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King Claudius is a fictional character and the main antagonist of William Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet. He is the brother to King Hamlet , second husband to Gertrude and uncle and later stepfather to Prince Hamlet .
Laertes slashes Hamlet with his poisoned blade. In the ensuing scuffle, they switch weapons, and Hamlet wounds Laertes with his own poisoned sword. Gertrude collapses and, claiming she has been poisoned, dies. In his dying moments, Laertes reconciles with Hamlet and reveals Claudius's plan. Hamlet rushes at Claudius and kills him.
What follows is an overview of the main characters in William Shakespeare's Hamlet, followed by a list and summary of the minor characters from the play. [1] Three different early versions of the play survive: known as the First Quarto ("Q1"), Second Quarto ("Q2"), and First Folio ("F1"), each has lines—and even scenes—missing in the others, and some character names vary.
In this reading, Hamlet is disgusted by his mother's "incestuous" relationship with Claudius while simultaneously fearful of killing him, as this would clear Hamlet's path to his mother's bed. Carolyn Heilbrun 's 1957 essay "Hamlet's Mother" defends Gertrude, arguing that the text never hints that Gertrude knew of Claudius poisoning King Hamlet.
In Act II, Hamlet refers to Polonius as a "tedious old fool" [3] and taunts him as a latter day "Jephtha". [4] Polonius connives with Claudius to spy on Hamlet. Hamlet unknowingly kills Polonius, provoking Ophelia's descent into madness, ultimately resulting in her (probable) suicide and the climax of the play: a duel between Laertes and Hamlet.
David P. Gontar in his book Hamlet Made Simple proposes that Hamlet's delay is best explained by conceiving of Prince Hamlet as the son of Claudius, not Hamlet the Dane. Noting that Hamlet is suicidal in the first soliloquy well before he meets the Ghost, Gontar reasons that his depression is a result of having been passed over for the Danish ...
Illustration for a 1904 celebrity charity performance, with the author as Claudius. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, A Tragic Episode, in Three Tabloids is a short play by W. S. Gilbert that parodies William Shakespeare's Hamlet.
"To be, or not to be" is a speech given by Prince Hamlet in the so-called "nunnery scene" of William Shakespeare's play Hamlet (Act 3, Scene 1). The speech is named for the opening phrase, itself among the most widely known and quoted lines in modern English literature, and has been referenced in many works of theatre, literature and music.