Hamlet

A freezing night on the battlements of Elsinore. For two nights, the guards have seen an armored figure prowling; when Hamlet comes to keep watch in turn, the ghost finally 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 while he slept, before seizing the crown and marrying Queen Gertrude while the grave was 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 "out of joint."

From then on, the prince plays a double game. He claims madness to be deemed harmless, and his feigned insanity baffles the court: the king grows anxious, the old counselor Polonius thinks he discerns the pangs of lovesickness, and Gertrude can no longer read her son. He harshly rejects Ophelia, whom he nevertheless loves, and banishes her to a "nunnery"—for in this castle, where spies lurk behind every tapestry, any tender avowal would become a weapon. The suspicious Claudius summons two of Hamlet's old schoolfellows, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to uncover the prince's secret; Hamlet sees right through them at a glance.

A troupe of players arrives, and chance provides him with a touchstone. He has them enact 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 performance: the murderer's conscience has just betrayed itself before the entire court. Hamlet has his proof. Yet when he finally comes upon the king alone, kneeling in prayer, he stays his hand: to kill Claudius at prayer would be to send him to heaven—and he wishes him damned. Once again, he delays.

Summoned by his mother, he overwhelms her with reproaches until she recoils in horror at herself. A movement behind the arras: believing he is striking the king, he runs his sword through Polonius, who was hiding there to eavesdrop. From this moment on, the blood will not stop flowing. Claudius, under the guise of protecting him, dispatches him 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 commission, and brings the sentence down upon Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in his stead.

Meanwhile, Ophelia has descended into madness. With her father killed by the hand of the man she loved, she loses her reason, sings broken snatches of song while distributing flowers, and drowns in the brook, borne away by her own garlands. Upon 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 bore him as a child, and contemplates what becomes of kings and clowns. Then the procession appears—it is Ophelia's burial. Laertes, her brother, mad with grief, leaps into the grave; Hamlet throws himself in as well, and the two men grapple over the maiden's body.

Claudius now has his weapon. He arms Laertes for a "courteous" duel in which the foil will be envenomed, and further prepares a poisoned chalice should the blade fail. The bout begins; everything is overturned. Gertrude drinks the cup intended for her son and collapses. The rapiers are exchanged in the scuffle, and each is struck by the envenomed blade. The dying Laertes denounces the king; Hamlet, in one last surge of strength, finally 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. "The rest is silence." In the distance, the drums of Fortinbras sound: the young prince of Norway enters the hall strewn with corpses, and orders Hamlet borne like a soldier, while the cannon salutes a kingdom changing hands.