Hamlet by William Shakespeare: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
Hamlet
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Act I, Scene I: The platform before the Castle
BARNARDO. Who’s there?
FRANCISCO. Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.
BARNARDO. Long live the King!
The opening pages are printed here exactly as they stand in the text; the complete book is in the free download below.
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~35,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 1.9 hours
Standalone
Elsinore, Denmark
5 acts, 20 scenes
EPUB · AZW3 · KEPUB
0.34 MB (EPUB) · 0.44 MB (AZW3) · 0.37 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #1524
Hamlet is William Shakespeare’s tragedy of a prince who comes home to Elsinore to find his father dead, his mother married to his uncle, and his father’s ghost walking the battlements with an accusation of murder. Told that Claudius poured poison into the sleeping king’s ear, Hamlet swears revenge and then does almost everything except take it: he feigns madness, turns Ophelia away, weighs “To be, or not to be” aloud, stages a play to test the king’s conscience, spares him at prayer, stabs Polonius through the arras, and is shipped to England with two schoolfellows he no longer trusts. The fifth act brings him back to a fencing match with Laertes, a poisoned blade and a poisoned cup.
The play is written mostly in blank verse, with prose for the gravediggers, the players and Hamlet’s fits of assumed madness; it has five acts and twenty scenes, and its soliloquies are the most quoted passages in the language. It survives in three early printings that disagree with each other, which is why no two editions of Hamlet read exactly alike. The file offered below is the whole play, complete and without cuts. See Wikipedia’s article on Hamlet for its publication history. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #1524.
Hamlet by William Shakespeare: Summary, Characters & Themes
This page is a summary and analysis of Hamlet by William Shakespeare, with the historical context, the characters and the themes, followed by scene-by-scene summaries and the free download links. The play opens on the platform of Elsinore, where two guards and a scholar see the dead king’s ghost and cannot make it speak. Inside, the new king Claudius has married his brother’s widow, and her son Hamlet is the one man in the hall who will not pretend that a funeral and a wedding are the same event. The ghost names the murderer and demands revenge; from that hour Hamlet has a duty he believes in and a reason to wait, and the rest of the play is the argument between them, conducted in soliloquies, in a play performed at court, and at last in a room with a sword.
The author is William Shakespeare, and the text of Hamlet itself has a long critical history. The author is William Shakespeare, and Hamlet is the play in which he is most often said to have written himself into the part. Shakespeare was in his late thirties when it was written, about 1599 to 1601, the years in which his company moved into the Globe on Bankside and turned from English histories toward the great tragedies. He did not invent the story. It comes from the twelfth-century Danish chronicle of Saxo Grammaticus, by way of Francois de Belleforest’s French version, and from an earlier English play, now lost, that scholars call the Ur-Hamlet. What Shakespeare added to that material is the interior life: a revenger who thinks between the command and the act, and who tells the audience what the thinking costs.
The form is the revenge tragedy, a popular Elizabethan shape that supplies a ghost, a secret murder, a mad heroine and a final massacre, and Shakespeare fills it with something the shape does not require, which is uncertainty. The play is written mostly in blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, and it switches to prose for the gravediggers, the travelling players, Polonius’s household talk and Hamlet’s assumed madness, so that whether a character speaks verse or prose is itself a cue. There are five acts and twenty scenes, a division made by editors rather than by the playwright, and one play performed inside the play: The Mousetrap, a version of the murder Hamlet suspects, staged in front of the king to make him flinch. Hamlet’s advice to the players, that they should hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature, doubles as a description of what the tragedy is doing.
The question every reader brings to the play is why Hamlet does not kill Claudius, and the usual answers, that he is too sensitive or too intellectual, are less interesting than what the text actually shows. He has the chance in Act III, Scene 3, finds the king alone and kneeling, and puts up his sword because killing him at prayer would send him to heaven: ‘Now might I do it pat, now he is praying.’ That is a reason, and a bad one. Earlier, in ‘To be, or not to be’, he has already said that ‘conscience does make cowards of us all’, using conscience in its older sense of consciousness and reflection as well as moral scruple. The delay is not a defect in the character but the subject of the play: a man who cannot stop seeing the case from more than one side.
