99 Fun Facts About Hamlet

What are the dying Hamlet's final words?

The rest is silence, Hamlet says as he dies, and the friend at his side answers with a line almost as well known: 'Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.'

How is Claudius, who kills Hamlet's father and marries his mother, related to Hamlet?

His uncle: Claudius is the dead king's brother, which is why Hamlet greets his new title of 'son' with the bitter pun 'A little more than kin, and less than kind'.

What is the name of Hamlet's mother?

Gertrude, Queen of Denmark, remarried within two months of her husband's death, the haste that makes Hamlet cry 'Frailty, thy name is woman' in his first soliloquy.

Which friend does the dying Hamlet charge to stay alive and tell his story?

Horatio wants to die beside him, calling himself 'more an antique Roman than a Dane', but Hamlet stops him and begs him to 'absent thee from felicity awhile' and tell the story.

How does Hamlet kill the king's eavesdropping counsellor?

Stabbing him through a wall hanging is done blind: the old man cries out from behind the arras in the queen's room, and Hamlet thrusts without looking, hoping it is the king.

How does Ophelia die?

She drowns when a willow branch breaks and drops her into a brook, the queen reports; a 1569 inquest on a drowned child named Jane Shaxspere, found in 2011, may have fed the scene.

Where does Ophelia's brother go at the start of the play, before returning in a rage in Act 4?

Ophelia's brother goes back to France; their father later sends the servant Reynaldo to Paris to check on how his son is behaving there.

Who is Ophelia's brother, who fights Hamlet in the final duel?

Laertes, Ophelia's brother, fences Hamlet with an unbated, venom-tipped rapier; the weapons change hands in a scuffle and both men die of the same poison.

Which two old friends are sent to spy on Hamlet and later escort him to England?

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, summoned by the king to sound Hamlet out, carry sealed orders for his execution in England; Hamlet rewrites the commission so they die instead.

What is the title of the play Hamlet has the travelling actors perform to test Claudius's guilt?

The Murder of Gonzago is the play Hamlet requests, adding a speech of his own; asked its name, he tells the king it is 'The Mousetrap', and the king stops the performance and storms out.

Why does Hamlet spare the king when he finds him alone after the play scene?

He is praying, and Hamlet reasons that a man killed at prayer would go to heaven; the irony is that the king then admits his words never got there.

Whom does the dying Hamlet name as his successor to the Danish throne?

Fortinbras, the Norwegian prince, receives Hamlet's 'dying voice' for the election and marches in as the play ends to claim the kingdom and order a soldier's funeral.

Whose skull does Hamlet hold in the graveyard scene?

Yorick's skull belongs to the old king's jester, who carried Hamlet on his back as a boy; the gravedigger's tally of 23 years in the earth is a much-argued clue that the prince is about thirty.

Which company was left a pianist's skull in 1982 for use in Hamlet?

The Royal Shakespeare Company received the skull of the pianist André Tchaikowsky, but it was used only in rehearsals until David Tennant held it on stage in 2008.

Moments after 'To be, or not to be', Hamlet turns on Ophelia with which famous command?

Get thee to a nunnery comes in Act 3, Scene 1, straight after the soliloquy: Hamlet tells her he never loved her and that she should bear no children, while the king and his counsellor listen from hiding.

In the 1603 First Quarto of Hamlet, which words follow 'To be, or not to be'?

Aye, there's the point is how the First Quarto prints it (spelling 'aye' as 'I'); a long-held theory blames an actor rebuilding the play from memory for such slips.

Which Hamlet character advises 'Neither a borrower nor a lender be' and 'To thine own self be true'?

Polonius also coins 'Brevity is the soul of wit', a joke at his own expense, since it comes in the middle of his most long-winded speech.

Where does Hamlet rank by length among Shakespeare's plays?

The longest: at around 4,000 lines, an uncut Hamlet takes about four hours to perform.

What do scholars call the garbled 1603 First Quarto of Hamlet?

Bad quarto is the usual label for a text far shorter than the versions that followed; it lay unknown until a copy turned up in 1823, and only two are known to survive.

The king's counsellor in Hamlet boasts of once acting which Roman, the title figure of a 1599 Shakespeare tragedy?

Julius Caesar is the part he claims ('I was killed i' the Capitol; Brutus killed me'), and since that play dates from 1599, the in-joke helps scholars place Hamlet between 1599 and 1601.

Which medieval Danish chronicler's 'Life of Amleth' is the main legendary source of Hamlet?

Saxo Grammaticus told the Amleth story in Books III and IV of his Latin Gesta Danorum (c. 1200); his prince also feigns madness and kills an eavesdropper in his mother's chamber.

