Prince Hamlet of Denmark, has been summoned from his studies at Wittenberg to the castle and court at Elsinore, due to the recent death of his father, the king. Hamlet’s sorrow is doubled by the hasty remarriage of his mother, Gertrude, to his Uncle Claudius, who has seized the throne. Around midnight, outside the castle, the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears to inform him that he was murdered by Claudius who then married Gertrude. The ghost challenges Hamlet to take revenge on his uncle, the king.

In hesitation at performing this command, Hamlet vacillates between action and inaction, and feigns madness. In his famous soliloquies, he chastises himself for not acting against his uncle and for his inability to fulfill his ghost father’s wishes. He also considers the positives and negative aspects of suicide and repulses Ophelia, whom he loves.

Hamlet plots to “catch the conscience of the king”, and prove Claudius’ guilt, by using a band of traveling actors to perform a play representing the crimes of his uncle, whose violent reaction on seeing the play betrays his guilt to Hamlet’s satisfaction. Claudius flees from the play to seek privacy and pray, where Hamlet discovers him but rejects the chance to kill him, fearing he would send his soul to heaven by killing him while he repents. Summoned to an emotional interaction with his mother in her bedroom, Hamlet believes that Claudius is spying on him and Gertrude and accidentally kills Polonius, a counselor to the king and father of Ophelia and Laertes, who planted himself behind the draperies to eavesdrop. The ghost of the former king appears to Hamlet after this murder, but is invisible to the queen, who is convinced of her son’s insanity as she listens to him discourse to an unseen ghost.

Claudius exiles Hamlet to England, ostensibly as punishment for killing Polonius, but in reality sends secret orders that the prince be executed after he arrives. Devastated by Hamlet’s cruel indifference and by her father’s death, Ophelia goes mad and drowns herself, even as word comes that Hamlet changed the execution orders Claudius planned for him and instead had his duplicitous friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern killed and is back in Denmark. Meanwhile Laertes, arrives in a fury to demand satisfaction from the king for his father’s death. Claudius, however, turns Laertes’s wrath against Hamlet, and they plot to kill Hamlet with a poisoned sword in a fencing match, and, in case that fails, Claudius will provide a poisoned drink.

When the challenge from Laertes arrives, Hamlet agrees to what he thinks is a friendly contest, and the two meet in the court. Hamlet has scored two hits when his mother inadvertently drinks to his health from the poisoned cup. A desperate Laertes catches Hamlet off guard and pierces him with the poisoned rapier. Hamlet’s anger is aroused, and he manages to exchange weapons with Laertes and to wound him with the poisoned sword. The queen dies, and Laertes clears his conscience before his death by revealing the whole plot. Hamlet leaps at Claudius, runs him through, and makes sure of his death by forcing him to drink the remaining poisoned wine. Hamlet then dies, having avenged his father’s death in the final moments of his own life.

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