Hamletthe whole play in modern English, scene by scene
A prince is told by his father's ghost that his uncle murdered him — and spends the play deciding whether to believe it, and whether to act. The most famous play in English. Every scene below shows Shakespeare's original text and a plain modern English translation side by side — free, printable, no account, no paywall.
Act 1
- Scene 1Midnight on the guard platform of Elsinore castle.
- Scene 2Claudius holds his first court as King of Denmark: he announces his marriage to Gertrude, his dead brother's widow, sends ambassadors to defuse young Fortinbras's threat, grants Laertes leave to return to France, and orders Hamlet to stop mourning and stay at Elsinore instead of returning to university.
- Scene 3Laertes, leaving for France, warns his sister Ophelia that Hamlet's affection is a passing fancy and that a prince cannot choose his own wife anyway.
- Scene 4Just before midnight on the guard platform, Hamlet waits with Horatio and Marcellus while Claudius's drunken celebration booms from the castle below, prompting Hamlet's disgust at Denmark's reputation for drinking.
- Scene 5The Ghost tells Hamlet he is the spirit of his murdered father: Claudius poured poison in his ear as he slept in the orchard, and the story of a snake bite was a lie.
Act 2
- Scene 1Polonius sends his servant Reynaldo to Paris with money for Laertes and elaborate instructions to spread mild slanders about him in order to trick strangers into revealing what Laertes is really up to.
- Scene 2Claudius and Gertrude recruit Hamlet's old schoolfriends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on him, while Polonius announces he has solved the mystery — Hamlet is mad with thwarted love for Ophelia — and proposes to prove it by using her as bait while he and the King eavesdrop.
Act 3
- Scene 1Claudius and Polonius plant Ophelia in a corridor and hide to eavesdrop, hoping to prove that lovesickness is behind Hamlet's strange behaviour.
- Scene 2Hamlet coaches the visiting actors and asks Horatio to watch Claudius while they perform 'The Mousetrap', a play staged to mirror the murder of Hamlet's father.
- Scene 3Claudius orders Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to escort Hamlet to England, and Polonius leaves to hide behind the tapestry in Gertrude's room.
- Scene 4In Gertrude's private room, Hamlet confronts his mother so violently that she fears for her life; when Polonius cries out from behind the tapestry, Hamlet stabs through it and kills him, hoping it was Claudius.
Act 4
- Scene 1Immediately after the closet scene, Gertrude tells Claudius that Hamlet, in a fit of madness, stabbed Polonius through the tapestry believing him to be a rat.
- Scene 2Hamlet, having hidden Polonius's corpse, is cornered by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who demand to know where it is.
- Scene 3Claudius admits he cannot punish Hamlet openly because the people love him, so exile must be dressed up as a considered decision.
- Scene 4Fortinbras marches his army across Denmark on the way to fight Poland, and Hamlet, being escorted to the ship for England, stops the Norwegian captain and learns that twenty thousand men are about to die over a worthless patch of land.
- Scene 5Ophelia, driven mad by her father's death and Hamlet's disappearance, is let in to see Gertrude and Claudius, and sings broken songs about a dead man and a girl seduced and abandoned.
- Scene 6Sailors arrive at Elsinore with a letter for Horatio from Hamlet, who reports that a pirate ship attacked his vessel on the way to England and took him prisoner when he boarded it alone.
- Scene 7Claudius convinces Laertes that Hamlet killed Polonius and is now coming for the King, then talks him into a rigged fencing match: Laertes will use a sharpened blade, which he offers to smear with a poison he bought from a quack, and Claudius adds a poisoned cup of wine as a backup.
Act 5
Famous lines
- “Who’s there?” — Act 1, Scene 1
- “But look, the morn in russet mantle clad, / Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill.” — Act 1, Scene 1
- “A little more than kin, and less than kind.” — Act 1, Scene 2
- “O that this too too solid flesh would melt, / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!” — Act 1, Scene 2
- “Do not as some ungracious pastors do, / Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven; / Whilst like a puff’d and reckless libertine / Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,” — Act 1, Scene 3
- “Neither a borrower nor a lender be:” — Act 1, Scene 3
- “And to my mind, though I am native here, / And to the manner born, it is a custom / More honour’d in the breach than the observance.” — Act 1, Scene 4
- “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” — Act 1, Scene 4
- “Murder most foul, as in the best it is; / But this most foul, strange, and unnatural.” — Act 1, Scene 5
- “O villain, villain, smiling damned villain! / My tables. Meet it is I set it down, / That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain!” — Act 1, Scene 5
A free No Fear Shakespeare alternative
If you came here looking for a No Fear Shakespeare–style Hamlet, this is the same idea without the wall: SparkNotes now puts most of each play behind a subscription, while every scene here is free — the original text and a plain modern English translation side by side, phone-friendly, printable, and downloadable as a full-play PDF. We're not affiliated with SparkNotes; our translations are written in-house from the public-domain text, and you can paste any line from any edition to translate it.
Want to read Shakespeare unassisted? The Shakespearean English course teaches the grammar and vocabulary behind these lines — or paste anything into the Shakespearean English translator.