Hamlet

A prince is asked by a ghost to avenge a murder and spends five acts interrogating the request, the ghost, and himself.

TragedyRevenge dramaGriefMadnessDelayMortality

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English reading edition

Full Project Gutenberg text, newly typeset—not a publisher scan. Public-domain status varies by country; check local laws. The source license is included.

Edition and source

How to read it

The first play in which thinking is the action. Hamlet's soliloquies invented a stage where consciousness could be overheard mid-argument; the delay everyone complains about is the play's real subject — a mind refusing to convert grief into a plot.

Selected section overview

These are selected acts, parts or episodes, not a complete chapter list. Summaries contain spoilers; descriptive headings are editorial.

Act IThe ghost
Elsinore's cold watch, Claudius's slick court, and the ghost's charge. Hamlet's 'inky cloak' sets grief against political convenience.
Act IIAntic disposition
Feigned madness, Polonius's surveillance, the players arrive. 'What a piece of work is a man' — despair phrased as praise.
Act IIIThe Mousetrap
'To be, or not to be'; the nunnery scene; the play-within-the-play traps Claudius; Hamlet spares him at prayer and kills Polonius behind the arras.
Act IVDispersal
Hamlet shipped to England, Ophelia's madness and drowning, Laertes returns as the revenger Hamlet refuses to be.
Act VGraveyard and duel
Yorick's skull turns metaphysics into bone. The rigged duel kills the whole royal line; Fortinbras inherits a stage of corpses.