Hamlet
William Shakespeare (1600)
“The most performed play in the English language asks one question: when everything you believe is a lie, is action even possible?”
Language Register
Formal Elizabethan verse dominant — but systematically broken by prose that signals performance, mockery, or madness
Syntax Profile
Blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) as default for nobility and sincerity. Prose for lower characters, comic scenes, and Hamlet's performances of madness and mockery. Rhymed couplets close scenes or signal performed emotion. Shakespeare's sentences in the soliloquies run to extraordinary length — subordinate clauses extending through six, eight, ten lines before resolution. The effect is a mind that cannot stop qualifying, cannot stop thinking its way around every position.
Figurative Language
Extremely high — extended metaphors ('sea of troubles,' 'unweeded garden,' 'bestial oblivion'), embedded similes, and elaborate conceits. The play's central imagery clusters: disease/corruption, theater/performance, war/military, death/rotting flesh, the ear (poison enters through the ear; Hamlet must believe what he hears from the Ghost; Claudius whispering in Laertes's ear).
Era-Specific Language
Mild oath ('indeed'), from 'By the Virgin Mary' — period-appropriate expletive now reads as neutral
Expression of disgust or disapproval — strong moral condemnation in Elizabethan English
'Truth' — archaic even by Shakespeare's time, used for elevated or sincere register
Deliberately mad behavior — 'antic' in 1600 meant grotesque, clownish, farcical performance
Small dagger — appears in 'To be or not to be' ('with a bare bodkin'), specific to the period's material culture
How Characters Speak — Class & Identity
Hamlet
Switches between high blank verse (soliloquies, Horatio) and riddling prose (Polonius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern). The switch encodes trust and contempt simultaneously.
A prince performing madness who cannot stop being a philosopher. His language is his identity and his prison.
Claudius
Smooth, antithetical verse — always balanced, always paired opposites held in political suspension. Falls apart only in the prayer scene.
A supremely competent politician whose language is armor. When the armor fails, there's a murderer who cannot repent beneath it.
Ophelia
Dutiful verse when sane, broken prose and song when mad. Her speech is a seismograph for her psychological state.
A woman whose language is entirely shaped by what others require of her — and whose dissolution is encoded in the dissolution of form.
Horatio
Plain, unornate verse. No wordplay, no rhetoric, no performance.
Trustworthiness encoded as simplicity. In a court full of elaborate speech, straightforwardness is its own kind of radicalism.
Polonius
Verse that sounds wise and isn't. Perfect meter, hollow content. Famous for giving advice while listening at doors.
The bureaucrat who has mastered the forms of wisdom without the substance. His death behind an arras is the right metaphor: a man who lived by eavesdropping.
Gravediggers
Ribald prose, riddling logic, cheerful mortality. The lowest-status characters who are also the most at ease.
Class inversion: the men who bury everyone are the only ones not consumed by anxiety about death. They know where everyone ends up.
Narrator's Voice
Hamlet is not a novel, so there is no narrator — but Hamlet himself functions as a narrator of his own experience through soliloquy. The convention of soliloquy creates the illusion of unmediated access to his consciousness, but Shakespeare frames even this as performance: the soliloquies are addressed to no one, but they are always crafted, always rhetorical. Even alone, Hamlet is writing his own story.
Tone Progression
Act I
Grief-saturated, conspiratorial
The court appears corrupt, the ghost appears, the task is set. Hamlet's verse is desperate and reactive.
Acts II-III
Feverish, intellectually overloaded
The philosophical centre of the play. Hamlet's language is at its most elaborate and his action at its least.
Act IV
Catastrophic, elegiac for Ophelia
Things fall apart. Ophelia's mad scenes bring the play's most broken language. Hamlet is action in exile.
Act V
Quiet acceptance, surgical violence
Hamlet's language simplifies. The graveyard strips abstraction from mortality. The duel is fast and decisive.
Stylistic Comparisons
- Macbeth — Shakespeare's other great study of action and guilt, but Macbeth acts and is destroyed by having acted; Hamlet is destroyed by not acting
- Lear — Hamlet's father-grief and Lear's child-grief as paired meditations on family and power
- Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment — Raskolnikov is Hamlet who goes through with it; the psychological machinery is near-identical
Key Vocabulary from This Book
Notable words used in this text — click to see full definitions