Which 2022 Robert Eggers film retells the Amleth legend with Alexander Skarsgård?

The Northman goes back to the old Danish legend behind Hamlet: Skarsgård's Amleth flees as a boy when his father is murdered and years later poses as a slave to get onto the killer's farm.

What do scholars call the lost earlier play, possibly by Kyd, that Shakespeare may have reworked?

The Ur-Hamlet is known only from allusions: Thomas Nashe mocked 'whole Hamlets' of tragical speeches in 1589, and Thomas Lodge in 1596 recalled a ghost crying 'Hamlet, revenge'.

What was the name of Shakespeare's only son, who died in 1596 aged eleven?

Hamnet Shakespeare, twin of Judith, was buried in Stratford in August 1596; Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable spellings then, and Stephen Greenblatt links the father's grief to the tragedy.

At which German university has Hamlet been studying before the play begins?

Wittenberg is where Hamlet wants to resume his studies, but the king calls the plan 'most retrograde to our desire' and he stays; the town is better known as Martin Luther's base.

Which real Danish castle at Helsingør is the Elsinore of Hamlet?

Kronborg guards the narrowest point of the sound between Denmark and Sweden; Hamlet has been staged there since 1816, and Jude Law played the prince in its courtyard in 2009.

For which leading actor of his company did Shakespeare almost certainly write the role of Hamlet?

Richard Burbage was the chief tragedian of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and an elegy on his death in 1619 mourned that 'young Hamlet' had died with him, along with Lear and Othello.

Which actress played Hamlet in London in 1899 and filmed the duel scene a year later?

Sarah Bernhardt played the prince in a French translation made for her, and her 1900 film of the duel was shown in Paris to the sound of clashing swords, in a programme that paired films with recordings.

Whose 1948 black-and-white Hamlet won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Actor?

Laurence Olivier directed as well as starred, and cast as his mother Eileen Herlie, who at 29 was eleven years younger than her screen son; it was the first British film to win Best Picture.

The 1948 film's prologue calls Hamlet the tragedy of a man who could not do what?

'Make up his mind' is the film's phrase, not Shakespeare's: the director-star speaks the line in voice-over at the start, steering viewers to read the prince as fatally indecisive.

Who directed and starred in the first full-length, unabridged film of Hamlet in 1996?

Kenneth Branagh's four-hour, 70mm epic kept every line and cast Billy Crystal and Robin Williams in small roles, yet it took under $5 million in US cinemas against an $18 million budget.

Which English stately home stood in for Elsinore in the four-hour 1996 film of Hamlet?

Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire supplied only the castle's exterior; the film was shot almost entirely on sets at Shepperton Studios, including its mirrored throne room.

Who played Ophelia in the four-hour 1996 film of Hamlet?

Kate Winslet was 20 and had auditioned without success for the same director's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Julie Christie played the queen.

Which Hollywood action star played Hamlet in Franco Zeffirelli's 1990 film?

Mel Gibson co-founded Icon Productions in 1989 to get the film made; Glenn Close played his mother, though she is less than nine years his senior.

In Michael Almereyda's 2000 version, Ethan Hawke plays Hamlet as what, in modern Manhattan?

A film student is how Hawke plays him, and his 'Mousetrap' is a video montage he edits himself; the king runs the Denmark Corporation and the Ghost first appears on closed-circuit TV.

Who played Claudius opposite David Tennant's Hamlet in the stage production filmed for the BBC in 2009?

Patrick Stewart doubled the king and the Ghost in Gregory Doran's production; he had already played Claudius in the 1980 BBC Television Shakespeare Hamlet opposite Derek Jacobi.

Which actor played Hamlet for a 12-week run at London's Barbican in 2015?

Benedict Cumberbatch played a modern-dress prince stuck in adolescence, at one point wearing a David Bowie T-shirt under a tailcoat daubed with the word 'KING'.

Whose 1964 Broadway Hamlet, directed by John Gielgud, ran for 137 performances?

Richard Burton played it in street clothes on a bare 'rehearsal' set, Gielgud's idea, and married Elizabeth Taylor during the Toronto tryout; the run set a Broadway record for the play.

Which 1994 Disney film borrows much of its plot from Hamlet?

The Lion King maps the plot onto the savanna: Simba is the exiled prince, Scar the usurper who killed the king, and Mufasa the father who returns as a vision in the clouds.

Who wrote the 1966 absurdist play that follows Hamlet's two doomed courtiers from the wings?