Hamlet reached print in a short quarto in 1603, in a much fuller second quarto in 1604-5, and in the 1623 Folio, and the three versions differ enough that editors still choose between them; the play we read is a composite. Its reception changed the language: Coleridge said he had something of Hamlet in his own nature, A. C. Bradley made the delay a case study in character, T. S. Eliot called the play an artistic failure, and later critics have found melancholy, Oedipal feeling, court politics and the theatre itself in it. For a first reading, take the scenes in order and read the soliloquies aloud; the verse wants a voice. The text used here is the Project Gutenberg transcription (#1524), in the public domain in the United States. Other free editions on this site include The Iliad, The Divine Comedy and A Doll’s House.
Historical Context
Elsinore is a real castle on the Oresund, the strait between Denmark and Sweden, and in the 1580s and 1590s it was where the Sound toll was collected: ships passed under its guns and paid. Shakespeare had almost certainly never been there, though English players had toured Denmark and performed at court, and the play’s geography is as vague as stage geography usually is. What an audience of 1600 recognised was closer to home: a royal succession nobody is sure about, a court where the ruler has married his brother’s widow quickly, and an old religious order, with its ghost from purgatory, being argued away by the new one.
Shakespeare wrote the play at a point of change in his own career. Through the 1590s he had been a maker of comedies and English histories; the Globe opened in 1599 with Henry V, and within a few years came Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. The company needed plays with a large central part, because Richard Burbage was the actor who could carry one, and Hamlet is written for exactly that: long soliloquies, sudden switches into prose, and a role that runs to more than a third of the play’s lines. It is also a play about actors, with a company of travelling players arriving at court and a prince who lectures them on how to perform.
The dates are inferred rather than recorded. The play is not in the list of Shakespeare’s works printed in 1598, and it is being parodied by 1601, so a date of about 1599 to 1601 is the usual compromise. It was entered in the Stationers’ Register in July 1602, printed in a short quarto in 1603, and printed again in a fuller quarto in 1604-5; the Folio of 1623 adds and cuts material. The text in this edition runs to about 35,000 words, five acts and twenty scenes, with entrances, exits and asides kept in brackets as the transcription prints them, and the songs of Ophelia set out as songs.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- Hamlet: the prince of Denmark, called home from the university at Wittenberg for his father’s funeral and kept at Elsinore for his mother’s wedding; in Act I, Scene 5 he takes the ghost’s command and warns his friends he may put on an antic disposition, and in Act III, Scene 3 he has the king alone and praying, and does not kill him.
- Claudius: the king’s brother, who took crown and queen within two months of the murder and rules by flattery and surveillance; he sets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on Hamlet in Act II, Scene 2, sends him to England in Act IV, Scene 3, and in Act IV, Scene 7 arranges an unbated foil and a poisoned chalice with Laertes. His one honest speech is the prayer of Act III, Scene 3.
- Gertrude: the queen, who married her husband’s brother with what Hamlet calls wicked speed; in Act III, Scene 4 he shows her two portraits in her own chamber and she says ‘O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain’. In Act IV, Scene 7 she reports how Ophelia drowned by the willow, and in the last scene she drinks the cup that Claudius had prepared for her son.
- Ophelia: Polonius’s daughter, warned against Hamlet by her brother in Act I, Scene 3 and ordered by her father to refuse his letters; she is set as bait in Act III, Scene 1, where Hamlet tells her ‘I loved you not’, and after Polonius is killed she goes mad in Act IV, Scene 5, singing of rosemary and pansies, before she drowns in the willow brook.
- Polonius: the lord chamberlain, a man of maxims and errands who sends Reynaldo to watch Laertes in Act II, Scene 1 and hides behind the arras in Act III, Scene 4 to overhear Hamlet with his mother; when he calls out, Hamlet stabs through the hanging and kills him, and that death sets Laertes on a revenge of his own; the maxims he hands out in Act I are the ones the play goes on to test.
- Horatio: Hamlet’s fellow student from Wittenberg and the one friend who is told everything: he keeps the watch on the platform in Act I, Scene 1, receives Hamlet’s letter from the pirates in Act IV, Scene 6, and in Act V, Scene 2 is asked to live and ‘report me and my cause aright’, which he does as the play ends.
