Hamlet Characters

Hamlet · Characters

Hamlet is a single text on the 2028 Leaving Cert course only, and the play’s power comes as much from its characters as from its plot. This page profiles the six figures examiners return to most often: Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, Ophelia, Polonius, and Laertes, each anchored in their own words.

Hamlet

Hamlet is a thinker forced into a role, revenge, that demands action rather than reflection, and the gap between his temperament and his task defines the whole play. He is savagely self-critical about his own hesitation, comparing himself unfavourably to an actor who can summon real emotion for a fiction while he cannot act on a genuine grievance.

O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2

His most famous diagnosis of his own paralysis comes later, when he identifies over-thinking itself, conscience, as the thing that turns brave intentions into inaction.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1

By the graveyard scene, something in him has settled. Confronted by Laertes, he asserts his identity plainly and without the earlier evasions, a small but telling sign of the resolve that carries him through to the final act.

This is I, Hamlet the Dane.Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 1

Claudius

Claudius is the play’s most successful performer of appearance, ruling capably and speaking with real political skill while concealing a fratricide underneath it all. His one moment of unguarded honesty comes in prayer, alone, when he admits the full weight of what he has done in language stripped of any court polish.

O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven;King Claudius, Act 3, Scene 3

Even in that private confession, though, he cannot bring himself to give up what the murder won him, and he recognises, with a kind of despairing clarity, that words spoken without real repentance behind them cannot save him.

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below; Words without thoughts never to heaven go.King Claudius, Act 3, Scene 3

Publicly, though, he never drops the mask of legitimate kingship, and he leans on the idea of divine protection around the throne to talk Laertes out of an open rebellion, using the very language of sacred authority he has himself violated.

There’s such divinity doth hedge a king That treason can but peep to what it would,King Claudius, Act 4, Scene 5

Gertrude

Gertrude is one of the play’s hardest characters to read, because Shakespeare gives her almost no soliloquy to explain her true feelings about the marriage or how much she actually knows. Watching a staged queen swear eternal loyalty, she offers an unwittingly self-implicating verdict on the performance.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.Gertrude, Act 3, Scene 2

Her clearest moment of genuine feeling comes in the closet scene, when Hamlet’s brutal confrontation finally breaks through whatever denial she has been living in, and her grief in that moment reads as entirely real.

O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain!Gertrude, Act 3, Scene 4

By the play’s final act, grief has become her constant condition, and she names the pattern of the family’s catastrophe with a weariness that anticipates her own death by poison only scenes later.

One woe doth tread upon another’s heel, So fast they follow.Gertrude, Act 4, Scene 7

Ophelia

Ophelia begins the play as an obedient daughter with very little room to make her own choices, caught between her father’s instructions, her brother’s warnings, and her own feelings for Hamlet. She sees through Polonius’s hypocrisy earlier than he expects, quietly warning him not to preach caution he does not practise himself.

Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven, Whiles, like a puffed and reckless libertine, Himself the primrose path of dalliance treadsOphelia, Act 1, Scene 3

Watching Hamlet’s cruel treatment of her in the nunnery scene, she mourns not just her own hurt but the collapse of the noble man she believed him to be, in a line that captures how completely his behaviour has unravelled her expectations.

O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!Ophelia, Act 3, Scene 1

Her own descent into madness after her father’s death gives her a strange, fractured clarity, and one line from her mad scenes reads almost like the play’s thesis statement about how quickly identity itself can come apart.

Lord, we know what we are but know not what we may be.Ophelia, Act 4, Scene 5

Polonius

Polonius presents himself as a fountain of wisdom, and his advice to Laertes before he leaves for France is still quoted as genuine good sense, urging discretion above all else.

Give thy thoughts no tongue,Polonius, Act 1, Scene 3

He piles up maxim after maxim in the same speech, cautioning against the financial entanglements that can quietly ruin a friendship.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be,Polonius, Act 1, Scene 3

The advice culminates in a line about self-knowledge that sounds noble in isolation, yet Polonius himself never lives up to it, spending the play manipulating his own children and spying on the prince rather than acting with the honesty he preaches.

This above all: to thine own self be true,Polonius, Act 1, Scene 3

Laertes

Laertes functions as Hamlet’s most direct foil, a young man who feels an almost identical grievance, a murdered father, and responds to it with none of Hamlet’s hesitation. Before he ever faces that test himself, he warns Ophelia in careful, protective terms about trusting Hamlet’s affections too quickly.

A violet in the youth of primy nature, Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting,Laertes, Act 1, Scene 3

When Polonius is killed, Laertes returns from France ready for immediate, total violence, declaring he would break every rule of sanctuary to get to Hamlet.

To cut his throat i’ th’ church.Laertes, Act 4, Scene 7

His fury is framed explicitly as a matter of family honour, and he treats any hesitation on his part as a stain on his father’s name and his own legitimacy.

That drop of blood that’s calm proclaims me bastard, Cries “cuckold” to my father,Laertes, Act 4, Scene 5

Hamlet Characters: Conclusion

These six characters are built to reflect and contrast with one another: Hamlet’s hesitation against Laertes’ speed, Claudius’s public authority against his private guilt, Gertrude’s silence against Ophelia’s eventual, devastating clarity, Polonius’s hollow wisdom against the genuine self-knowledge none of the older generation manages to practise. For the exam, the strongest character answers do not describe these figures in isolation but show how each one is defined, at least in part, by the others around them.