Tom Stoppard took the title from an ambassador's line in the last scene; first staged by students at the 1966 Edinburgh Fringe, the play joined the National Theatre's repertory a year later and made his name.

Which 2014 Bollywood film relocates Hamlet to modern Kashmir?

Haider, the last of Vishal Bhardwaj's Shakespeare trilogy after Maqbool (Macbeth) and Omkara (Othello), stars Shahid Kapoor as a student searching for his disappeared father in 1995 Kashmir.

Which psychoanalyst argued that Hamlet delays because the king acted out Hamlet's own repressed wishes?

Sigmund Freud linked Hamlet's delay to repressed Oedipal desire in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899); his follower Ernest Jones expanded the reading, which shaped the 1937 Old Vic staging and the 1948 film.

Which composer scored Grigori Kozintsev's 1964 Soviet film of Hamlet?

Dmitri Shostakovich wrote the score for a film that used Boris Pasternak's translation and shot Elsinore as a prison, the camera forever peering through bars and grates.

Which chief counsellor to Elizabeth I is often suggested as the model for the long-winded royal adviser in Hamlet?

William Cecil, Lord Burghley, wrote out ten precepts of worldly advice for his son Robert, much as the play's adviser lectures his own departing son, though some editors call the link conjecture.

In the play staged within Hamlet, how is the player king killed?

Poison poured in his ear is exactly how the Ghost says Hamlet's father died, asleep in his orchard, which is why the re-enactment sends the king calling for lights and rushing out.

Which plant does Ophelia, in her madness, hand out saying it is 'for remembrance'?

Rosemary is 'for remembrance' and pansies 'for thoughts' as she hands flowers round the court; she keeps some rue, the herb of regret, for herself.

In Hamlet, Norway's prince asks to march across Denmark to attack which country?

Poland is the target: warned off Denmark by Norway's old king, the prince marches instead to fight over a patch of ground that his own captain says is not worth farming.

What is Claudius's backup plan if the envenomed foil fails to kill Hamlet in the fencing match?

Poisoned wine is the fallback: the king will offer Hamlet a 'chalice for the nonce' when he pauses to drink, and the queen drains it instead.

Which diarist saw Thomas Betterton play Hamlet in 1661 and judged his performance 'beyond imagination'?

Samuel Pepys was praising a newcomer to the part: Betterton, then about 26, went on playing the prince into his seventies.

Which title, later borrowed by Agatha Christie, does Hamlet give the play staged for the king?

The Mousetrap is Hamlet's private joke, since the play is bait for a guilty king. Christie's son-in-law suggested the name when her thriller Three Blind Mice needed a new title.

In Hamlet's phrase 'hoist with his own petard', what is the petard that undoes its own engineer?

A small bomb for blasting open gates was called a petard, so the engineer is blown up by his own charge. The name traces back to the Latin for breaking wind.

Hamlet's mother, watching the Player Queen swear eternal loyalty, says the lady doth what too much?

Protest meant 'vow' in Shakespeare's day, so the queen is objecting to too many oaths, not too many denials. The line is usually misquoted with 'methinks' moved to the front.

In Hamlet's graveyard scene, the skull the prince picks up belonged to a man with which court job?

The king's jester had carried the young Hamlet on his back 'a thousand times', which is why the sight of the bare skull turns the prince's stomach.

Which unlikely rescuers attack Hamlet's ship bound for England and end up bringing him home?

Pirates chase the ship two days out, and Hamlet, the only prisoner they take, calls them 'thieves of mercy' who spared him in return for a favour.

Which Star Trek film takes its subtitle from Hamlet's description of death in 'To be, or not to be'?

The Undiscovered Country is the place from which 'no traveller returns'. Translating Shakespeare into Klingon later proved tricky because the language had been invented without a verb 'to be'.

Which quality does Ophelia's father find in Hamlet's madness, giving English a lasting phrase?

Method is what the old counsellor spots in Hamlet's riddling insults: 'Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't', the origin of 'method in the madness'.

After berating his mother in her chamber, Hamlet says he must be cruel only to be what?

Kind completes a rhyming couplet, 'I must be cruel, only to be kind: thus bad begins and worse remains behind', the source of the saying 'cruel to be kind'.

Which nervous challenge from a sentry on the midnight battlements is the opening line of Hamlet?

'Who's there?' comes from the wrong man: the sentry arriving to take over challenges the one already on guard, a first hint that the whole castle is on edge.

Which TV crime drama borrows from Hamlet, with a stepfather who now leads the dead father's gang?

Sons of Anarchy has been nicknamed 'Hamlet on Harleys': its biker hero's father was usurped by a club 'brother' who then married the hero's mother.

