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Modern editors have divided the play into five acts, and each act into scenes. The First Folio marks the first two acts only. The quartos do not have such divisions. The division into five acts follows Seneca, who in his plays, regularized the way ancient Greek tragedies contain five episodes, which are separated by four choral odes.
Within Hamlet, the stories of five murdered fathers' sons are told: Hamlet, Laertes, Fortinbras, Pyrrhus, and Brutus. Each of them faces the question of revenge in a different way. For example, Laertes moves quickly to be "avenged most throughly of [his] father", while Fortinbras attacks Poland, rather than the guilty Denmark.
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 Act III, Hamlet seems to drop the pretense of friendship, coldly dismissing the two in Scene 2. Line 319 is perhaps his only use of the royal "we" in the play, although he may also be addressing the other person present on the stage, Horatio, with whom Hamlet first saw the ghost they are discussing. To his mother, he comments in Scene 4 that ...
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.
Hamlet and Ophelia are each rebuked by their surviving parent in subsequent scenes; the surviving parent of each happens to be of the opposite gender. Both also enter scenes reading books and there is a contrast between the (possibly) pretend madness of Hamlet and the very real insanity of Ophelia.
"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.
The Gravediggers (or Clowns) are examples of Shakespearean fools (also known as clowns or jesters), a recurring type of character in Shakespeare's plays. Like most Shakespearean fools, the Gravediggers are peasants or commoners that use their great wit and intellect to get the better of their superiors, other people of higher social status, and each other.