The most famous play in the world, Hamlet, features the most intriguing and complicated character in all of

literature. Being an era's defining Hamlet is arguably the highest honor an actor can receive in the theater. The
multifaceted Hamlet, who can play many different roles, including son, lover, intellectual, prince, warrior, and
assassin, is the ultimate test for each generation's top actors. As successive generations have reshaped Hamlet in their
own image while discovering in it fresh resonances and access points to probe its depths, perplexities, and
possibilities, the play is no less a testing ground for the critic and scholar. No other play has received as much
analysis or had an equivalent influence on our culture. Only a few number of literary archetypes, such as Oedipus,
Faust, and Don Quixote, who represent fundamental facets of human nature and experience, have made the transition
from the stage to our collective consciousness and cultural mythology, including the brooding young man in black
holding a skull. William Hazlitt, a romantic critic, said that "Hamlet is us."

Additionally, Hamlet occupies a significant, central position in William Shakespeare's theatrical work. The
play, which was first presented around 1600, serves both a climax and a new departure for the author at about the
halfway point of his two-decade career. Shakespeare's first major tragedy, Hamlet, marks a clear transition from the
comedies and history plays that shaped his early career to the tragedies of his later years. Hamlet is clearly unique
even yet it is inextricably tied to both the plays that came before and those that followed. Shakespeare's Hamlet, with
about 4,000 lines, is nearly twice as long as Macbeth and is undoubtedly his most ambitious play. It features a wide
spectrum of characters, from royals to gravediggers, and happenings, including court, bedroom, and graveyard scenes
as well as a play within a play. Apparently endless variety of ideas and subjects are also present in Hamlet, as well as
a completely novel method of conveying them. Perhaps most significantly, soliloquies are transformed from
expositional and inspirational asides to the audience into the verbalization of awareness itself. According to
Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt, "Hamlet seems to mark an epochal shift not only in Shakespeare's own
career but in Western drama; it is as if the play were giving birth to a whole new kind of literary subjectivity." More
than any other play that came before it, Hamlet turns its action inward to dramatize an isolated, conflicted psyche
struggling to cope with a world that has loathed it. Prince Hamlet, who is attempting to balance two conflicting
identities—the heroic man of action and duty and the Christian man of conscience—becomes the contemporary
archetype of the alienated, self-divided person who is urgently seeking self-understanding and meaning. Without the
support of the conventional ideas that guide and encourage his actions, Hamlet must battle crushing doubt. Hamlet
predates that dialogue by more than two centuries. Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold said that the arrival of
the fragmentation and chaos of the modern world meant that "the calm, cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity
have disappeared, the dialogue of the mind with itself has begun."

