Hamlet

A freezing night on the battlements of Elsinore. For two nights, the guards have seen an armored figure roaming; when Hamlet takes his turn on watch, the ghost at last speaks to him. It is his father, the old king, dead barely two months. He did not die from a serpent's bite, as the realm was told: his own brother, Claudius, poured poison into his ear as he slept, before seizing the crown and marrying Queen Gertrude, the grave still fresh. "Avenge me," says the shade—but spare your mother, leave her to heaven and to her own remorse. And so the son is left alone, bearing on his shoulders the weight of a world that is "out of joint."

From then on, the prince plays a double game. He feigns madness so they will believe him harmless, and his counterfeit lunacy baffles the court: the king grows anxious, the old counselor Polonius thinks he reads lovesickness in it, and Gertrude can no longer read her son. He harshly repulses Ophelia, whom he nonetheless loves, banishing her "to a nunnery"—for in this castle, where spies lurk behind every tapestry, any tender confession would become a weapon. The suspicious Claudius summons two old schoolmates, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to pierce the prince's secret; Hamlet sees through them with a single glance.

A troupe of players arrives, and chance offers him his test. He has them perform before the king the murder of a sovereign poisoned in his garden—the very scene the ghost described. At the fatal moment, Claudius rises, pallid, and halts the play: the murderer's conscience has just betrayed itself before the entire court. Hamlet has his proof. Yet when he finally surprises the king alone, kneeling in prayer, he stays his hand: to kill Claudius in mid-prayer would be to send him to heaven—and he wishes to damn him. Once again, he delays.

Summoned by his mother, he overwhelms her with reproaches until she recoils in horror from herself. A movement behind the tapestry: believing he is striking the king, he runs his sword through Polonius, hidden there to eavesdrop. From this point on, the blood will not stop flowing. Claudius, under the guise of protecting him, ships him off to England with his two false friends and a sealed letter ordering the prince's death upon arrival. But Hamlet uncovers the snare, rewrites the letter, and brings the sentence down upon Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in his stead.

Meanwhile, Ophelia has descended into madness. Her father slain by the hand of the man she loved, she loses her reason, singing shattered songs while distributing flowers, and drowns in the river, swept away by her garlands. Returning to the realm, Hamlet passes through a churchyard where two gravediggers jest as they dig: he takes in his hands the skull of Yorick, the jester who carried him as a child, and contemplates what kings and clowns are reduced to. Then the procession appears—it is Ophelia's funeral. Laertes, her brother, mad with grief, leaps into the grave; Hamlet throws himself in as well, and the two men grapple over the dead woman's body.

Here Claudius has his weapon. He arms Laertes for a "courteous" duel in which the foil will be envenomed, and furthermore prepares a poisoned cup should the blade fail. The combat begins; everything is upended. Gertrude drinks the cup intended for her son and collapses. The swords are exchanged in the scuffle, and each man is struck by the venomous blade. Laertes, dying, denounces the king; Hamlet, in one final surge, at last forces Claudius to drink his own poison. The prince falls in turn, and entrusts his friend Horatio with the task of telling the living what has transpired there. "The rest is silence." In the distance, the drums of Fortinbras sound: the young Prince of Norway enters the corpse-strewn hall, and commands that Hamlet be borne like a soldier, while the cannons salute a kingdom changing hands.