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Hamlet holds off, however-if Claudius is praying as he dies, then his soul might go to heaven. Hamlet nearly gets his chance for revenge when, on the way to see Gertrude, he comes upon Claudius, alone and praying in a chamber. Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, angry with Hamlet’s embarrassing behavior at the play, summons him to her quarters to talk to him about what’s going on. At the play that night, however, as the actors perform a scene which mirrors the events of King Hamlet’s murder, Claudius runs from the room and thus proves his guilt in Hamlet’s eyes. Seeing Hamlet’s increasing instability as a threat, Claudius decides to send him away to England, where he will be less of a nuisance. Claudius concludes Hamlet neither loves Ophelia, nor is he mad. Hamlet flies into a rage against women and marriage, claiming that women only breed sinners and ordering Ophelia to get herself to a nunnery and hide herself away from men. Polonius and Claudius successfully spy on the meeting between Ophelia and Hamlet, during which Ophelia attempts to return gifts and letters Hamlet has given her over an undetermined amount of time-suggesting that Ophelia and Hamlet have had a romantic and perhaps sexual relationship for a while. Hamlet decides that if Claudius reacts in a way that marks him as truly guilty, he will be able to avenge his father’s death without any moral doubts-in other words, he’ll have no excuse not to act decisively and kill the king. As Polonius develops a plot to spy on a meeting between Hamlet and Ophelia-using Ophelia as a knowing pawn-Hamlet develops a plot of his own: to have a recently-arrived troupe of actors put on a play that resembles Claudius’s alleged murder of King Hamlet, and watch Claudius’s reaction. Claudius and Gertrude, unsatisfied with Polonius’s assessment, summon two of Hamlet's old school friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to try to find out what's wrong with him. The king’s obsequious old councilor, Polonius, begins to believe that Hamlet's behavior is tied to his affections for Ophelia, Polonius’s daughter. He tells himself that his madness is a front which will allow him to investigate his uncle without the king realizing Hamlet is onto him, but as Hamlet investigates his own existential and moral center, his thoughts begin to tend toward serious distress, if not full-blown madness. He delays his revenge and begins to act half-mad, contemplates suicide, and becomes furious at all women. Hamlet, newly enraged, quickly accepts the ghost's command to seek revenge.Īs the days go by, however, Hamlet is uncertain if what the ghost said is true, and struggles to decide whether he should actually kill his uncle. The ghost reveals that he did not die of natural causes, but rather was poisoned by Claudius. Hamlet agrees to meet the ghost, and as he speaks with it, it claims to be the spirit of his father.
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Hamlet, however, cannot accept his uncle’s rule, furious as he is about Gertrude's marriage to Claudius, and resentful of both his mother and his uncle for besmirching his father’s memory with their union. Claudius seems to be an able king, easily handling the threat of the Norwegian prince Fortinbras, who is seeking to take back the lands his own father lost in battle with Hamlet’s father. Hamlet is also the nephew of the present king, Claudius, who not only assumed his dead brother's crown but also married the king’s widow, Gertrude. When Horatio sees the ghost, he decides they should tell prince Hamlet-his closest friend and the dead king's son. The terrified sentinels Marcellus, Francisco, and Barnardo convince a skeptical nobleman, Horatio, to watch along with them one night. A ghost resembling the recently-deceased King of Denmark stalks the ramparts of Elsinore, Denmark’s royal castle, over the course of several nights, setting all the castle’s guardsmen on edge.