The skeleton plot of the play is fairly simple.
Prince Hamlet learns from his father’s ghost that the present king of Denmark, his brother Claudius (Hamlet’s uncle), murdered him after seducing his wife Gertrude (Hamlet’s mother).
To obey the ghost’s order to revenge his death, Hamlet pretends to be mad and even refuses the love of Ophelia, who eventually becomes insane and drowns herself.
After killing Ophelia’s father, Polonius, who is spying from behind a curtain, Hamlet arranges the performance of a play representing his uncle’s crime.
The play confirms Claudius’s guilt, but Hamlet puts off his revenge till the end, when a fencing match is organized by the king between Hamlet and Ophelia’s brother, Laertes.
During the duel, Hamlet kills Laertes, but is in his turn mortally wounded. Meanwhile Gertrude drinks from a poisoned cup prepared for Hamlet, and dies. Soon afterwards Hamlet too, after stabbing the king and making him drink off the rest of the poisoned cup, dies in the arms of his only friend, Horatio.
This short summary cannot give an idea of the depth and complexity of the work. Whether or not it is Shakespeare’s masterpiece is immaterial; of all his plays it is certainly the one that has been most debated and analyzed in every time and country. Interpretations of Hamlet have varied through the centuries, and the Danish prince has in turn been represented as irresolute and unpredictable, torn between moral conflicts, oppressed by melancholy, hindered by too much thinking, no longer able to cope with his times, full of Freudian complexes, etc. All these viewpoints are valid in themselves as Hamlet is all this and something more, too. Yet thinking of the period in which the play was written, as Iann Kott states, it can also be considered a political drama. The Court of Denmark, when everything is corroded by fear and everyone is watched and spied upon, turns into a prison, where there is not even room for love.