Book Club Guide

Hamlet

by William Shakespeare · 1603 · Classics

Key themes

Delay, paralysis and the impossibility of certain knowledge
Death, corruption and the rottenness of the Danish court
Performance — the play within the play, and the roles we assume

About this book

The prince of Denmark is commanded by his father's ghost to avenge his murder by his uncle Claudius, who has married Hamlet's mother and taken the throne. Shakespeare's most analysed play circles the question of why Hamlet delays, producing a meditation on consciousness, action, mortality and the impossibility of certainty.

Probably written between 1599 and 1601, Hamlet is the longest of Shakespeare's plays and the most widely produced. More critical writing has been published on Hamlet than on any other literary work.

Discussion questions

Hamlet knows who killed his father but delays the revenge for almost the entire play. What explanations does the play offer for his hesitation — and which do you find most convincing?
The Ghost could be a genuine spirit, a devil, or a product of Hamlet's disturbed mind. How does this uncertainty function — and what does it say about the difficulty of acting on knowledge that cannot be verified?
Hamlet puts on an 'antic disposition' — a performance of madness. At what point, if any, does the performance become real? How does the play think about the line between acting and being?
The women in the play — Gertrude and Ophelia — are largely defined by their relationships to men and by their capacity (or failure) to maintain loyalty. How does the play treat them — with complexity or with reduction?
The ending accumulates deaths with almost arbitrary speed. Is this chaos meaningful — a commentary on the cost of delayed action — or simply the mechanism of tragic convention?