🚨 Spoilers ahead. That's the whole point. If you wanted to be surprised, you should have read the book.
Hamlet, prince of Denmark, comes home to find his father dead and his uncle Claudius wearing the crown and married to his mother. Dad's ghost shows up to say Claudius murdered him. Hamlet spends most of the play stalling, faking madness, and staging a play to confirm it, leaving Polonius stabbed, Ophelia drowned, and two old school friends executed. The finale is a rigged fencing match with a poisoned sword and a poisoned cup. Almost everyone dies, Claudius included, and Norway's Fortinbras strolls in to take over.
- Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play. Combined texts run past 4,000 lines, more than any other Shakespeare play. The man took a simple revenge plot and kept adding scenes until the story needed its own weekend.
- Shakespeare's son Hamnet died in 1596. Hamnet was eleven. Hamlet was written a few years later, around 1599 to 1601. The dates are documented. How much the two are connected is still argued over.
- The first printed Hamlet is much shorter. The First Quarto of 1603 is far shorter than the Second Quarto, and it puts the famous soliloquy in a different place in the play. Three early texts, three different Hamlets.
- “Hamlet does his big soliloquy holding the skull.” Wrong speech. The skull belongs to the Act 5 graveyard, where Hamlet talks to Horatio about Yorick. 'To be, or not to be' is Act 3, and nobody hands him a prop.
- “Hamlet is the one who says something's rotten in Denmark.” Marcellus would object. He says 'Something is rotten in the state of Denmark' to Horatio in Act 1, right after Hamlet follows the ghost offstage. The prince is not even in the room.
- “Hamlet says the lady doth protest too much.” Mom said it. Gertrude says 'The lady doth protest too much, methinks' in Act 3, about the Player Queen, right after Hamlet asks how she likes the play.
- If they say: “Hamlet is just a guy who can't make up his mind.”
You say: “I say he makes plenty of decisions. He stabs Polonius through a curtain, and he rewrites the orders so Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are the ones killed in England.” - If they say: “Ophelia killed herself, right?”
You say: “I say the play never states it flatly. Gertrude reports she drowned when a branch broke, and in Act 5 a priest calls her death doubtful while the gravediggers argue about her burial.”
🍸 Your Bar Line
A prince takes five acts to avenge his father, kills Polonius by mistake, and dies by poisoned sword, while Horatio survives and Fortinbras walks into a very empty castle.