Core Literary Themes
- Delay and conscience: the puzzle is not that Hamlet fails to act but that his reasons keep changing: doubt about whether the ghost is honest, the wish for public proof in the Mousetrap, the refusal to kill a praying man, and the claim in ‘To be, or not to be’ that ‘conscience does make cowards of us all’. Read together, those reasons make the delay a subject rather than a hole in the plot, and they keep the audience inside his hesitation. The killing is the one thing in the play that keeps being thought about instead of done.
- Performance and seeming: Elsinore is a court of appearances before the players ever arrive: Claudius smiles and smiles, Polonius performs the wise counsellor, and Hamlet puts on madness as a costume and then cannot always take it off. The play’s own test is theatrical, a play staged to catch a king, and Hamlet’s advice that the players hold ‘the mirror up to nature’ turns the tragedy’s method into its subject. Even his sincerity is a performance, and the play never lets the audience decide where the acting stops.
- Mortality and the graveyard: death in this play is first a ghost, then a corpse, then a joke, and finally dust: the gravedigger tosses up Yorick’s skull, Hamlet follows Alexander and Caesar into the clay, and Ophelia is buried without the full rite. By the fifth act the fear of dying has given way to ‘the readiness is all’, and the last words Hamlet speaks are about silence rather than judgement. The grave is the level ground on which the court’s rank finally looks like what it is.
- Corruption and disease: Denmark is sick before the murder is proved. ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ is said in Act I, Scene 4, and images of poison, ulcers, rank offence and desperate cures run through the play: Claudius calls his crime rank, Hamlet calls the world an unweeded garden, and the body politic is healed only by a foreign army arriving after everyone is dead. The king’s own language for his crime is medical, and his cure is to send the sickness to England.
- Revenge convention and its refusal: the play uses every piece of the revenge tragedy, the ghost, the feigned madness, the play-within-a-play and the final slaughter, and then withholds the satisfaction the form promises: the revenger dies, the innocent die first, and the throne goes to a Norwegian prince who arrives too late to do anything but take it. What Hamlet asks for at the end is not justice but a hearing, that Horatio live to ‘report me and my cause aright’. The form is fulfilled and emptied at once, which is why the last scene feels like an ending and a refusal.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of Hamlet?
Most free Hamlets are a single wall of text. This one keeps the play’s own furniture: speech prefixes in capitals, act and scene headings as real chapter marks, entrances and exits in the brackets the transcription uses, and Ophelia’s songs set out as songs. Nothing is abridged, modernised or smoothed, so a reader can see exactly where the verse stops and the clowns begin, and where a scene changes without anyone stepping in to explain it.
The files are DRM-free EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB. The EPUB opens with a table of contents that lists five acts and twenty scenes, so you can go straight to ‘To be, or not to be’ or to the graveyard without scrolling through the rest. The KEPUB is made for Kobo’s renderer and the AZW3 for older Kindles; all three carry the same complete text and the same scene marks, so nothing is lost by choosing one.
At about 35,000 words the play takes roughly two hours, or a little more if you read the soliloquies aloud. A practical route: Act I for the ghost and the court, Act III for the Mousetrap and the closet scene, Act V for the graveyard and the duel. The summaries above follow that order and name the scenes, so you can put the book down and pick the thread up again.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #1524 — the complete text, unabridged, with the chapter headings the author set.
- Stage directions kept every entrance, exit and aside stays where the transcription put it, so the play reads as a script rather than a novel.
- Acts and scenes as chapter marks five acts and twenty scenes arrive as separate divisions in the file, so the reader’s table of contents matches the play.
- Verse and prose kept apart speech prefixes are set in capitals, verse lines keep their own breaks, and the clowns and the gravediggers speak in prose, as the text has them.
- The Iliad — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Divine Comedy — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- A Doll’s House — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
Hamlet has five acts and twenty scenes. These ten summaries follow the play in order and group the scenes into movements, marking where each act turns; the label on each line gives the act and the scenes it covers.