Which colour does Hamlet keep wearing at court, to the open irritation of the new king and queen?

Black is his mourning for a father not two months dead. His mother asks him to 'cast thy nighted colour off', and he retorts that an 'inky cloak' is the least part of his grief.

Hamlet jokes that leftover food from which event was served cold at his mother's wedding?

His father's funeral came so soon before the wedding that, in Hamlet's sour joke about thrift, the 'funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables'.

How is the Ghost of Hamlet's father dressed when the castle sentries see it walk the battlements?

In full armour, 'from head to foot', but with the visor raised, so the watchers can make out a pale face that looks 'more in sorrow than in anger'.

Which sound makes the Ghost in Hamlet start 'like a guilty thing' and vanish before it can speak?

A cock crowing means dawn, when wandering spirits must hurry back to their confines. The watchers add a folk belief that at Christmas the bird sings all night, so no spirit dares stir.

According to the Ghost in Hamlet, where was the old king taking an afternoon nap when killed?

In his orchard, where he slept every afternoon: the killer picked what the Ghost calls 'my secure hour', when the king was alone and off his guard.

In Hamlet, which false cause of the old king's death does the Ghost say was given out to Denmark?

A serpent's sting was the official story, and the Ghost seizes on the image at once, telling Hamlet that the real serpent is still alive and thriving at court.

On which object does Hamlet make his companions swear never to speak of the Ghost they have seen?

His sword is held out again and again, because the Ghost keeps crying 'Swear' from beneath them and the startled group shifts to new ground each time.

Having met the Ghost, Hamlet warns friends he may put on which 'disposition' as a show of madness?

Antic disposition is his cover story, and he makes his friends promise never to hint, by folded arms, a headshake or a knowing phrase, that they understand what he is up to.

As the Ghost's voice follows from under the ground, Hamlet jokingly hails it as an old what?

Mole is his name for a voice that keeps turning up underfoot: 'Well said, old mole! canst work i' the earth so fast?', he calls, before moving his friends to yet another spot.

What does the Ghost in Hamlet order the prince to do about his mother while pursuing the murderer?

Leave her to heaven, the Ghost says, 'and to those thorns that in her bosom lodge'. It returns later, while Hamlet is raging at her, to remind him of the task he has let slide.

In Hamlet, which quality does Ophelia's long-winded father call 'the soul of wit' mid-ramble?

Brevity is praised by the least brief man in Denmark: he announces 'I will be brief' in a speech so padded that the queen has to ask for 'more matter, with less art'.

Which cause does Ophelia's father confidently give the king and queen for Hamlet's madness?

Rejected love is his diagnosis, and he is sure of it because he ordered the rejection himself, telling his daughter to admit no messengers and receive no tokens from the prince.

Asked 'Do you know me, my lord?' by Ophelia's father, Hamlet says the old man follows which trade?

A fishmonger, says Hamlet, and when the old man denies it he adds 'Then I would you were so honest a man'. His victim concludes that the prince is 'far gone'.

Asked by Ophelia's father what he is reading, Hamlet gives which one-noun answer three times over?

Words, words, words is the whole reply, and when pressed for the 'matter' Hamlet claims the book says old men have grey beards, wrinkled faces and weak hams, a jab at his questioner.

In Hamlet, what does the prince call Denmark when two old schoolfriends arrive to sound him out?

A prison, he says, and 'one o' the worst' in a world full of them. When the pair disagree, he shrugs that 'there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so'.

Hamlet's speech 'What a piece of work is a man' ends by calling man the 'quintessence' of what?

Dust is the punchline: after praising man as 'the paragon of animals' and 'in apprehension how like a god', Hamlet says the whole species no longer delights him.

Mad only 'north-north-west', Hamlet says that in a southerly wind he can tell a hawk from what?

A handsaw ends a riddle aimed at the two friends he has just forced to admit 'we were sent for': his madness, he hints, depends on which way the wind blows.

Which woman of Troy does the First Player weep for, leaving Hamlet to ask what she is 'to him'?

Hecuba, Troy's queen, means nothing to the actor, yet he sheds real tears for her. Hamlet, who has an actual murdered father to avenge, is shamed by the comparison.

In a famous couplet, Hamlet says 'the play's the thing' wherein he will catch the king's what?

Conscience is the target because Hamlet doubts the Ghost: a devil could have taken his father's shape, so he wants the king's own face to confirm the story.

What was Ophelia doing in her room when Hamlet burst in half-dressed and gripped her by the wrist?

Sewing, she tells her father, when Hamlet appeared with his doublet undone, no hat and his stockings round his ankles, studied her face at arm's length, sighed and left.

