So, although the West and East Egg are contrasting cities because of the money, they're also different when it comes to the characters who live there. 

Response to Course Materials #5

For the past few weeks in lit, we have been finishing up Hamlet. It really feels like a never ending play. At first, it took me a while to get down the characters and how they were all related or what their story was, but after going over it a few times, I think I got it down. Aside from actually reading the play and discussing it in class, we have been annotating and watching a few versions of the movie. I have to say, I honestly did not think it would take this long to finish annotating Hamlet. I have spent a good amount of time annotating this play everyday for the last 2-3 weeks, and I just finished today. So that was definitely a challenge. I was really focused on finding all of the themes/motifs in this play while annotating. As for the movies, the first one was a bit boring in my opinion. I didn't like the fact that there wasn't much scenery. I liked the second one better, mainly because of the setting and how much more modern it was. It was much more interesting to watch, and a lot more dramatic, too! We just started watching a third version in class on Friday, so I'm interested to see how that turns out. It is much more modern than the other two, so it should be good.
Other than Hamlet, I'm getting focused on studying the terms from the terms test for the final. I hope I do a lot better on the final than I did on either of the terms tests. I'm a little scared for that. Another new thing that we are doing in class is writing about atmosphere and incorporating tone in the writing. I think that will be really helpful for when we take the AP exam in May!