Hamlet

Higher Level · 2028 Leaving Cert

Hamlet is the prescribed Shakespearean play for Higher Level students sitting the 2028 Leaving Cert. The plot is simple. A prince is told by his father’s ghost to avenge a murder and then spends four acts not doing it. Everything worth writing about lives inside that delay.

Shakespeare wrote it around 1600, borrowing an old revenge story and then doing something odd with it: he gave the avenger a mind. Most revenge plays are about how the killing gets done. This one is about a young man who cannot decide whether acting or thinking is the braver thing, and who talks himself out of the deed so persuasively that we half agree with him.

That is why it is examined so heavily. If you can explain why Hamlet hesitates, you can answer almost any question the paper sets on this text.

Hamlet: The Story in Five Beats

One. Old King Hamlet is dead. His brother Claudius has taken the throne and married the widow, Gertrude, within a month. Prince Hamlet is in mourning and in open disgust. The Ghost appears to him on the battlements and says he was murdered by Claudius, poison poured in his ear while he slept.

Two. Hamlet puts on an antic disposition, pretending madness while he decides whether the Ghost can be trusted. Claudius and Polonius spy on him, using Ophelia as bait. Hamlet turns on her with real cruelty.

Three. A troupe of travelling players arrives and Hamlet has them stage a murder that matches the Ghost’s account. Claudius bolts from the room, and Hamlet has his proof. Minutes later he finds Claudius at prayer and does not kill him, reasoning that a soul sent to heaven is no revenge at all.

Four. In his mother’s chamber Hamlet stabs through a curtain and kills Polonius by mistake. He is shipped to England with a sealed order for his execution, rewrites it, and returns. Ophelia, having lost her father and her mind, drowns.

Five. Laertes comes home for revenge and is talked into a rigged fencing match with a poisoned blade. Claudius adds a poisoned cup as a second plan. Within minutes Gertrude, Laertes, Claudius and Hamlet are all dead, and Fortinbras walks in from Norway to take a kingdom nobody is left to defend.

Playing a Part in a Court of Actors

Appearance and reality is the theme the paper returns to most often on this play, because everyone in Elsinore is performing. Claudius performs grief for a brother he murdered. Polonius performs wisdom. Ophelia is placed in a corridor holding a prayer book so her father can listen in. Hamlet is the only one who says he refuses to perform, which is itself a performance.

“Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not seems.”Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 2

“That one may smile and smile and be a villain.”Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 5

Watch what he does with this. Hamlet’s answer to a court full of actors is to become the best actor in it and then stage an actual play. The Mousetrap works because Claudius cannot keep his face still.

Thought That Eats Action

Hamlet’s problem is not cowardice. He fights pirates, kills Polonius without hesitation, and sends two former friends to their deaths without losing sleep. What stops him is thinking, and he knows it.

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

The prayer scene is the sharpest example. He has the sword up and the man on his knees, and he constructs a theological argument for waiting. He is not wrong about the theology. He is also, plainly, looking for a reason. If you want one moment to build a paragraph on, use that one.

A Kingdom Rotting From the Throne Down

Denmark is described in the language of disease from the first act, and the language belongs to nearly everyone, not just the prince. An ordinary soldier on watch senses it before anyone explains it.

“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”Marcellus, Act 1 Scene 4

Claudius knows exactly what he is. Alone, trying and failing to pray, he uses the same vocabulary of rot the play uses about the country.

“O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven”Claudius, Act 3 Scene 3

The corruption ends where it began, with poison. What was one hidden drop in an orchard becomes a poisoned cup and a poisoned blade in plain view, killing four people in the last scene.

Death, Close Up

The graveyard in Act 5 changes the play’s temperature. Hamlet holds the skull of a man who used to carry him on his back and works out that a jester, a lawyer and Alexander the Great all end as the same dust.

“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio.”Hamlet, Act 5 Scene 1

Something settles in him after this. By the fencing match he has stopped arguing with fate, and his last words are a request that Horatio tell the story properly.

Who’s Who

Hamlet is a student called home to a court he despises. Grieving, clever, cruel in flashes, and funniest when he is most dangerous.

Claudius is a competent king and a murderer. He manages the Norway crisis by letter in Act 1 while Hamlet is still deciding whether to get out of bed.

Gertrude is the play’s great question mark. Shakespeare never tells us whether she knew, which is why the closet scene is worth a paragraph on its own.

Ophelia is used by her father, her brother and Hamlet in turn. Her madness scene is the only place she is allowed to say anything of her own.

Polonius, Laertes, Horatio and Fortinbras are the foils. Laertes acts instantly and destroys himself, Fortinbras acts decisively and inherits everything, Horatio does not act and survives to tell it.

Using This in the Exam

How to use it: Build answers from four scenes rather than the whole plot: the first soliloquy, the play within the play, the prayer scene, and the graveyard. Between them they cover appearance and reality, corruption, delay, madness and mortality, so you can meet almost any question without learning new material. Quote a line, then say what the character is doing with it. Examiners reward the second half of that sentence, not the first.

Quick Links

Each guide takes one part of the play the paper comes back to. Start where your question points.