Where does Hamlet repeatedly order Ophelia to go, asking why she would be 'a breeder of sinners'?

To a nunnery, he says five times in one scene, and he turns the same disgust on himself: 'I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me.'

In 'To be, or not to be', Hamlet weighs suffering 'the slings and arrows of outrageous' what?

Fortune is the enemy in the speech's opening choice: endure its 'slings and arrows', or 'take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them'.

Coaching the actors, Hamlet says the purpose of playing is to hold a mirror up to what?

Nature is Hamlet's test of good acting, and he has just told the players not to saw the air with their hands or 'tear a passion to tatters' to please the groundlings.

What does the shaken king call for as he breaks off the court play in Hamlet and hurries out?

Light is his only request, 'Give me some light: away!', and the whole court takes up the cry. A delighted Hamlet says he would now stake a thousand pounds on the Ghost's honesty.

Which instrument does Hamlet thrust at his two spying friends, saying they cannot play him either?

A recorder, borrowed from the players, makes the point: when the friend objects that he has no skill to play it, Hamlet asks, 'do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?'

Hamlet makes Ophelia's father agree a cloud is like a camel, then a weasel, then which sea creature?

A whale is the third shape, and 'Very like a whale' comes the eager reply. Hamlet mutters that such yes-men 'fool me to the top of my bent'.

Hearing a hidden listener in his mother's room, Hamlet shouts 'Dead, for a ducat' at which animal?

A rat is all he claims to have found, and he bets a ducat on the kill. When his mother asks what he has done, he answers, 'Nay, I know not: is it the king?'

In Hamlet's closet scene, what does the prince make his mother study to compare her two husbands?

Two portraits: Hamlet praises one face for 'Hyperion's curls' and 'the front of Jove himself', then asks how she could leave 'this fair mountain' to 'batten on this moor'.

Asked by the king where the dead counsellor's body is, what does Hamlet first reply?

At supper, 'not where he eats, but where he is eaten': worms are dining on him, Hamlet explains, and the same worms make a fat king and a lean beggar two dishes at one table.

What do the sealed letters that the king sends to England with Hamlet secretly ask for?

His execution, and at once: Hamlet later reports that the order allowed no delay, 'not to stay the grinding of the axe', before his head was to be struck off.

Which herb does the grief-crazed Ophelia hand out in Hamlet, saying 'that's for remembrance'?

Rosemary comes first, then pansies 'for thoughts', fennel, columbines, rue and a daisy. The violets, she says, 'withered all when my father died'.

How does the poisoned rapier come to wound its own owner during the final duel in Hamlet?

The fencers swap weapons in a scuffle after Hamlet is first cut, so the plotter is caught, in his own image, 'as a woodcock to mine own springe'.

Which line does the dying Hamlet speak just before a friend bids him 'Good night, sweet prince'?

The rest is silence follows Hamlet's last piece of business, giving his 'dying voice' to the man who is about to become the next king of Denmark.

Which foppish courtier, mocked by Hamlet as a 'water-fly', delivers the challenge to the final duel?

Osric is so eager to please that, having called the day very hot, he lets Hamlet talk him into cold and then sultry again. He goes on to referee the fencing, calling 'a very palpable hit'.

Defying omens before the duel, Hamlet sees 'a special providence' in the fall of which bird?

A sparrow is enough to persuade him that everything is ordained: death will come now or later, he reasons, so 'the readiness is all'.

Which object in his purse lets Hamlet seal the forged royal order he writes on the ship to England?

His father's signet matched the Danish royal seal, so the forgery passed as genuine. Hamlet takes the luck of having it with him as a sign that heaven was guiding events.

Which poet called Hamlet 'most certainly an artistic failure' in a 1919 essay on the play?

T. S. Eliot argued that Shakespeare never found events to match his hero's emotion, and the essay made the term for such a match, the 'objective correlative', a fixture of criticism.

Which English actor, first cast as Hamlet in 1661, went on playing the young prince until he was 74?

Thomas Betterton was cast by William Davenant and played the part opposite Mary Saunderson, the Ophelia he soon married.

Which composer turned Hamlet into an 1868 grand opera whose original ending lets the prince live?

Ambroise Thomas followed a stage version by Alexandre Dumas in which the Ghost tells Hamlet he shall live, and the opera ends with him proclaimed king. A shorter finale named for Covent Garden has the prince die after all.

Which Ian McEwan novel retells Hamlet through a narrator who has not yet been born?

Nutshell takes its title from Hamlet's boast that he 'could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space'; its narrator overhears a murder plot from the womb.