The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark remains William Shakespeare's most popular play, rivaled only by Othello in terms of number and variety of performances. It's the themes of Hamlet that make it a popular production — madness, revenge and loyalty being the foremost — in addition to the fluid nature of the prose and the set.
The entire plot of the play turns on the prospect of revenge for the death of the king, Hamlet's father. In Act I, Scene V, Hamlet is entreated by his father's ghost to murder his uncle, the present king, because he poisoned Hamlet's father. This revelation is the catalyst for the rest of the play's action and, as a result, Hamlet crafts a plot to force his uncle the king into confessing to the crime.
Hamlet's Madness
Hamlet pretends to be insane, or mad, as part of this goal. The first instance of his false insanity arises when he appears to Ophelia, the woman to whom he's "made many tenders of his affection (Ophelia, Act I, Scene III)" prior to the opening of the tale. He shows up in her sewing closet, clothes akimbo, and acts insane by grabbing her arms, caressing her face, and staring at her intently as he leaves the room. Ophelia believes this is because she started refusing his advances — which she'd accepted before — on the advice of her father Polonius.
Polonius thus ascribes Hamlet's madness to him being sick with love for Ophelia, and informs the King and Queen of this after they'd asked Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to try bringing Hamlet out of the melancholy they observed him in. During Hamlet's conversation with the two men, a group of players enters and Hamlet engages them to perform for the court that same night to see if a murder onstage will affect the king enough to determine whether the ghost was telling the truth.
Thus begins Hamlet's intrigue into discovering if his uncle is a murderer. He withdraws, continues feigning madness, and alienates Ophelia by declaring he never loved her at all. Hamlet confuses the issue further by sitting near her during the play within a play sequence in Act III, which causes Ophelia to remark on his attitude change from melancholy to ecstatic.
Hamlet and Revenge
King Claudius, Hamlet's uncle, rushes from the room after the play within a play and Gertrude, Hamlet's mother, sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to her son. It's here Hamlet reveals he knows they're not on his side by comparing himself to a recorder that Guildenstern protests he has no knowledge of how to play. "You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass: and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak, (Act III, Scene II)," Hamlet proclaims.
After sending Rosencrantz and Guildenstern away, Hamlet discovers his uncle kneeling in prayer. It's the perfect time to strike, to avenge his father's murder, and yet Hamlet hesitates because prayer smacks too much of the potential for salvation. Instead, Hamlet goes to his mother's closet to hear her concerns about the play. He unwittingly kills Polonius, who was spying, and extorts a promise from his mother that she won't go to his uncle's bed anymore.
In the final scene of Act IV, Claudius tries to thwart Hamlet's revenge by weaving a fantasy of the prince envying Laertes' achievements in France. This has the effect of Laertes crafting a plot to treat his sword with poison so a single cut will kill Hamlet during a duel Laertes intends to call to avenge Polonius. As a backup plan, Claudius decides to poison a glass of wine that he'll give to Hamlet when he calls for a drink during the duel.
Hamlet and Loyalty
Another theme present throughout the play's five acts is loyalty. Hamlet is loyal to his father's memory, which he feels his mother betrayed by wedding his uncle not a month after his father was set in the ground. "Thrift, thrift, Horatio! the funeral baked meats Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables," Hamlet says in Act I, Scene II. This remark is twined with several others about the brevity of woman's love, something Hamlet sees as capricious and disloyal by its very nature.
Loyalty and its innate honor is hit upon several other times in the course of the play; in Act I, we see Horatio, Marcellus and Bernardo revealing the ghost to Hamlet and swearing to keep silent -- a promise they keep. Later, in Act III, Horatio agrees to watch the king's reactions during the play for any blanching that marks his guilt. Horatio is also the one that Hamlet writes to after leaving Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on the way to England; and the sole survivor of the final duel that results in the deaths of the remaining main characters.
These themes of revenge, madness, and loyalty weave throughout the play like so many strands of thread, pulling on the characters along with their other desires to craft a story engaging enough to last 400 years.
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