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Shakespearean TragedyAQAEdexcelOCRA-Level

Hamlet — Complete Revision Guide

William Shakespeare, c. 1600–1601

Everything you need for GCSE and A-Level. Act-by-act plot, character profiles, themes with evidence, 20+ pivotal quotations with analysis, Elizabethan and Jacobean context, and exam-style questions with planning notes.

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Plot Summary Characters Themes Context Key Quotations Exam Questions

IAct 1: The Ghost and the Charge

On the battlements of Elsinore, the guards Barnardo and Marcellus, with the scholar Horatio, see the Ghost of the late King Hamlet. Meanwhile, Claudius — the dead king's brother — has married the queen, Gertrude, and taken the throne. He addresses the court, dispatching ambassadors to Norway to neutralise the threat from young Fortinbras. Prince Hamlet appears in mourning black and is publicly chided for prolonged grief. Alone, he delivers his first soliloquy (“O, that this too too solid flesh would melt”), expressing disgust at his mother's hasty remarriage. Laertes warns his sister Ophelia against Hamlet's affections; Polonius forbids her to see him. Horatio brings Hamlet to meet the Ghost, who reveals he was murdered by Claudius and demands revenge. Hamlet swears the others to secrecy and resolves to feign madness — an “antic disposition.”

Key Moments

• The Ghost's appearance — supernatural, providential, or demonic?
• Claudius's smooth public rhetoric — “mirth in funeral”
• Hamlet's first soliloquy establishes his disgust and inwardness
• The Ghost's command: “Remember me”

IIAct 2: The Antic Disposition

Polonius sends Reynaldo to spy on Laertes in Paris — a small scene that establishes the play's pervasive surveillance. Ophelia reports Hamlet's strange visit to her closet; Polonius decides love-melancholy is the cause. Claudius and Gertrude welcome Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet's university friends, recruited to discover what ails him. The travelling Players arrive. Hamlet, alone, berates himself for inaction in the “rogue and peasant slave” soliloquy and conceives the Mousetrap plan: he will have the Players perform a re-enactment of his father's murder to test Claudius's guilt — “the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.”

Key Moments

• Surveillance everywhere — spies, eavesdroppers, false friends
• Hamlet's wit deployed as weapon (“fishmonger”)
• The Player's emotion for Hecuba shames Hamlet's passivity
• The Mousetrap plan — Hamlet seeks empirical proof

IIIAct 3: The Mousetrap and the Closet

Polonius and Claudius hide to observe Hamlet meeting Ophelia. Hamlet delivers “To be, or not to be” and then, suspecting he is being watched, cruelly rejects Ophelia: “Get thee to a nunnery.” Claudius concludes Hamlet is dangerous and resolves to send him to England. The Players perform “The Murder of Gonzago”; Claudius rises in horror and the play breaks off. Hamlet's suspicion is confirmed. Passing the chapel, he finds Claudius apparently praying and refuses to kill him — sending a soul to heaven would be “hire and salary, not revenge.” In Gertrude's closet, Hamlet rebukes his mother fiercely. Hearing a noise behind the arras, he stabs through it and kills Polonius, mistaking him for Claudius. The Ghost reappears, visible only to Hamlet, to remind him of his task and to spare Gertrude.

Key Moments

• “To be, or not to be” — the central meditation on suicide and action
• The play-within-the-play succeeds — Claudius is exposed
• Hamlet spares the praying Claudius — theological hesitation
• The killing of Polonius — Hamlet finally acts, but on the wrong target

IVAct 4: Madness, Plotting, and Poison

Claudius dispatches Hamlet to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, secretly carrying letters ordering his execution. Hamlet sees Fortinbras's army marching to fight over a worthless patch of Polish land and contrasts their decisive action with his own delay (“How all occasions do inform against me”). Ophelia, driven mad by her father's death and Hamlet's rejection, sings fragmented songs and distributes flowers before drowning in a brook. Laertes returns from France, raging, and is manipulated by Claudius into a plot: a fencing match in which Laertes will use a poisoned, unbated rapier. As insurance, Claudius will prepare a poisoned cup. News arrives that Hamlet's ship was attacked by pirates and he is back in Denmark. Gertrude reports Ophelia's death.