Hamlet employs borrowed material in a remarkably original way, just like all of Shakespeare's plays do. Saxo
the Grammarian, a Danish author, first gave the Scandinavian folktale of Amleth, a prince summoned to revenge his
father's murder by his uncle, literary shape in his late 12th-century Danish History. François de Belleforest later
rewrote the narrative in French for his Tragiques Histoires (1570). Shakespeare was given the fundamental characters
and relationships in an early draft of the Hamlet plot, but the ghost and the revenger's ambiguity were absent. There is
no question about the usurper's culpability in the Amleth narrative, and the avenger's duty is carried out without any
moral hesitation. Blood vengeance was a sanctioned filial obligation in pre-Christian Denmark, not a potentially
damning moral or religious transgression. Amleth successfully fulfills his duty by lighting the royal hall on fire,
killing his uncle, and announcing himself king of Denmark. Shakespeare's more direct inspiration could have come
from a now-lost English drama from around 1589 known as the Ur-Hamlet. The only thing that has been preserved
from this play is a printed mention of a ghost who yelled, "Hamlet, avenge! " as well as condemnation of the play's
tired bombast. Playwright Thomas Kyd, whose most well-known work was The Spanish Tragedy (1592), one of the
first still-existing English tragedies, is credited with creating the original Hamlet. The Spanish Tragedy popularized
the genre of the vengeance tragedy, which includes Hamlet and works by Seneca and Aeschylus like the Oresteia. A
secret crime, an impatient ghost seeking retribution, a protagonist plagued by uncertainty who fakes madness, a
woman who actually goes insane, a play within a play, and a final bloodbath that results in the death of the assailant
himself are all elements of Kyd's play that Shakespeare echoes in Hamlet. John Marston's Antonio's Revenge (1599),
another tale of retribution on a usurper by a sensitive protagonist, is an even more direct potential source for Hamlet.
 What stands out is the originality and complexity of Shakespeare's treatment, in which he makes radically
new and profound uses of established stage conventions, whether one compares Hamlet to its earliest source or the
handling of the revenge plot by Kyd, Marston, or other Elizabethan or Jacobean playwrights. Hamlet transforms its
exciting elements—a vengeful ghost, a murder investigation, lunacy, a heartbroken maiden, a conflict at her funeral,
and a duel that ends with four deaths—into a daring exploration of mortality, morality, perception, and fundamental
existential truths. Shakespeare used suspense, mystery, and sensation to further a challenging, in-depth dramatization
of epistemology. The "interrogative manner" of the play has been helpfully recognized by critic Maynard Mack,
starting with the play's opening line, "Who's there? "—in response to "What is this fundamental dust? Hamlet
"reverberates with questions, anguished, meditative, alarmed" through drama's most famous soliloquy, "To be, or not
to be, that is the question." The problematic nature of reality and the gap between truth and appearance stand behind
the play's conflicts, complicating Hamlet's search for answers and his performance of his role as avenger.

The ghost of Hamlet's father, King Hamlet, has been spotted in Elsinore, which is now controlled by his
brother, Claudius, who has rapidly married his widowed queen, Gertrude. This is how Hamlet begins, with shocking
evidence that "something is amiss in the state of Denmark." Hamlet is first distant and dubious of Claudius'
arguments for his interventions in support of reestablishing order in the state. The knowledge of mortality and the
vileness of human nature brought on by his father's unexpected death and his mother's quick, and in Hamlet's opinion,
incestuous remarriage to her brother-in-law, leaves Hamlet morbidly and suicidally disillusioned:
O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter!
O God! God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t! ah, fie! ’Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!

Hamlet is a Protestant Reformation thinker who recently graduated from Wittenberg University, whose
former students include Martin Luther and the fictional Doctor Faustus. Like Luther and Faustus, Hamlet challenges
orthodoxy while trying to articulate a central philosophy. When Hamlet is brought into contact with what appears to
be his father's ghost, he is the only one to hear the ghost say that Claudius was responsible for his death. His promise
of retribution drives Hamlet out of his suicidal despair. Hamlet is plagued by misgivings despite the ghost's
captivating presence. Is Hamlet being seduced by the devil or is the ghost actually his father's ghost? Is Claudius
really guilty of killing his father? What did Hamlet do when he sought revenge—right or wrong? Despite promising
retribution, Hamlet waits two months before acting in order to confirm Claudius' guilt for himself by pretending to be
insane. Due to Hamlet's odd behavior, Claudius launches a counter-investigation to see how mentally stable he is. A
meeting between the lovers is staged so that Claudius can witness it. Polonius, who believes that Hamlet is crazed
with love for his daughter Ophelia, summons school pals Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to discover everything they
can. The Elsinore court is therefore dominated by cunning, deception, role-playing, and disguise, and Hamlet's
alleged difficulty of acting slowly is directly tied to his lack of conviction about what is true. In addition, Hamlet's
perception of the world and his role in it are completely destroyed by the suspicion of his father's murder and his
mother's sexual treachery. Hamlet is immobilized by indecision and ambiguity, in which even death is problematic,
as he explains in the famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy in the third act. Hamlet is pushed back to the suicidal
despair of the play's outset.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
 Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death—
The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns—puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.

