What happens in Hamlet

On a freezing midnight platform at Elsinore, two sentries see a ghost in armor that looks exactly like the dead King Hamlet. They fetch Horatio, a scholar and a skeptic, who watches the figure march past and refuses to dismiss it as a trick of the eye. The men agree to tell the dead king’s son. Prince Hamlet is about thirty, home from university and sick at heart. His father has been dead barely two months, and his mother Gertrude has already married his uncle Claudius, who now wears the crown.

The ghost speaks to Hamlet alone. It says Claudius murdered him by pouring poison in his ear while he slept in the orchard, then took his crown and his queen in a single stroke. It demands revenge. Hamlet swears to obey, but he hesitates. To buy time and cover, he puts on an “antic disposition,” acting mad. His strangeness frightens Ophelia, the daughter of the king’s councilor Polonius, and her father decides love has unhinged the prince. Claudius is less sure. He summons Hamlet’s old schoolfriends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to spy on him.

A troupe of players arrives, and Hamlet sees his chance. He has them stage a murder that mirrors his father’s death, watching Claudius for a reaction. The king rises in the middle of it and flees, and Hamlet now knows he is guilty. He finds Claudius kneeling at prayer and could kill him there, but he holds back, unwilling to send a praying soul to heaven. Then, in his mother’s chamber, he hears someone behind the tapestry and stabs through it, thinking it is the king. It is Polonius, eavesdropping. Hamlet kills the wrong man.

Claudius now has his excuse. He ships Hamlet to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, carrying a sealed letter that orders the prince’s execution on arrival. Meanwhile Ophelia, ruined by her father’s death and Hamlet’s cruelty, goes truly mad. She drifts through the court singing broken songs, then drowns. Her brother Laertes storms back from France demanding answers, and Claudius, smooth and quick, points him at Hamlet.

Hamlet does not reach England. He discovers the letter at sea, rewrites it to condemn Rosencrantz and Guildenstern instead, and escapes back to Denmark after a pirate attack. He arrives at a churchyard as gravediggers turn up old bones. One skull belonged to Yorick, the jester he loved as a boy, and Hamlet holds it and thinks about how all greatness ends in dust. Then Ophelia’s funeral procession arrives. Laertes leaps into her grave in grief; Hamlet reveals himself and grapples with him before they are pulled apart.

Claudius and Laertes have already laid a trap. They propose a friendly fencing match, but Laertes will use a blade tipped with poison, and Claudius will keep a poisoned cup of wine ready as a backup. The match goes wrong for everyone. Hamlet scores the first hits. Gertrude, toasting her son, drinks the poisoned wine and dies. Laertes wounds Hamlet with the unbated sword, then in a scuffle the blades switch and Hamlet wounds him with it. Dying, Laertes confesses the plot and names the king. Hamlet stabs Claudius and forces the rest of the poisoned wine down his throat. Then Hamlet dies too, asking Horatio to live and tell the story. Fortinbras of Norway marches in to find the Danish royal family dead on the floor, and takes the throne.