Key Moments

• Ophelia's madness — the cost of patriarchal control
• Fortinbras as foil — honour-driven action vs Hamlet's delay
• Claudius and Laertes hatch the poisoned-rapier plot
• Ophelia's drowning — reported, not staged

VAct 5: The Graveyard and the Duel

Two gravediggers debate whether Ophelia deserves Christian burial. Hamlet and Horatio arrive; Hamlet contemplates the skull of Yorick, the old court jester (“Alas, poor Yorick”), reflecting on death's levelling of all human vanity. Ophelia's funeral procession enters; Hamlet leaps into the grave to rival Laertes's grief. Hamlet tells Horatio how he switched the execution letters and sent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths. He accepts the fencing match with calm fatalism: “The readiness is all.” In the duel, Laertes wounds Hamlet with the poisoned blade; in a scuffle they exchange weapons and Hamlet wounds Laertes. Gertrude drinks from the poisoned cup intended for Hamlet and dies. Laertes confesses the plot. Hamlet stabs Claudius and forces him to drink the poison. Dying, Hamlet asks Horatio to live and tell his story; he gives his “dying voice” to Fortinbras as the next king. Fortinbras enters, surveys the carnage, and orders Hamlet a soldier's funeral.

Key Moments

• The graveyard scene — memento mori in dramatic form
• Hamlet's new fatalism: “There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow”
• Four bodies on stage — Gertrude, Laertes, Claudius, Hamlet
• Fortinbras inherits a stage piled with corpses — political restoration after personal tragedy

Exam Tips for Hamlet

Use the soliloquies as structural backbone. Tracking Hamlet's seven soliloquies maps his psychological arc and gives any essay a clear chronological spine.
Always cite Shakespeare's methods. Discuss soliloquy, foil, dramatic irony, antithesis, blank verse / prose switches, and the play-within-a-play structure.
Anchor every theme in context. Reformation theology, Renaissance humanism, the Great Chain of Being, and the revenge-tragedy genre.
For A-Level: name your critics. Coleridge, Bradley, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Jones (Freudian), Stephen Greenblatt, Harold Bloom — each gives a different lens.
Use the foils. Laertes and Fortinbras are designed as comparison cases for Hamlet. Reference them when discussing action, revenge, or honour.
Hold the play's ambiguities. Top responses do not resolve the question of Hamlet's madness, the Ghost's status, or Gertrude's knowledge — they argue that the ambiguity is the point.

Shakespearean TragedyAQAEdexcelOCRA-Level

Hamlet — Complete Revision Guide

William Shakespeare, c. 1600–1601

Jump to section:

Plot Summary Characters Themes Context Key Quotations Exam Questions

IAct 1: The Ghost and the Charge

Key Moments

• The Ghost's appearance — supernatural, providential, or demonic?
• Claudius's smooth public rhetoric — “mirth in funeral”
• Hamlet's first soliloquy establishes his disgust and inwardness
• The Ghost's command: “Remember me”

IIAct 2: The Antic Disposition

Key Moments

• Surveillance everywhere — spies, eavesdroppers, false friends
• Hamlet's wit deployed as weapon (“fishmonger”)
• The Player's emotion for Hecuba shames Hamlet's passivity
• The Mousetrap plan — Hamlet seeks empirical proof

IIIAct 3: The Mousetrap and the Closet

Key Moments

• “To be, or not to be” — the central meditation on suicide and action
• The play-within-the-play succeeds — Claudius is exposed
• Hamlet spares the praying Claudius — theological hesitation
• The killing of Polonius — Hamlet finally acts, but on the wrong target

IVAct 4: Madness, Plotting, and Poison

Key Moments

• Ophelia's madness — the cost of patriarchal control
• Fortinbras as foil — honour-driven action vs Hamlet's delay
• Claudius and Laertes hatch the poisoned-rapier plot
• Ophelia's drowning — reported, not staged

VAct 5: The Graveyard and the Duel

Key Moments

• The graveyard scene — memento mori in dramatic form
• Hamlet's new fatalism: “There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow”
• Four bodies on stage — Gertrude, Laertes, Claudius, Hamlet
• Fortinbras inherits a stage piled with corpses — political restoration after personal tragedy

Exam Tips for Hamlet

Use the soliloquies as structural backbone. Tracking Hamlet's seven soliloquies maps his psychological arc and gives any essay a clear chronological spine.
Always cite Shakespeare's methods. Discuss soliloquy, foil, dramatic irony, antithesis, blank verse / prose switches, and the play-within-a-play structure.
Anchor every theme in context. Reformation theology, Renaissance humanism, the Great Chain of Being, and the revenge-tragedy genre.
For A-Level: name your critics. Coleridge, Bradley, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Jones (Freudian), Stephen Greenblatt, Harold Bloom — each gives a different lens.
Use the foils. Laertes and Fortinbras are designed as comparison cases for Hamlet. Reference them when discussing action, revenge, or honour.
Hold the play's ambiguities. Top responses do not resolve the question of Hamlet's madness, the Ghost's status, or Gertrude's knowledge — they argue that the ambiguity is the point.