The advent of a touring theatre troupe gives Hamlet the opportunity to test his theories concerning the ghost's
veracity and Claudius's guilt. Hamlet wants to "capture the conscience of the King" by watching Claudius' response,
so he has the troupe perform the Mousetrap play, which is an exact replica of Claudius' crime. The king's breakdown
during the play appears to support the ghost's charge, but once more Hamlet waits to act until he inadvertently
stumbles upon the guilty Claudius by himself as he is saying his prayers. Hamlet resolves to wait for a chance "That
has no savor of salvation in't," rationalizing that killing the seemingly repentant Claudius will send him to paradise
rather than hell. Instead, he visits his mother's room, where Polonius is concealed in yet another effort to understand
Hamlet's thoughts and motivations. The Freudian view of Hamlet's dilemma, according to which he is troubled not by
moral doubts but by Oedipal guilt, has been backed by this moment between a mother and son, one of the strongest
and most dramatic in all of Shakespeare. When Polonius starts to move in response to Gertrude's shouts of outrage
over her son's allegations, Hamlet instinctively hits the person he believes to be Claudius. Gertrude, convinced of her
son's craziness, tells Claudius of Polonius's death, which causes him to change his mind and order Hamlet's execution
in England instead of exile.

Off-stage, during Hamlet's journey to England, when he unintentionally learns of the death order, and later
when he returns to Denmark following a pirate attack on his ship, is when Hamlet's character undergoes the mental
transformation from reluctant to willing assailant. This sobering realization that levels all earthly distinctions of
nobility and acclaim is compounded by the shock of Ophelia's funeral procession, and he returns to confront the
inevitable human condition of mortality in the graveyard scene of act 5 where he realizes that even Alexander the
Great must return to earth that might be used to "stop a beer-barrel" and Julius Caesar's clay to "stop a hole to keep
the wind away." There is a divinity that shapes our ends, / Roughhew them how we will. In the end accepting his
inability to control his life, Hamlet resigns himself to accept whatever comes. Hamlet confesses to Horatio his
acceptance of a providential will revealed to him in the series of accidents on his journey to England. Hamlet declares
that "There's a peculiar providence in the fall of a sparrow" as he consents to a fight with Laertes that Claudius has set
up to kill his nephew. If it happens now, it won't happen. If it doesn't, it will happen right now. Even if it's not right
now, it will come. The only thing is preparation.

Ironically, Hamlet manages to exact his vengeance in the chaos of the play's last scene while still maintaining
his nobility and moral stature. All of the fatalities are either directly or indirectly caused by the murderer Claudius.
Laertes attacks Hamlet with a sword that has a poisoned point, but Hamlet is able to kill Laertes with the deadly
implement. In the meantime, Gertrude consumes the poisoned beverage that Claudius planted in the cup to ensure
Hamlet's demise. When Laertes, who is now repentant, accuses Claudius of being behind the plot, Hamlet no longer
hesitates and stabs the king to death. Hamlet gives the rule of Denmark to the sole remaining royal, the Norwegian
prince Fortinbras, as he passes away in Horatio's arms, giving the friend the instructions to "represent me and my
cause aright / To the unsatisfied." Although it took the lives of eight people—Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencranz,
Guildenstern, Laertes, Gertrude, Claudius, and Prince Hamlet—the murder of King Hamlet was finally put an end to.
Only Denmark's avowed enemy can restore order. Shakespeare's message appears to be clear-cut: Honor and duty
that demand vengeance consume both the guilty and the innocent. Heroism has to confront the grim reality of the
cemetery.

To emphasize the fact that Hamlet has died as a warrior on a battlefield of both the treacherous court at Elsinore and
his own mind, Fortinbras orders that Hamlet be taken off "like a soldier" and given a military funeral as he finishes
the play. Shakespeare's exceptional insights into Hamlet's nature and the play's events, as well as its astonishing
perplexities, are what make it so wonderful. Few other plays have addressed as many or as complex issues related to
human existence. Is there a particular providence in a sparrow's fall? What is this primordial dust? Being or not
being?