- Act I, Scenes 1-2: Midnight on the platform: Barnardo relieves Francisco, Horatio and Marcellus come to see the ghost, and the dead king appears and vanishes without speaking. In the hall Claudius announces his marriage to Gertrude and his claim to the throne, refuses to let Hamlet return to Wittenberg, and Hamlet, left alone, wishes his flesh would melt and says of the wedding that ‘the funeral bak’d meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables’.
- Act I, Scenes 3-5: At Polonius’s house Laertes warns Ophelia that Hamlet’s vows are ‘springes to catch woodcocks’, and Polonius forbids the match and sends his son away with the advice that ends ‘This above all: to thine own self be true’. On the platform the ghost leads Hamlet aside, names Claudius as his murderer, demands revenge and tells him to spare Gertrude; Hamlet makes the others swear silence and says ‘The time is out of joint’.
- Act II, Scenes 1-2: Polonius sends Reynaldo to Paris to spy on Laertes, and Ophelia describes Hamlet’s disordered visit to her room, which her father calls ‘the very ecstasy of love’. Claudius sets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to watch Hamlet and agrees to loose Ophelia on him. The travelling players arrive; Hamlet asks for a speech on Hecuba, calls himself ‘O what a rogue and peasant slave am I’, and plans a play to catch the king’s conscience.
- Act III, Scene 1: Claudius and Polonius listen behind the arras while Hamlet delivers ‘To be, or not to be’. Ophelia returns his gifts, he tells her ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ and then ‘I loved you not’, and when he has gone she mourns that ‘O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown’. Claudius decides that madness in great ones must be watched, and resolves to send Hamlet to England.
- Act III, Scene 2: Hamlet coaches the players to ‘suit the action to the word’ and has Horatio watch the king during The Mousetrap, a dumb show followed by a play about a murder in Vienna. Claudius rises and calls for light; Hamlet is exultant, baits Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with the recorder, and says he will ‘speak daggers to her, but use none’ on his way to his mother.
- Act III, Scenes 3-4: Claudius, alone and unable to pray, admits ‘O, my offence is rank’. Hamlet finds him kneeling, draws back because killing him now would send him to heaven, and leaves. In Gertrude’s chamber Polonius hides behind the arras; Hamlet’s questioning turns violent, Polonius calls out, and Hamlet stabs through the hanging. The ghost returns to sharpen his purpose, and Hamlet tells his mother ‘I must be cruel, only to be kind’.
- Act IV, Scenes 1-3: Gertrude tells Claudius that Hamlet has killed Polonius, and the king sends Hamlet to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and a sealed commission. Brought before him, Hamlet is flippant about the body: a king may go ‘a progress through the guts of a beggar’. Claudius, left alone, admits that ‘diseases desperate grown by desperate appliance are reliev’d’ and that England must do what Denmark cannot.
- Act IV, Scenes 4-7: A captain of Fortinbras’s army tells Hamlet the Norwegians march for ‘a little patch of ground’ worth nothing but its name, and Hamlet’s last soliloquy begins ‘How all occasions do inform against me’. Ophelia goes mad, singing and handing out rosemary and pansies; Laertes returns and the crowd cries ‘Laertes shall be king’. A letter tells Horatio of the pirates. Claudius and Laertes plan an unbated, anointed foil and a poisoned chalice, and Gertrude brings word that Ophelia has drowned.
- Act V, Scene 1: Two gravediggers argue whether Ophelia, a suicide, may have Christian burial. Hamlet and Horatio watch a skull thrown up, Hamlet says ‘Alas, poor Yorick’, and then follows Alexander and Caesar into the dust. He hides as the funeral arrives; when Laertes leaps into the grave, Hamlet declares ‘This is I, Hamlet the Dane’, and the two are parted by the court.
- Act V, Scene 2: Hamlet tells Horatio how he swapped the commission and sent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths, and accepts the wager with Osric because ‘the readiness is all’. The match turns: Gertrude drinks the poisoned cup, Laertes wounds Hamlet with the envenomed foil, the swords are exchanged and both men die. Hamlet names Fortinbras his successor, asks Horatio to ‘report me and my cause aright’, and says ‘The rest is silence’.
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Part of: Drama classics · Classic fiction
