48 pages • 1 hour read
William ShakespeareHamlet
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1609A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Act V Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Act V, Scene 1
Two gravediggers debate giving Ophelia a Christian burial which is traditionally denied to deaths by suicide. They agree that, while the coroner has declared Ophelia’s death an accident, he would not have done so if she hadn’t been a gentlewoman.
They are singing and making jokes about their profession—a gravedigger is a better builder than a mason, they say, because what a gravedigger builds lasts until Doomsday—when Hamlet and Horatio arrive. Neither is yet aware of Ophelia’s death.
Hamlet is both amused and appalled by the gravediggers’ humor. When they start to unearth old skulls, Hamlet himself begins to make morbid jokes, speculating on the skulls’ past lives. He gets into a punning battle of wits with one of the gravediggers, who claims to have been working at his profession since the day that the late king overthrew Fortinbras—coincidentally, the same day that young Hamlet was born. The gravedigger, not knowing who is speaking to, says Hamlet was sent away to England because he was mad.
At last, the gravedigger unearths the skull of someone Hamlet knew: the jester Yorick. Hamlet addresses the skull, at first horrified to the point of sickness, then blackly joking that everyone, king and jester alike, will come to this same fate in the end.
His reflections are interrupted by the arrival of Ophelia’s burial party. Still unsure who is being buried, Hamlet and Horatio listen as Laertes bitterly argues with the priest about whether Ophelia’s death was a suicide. In his grief, Laertes leaps into Ophelia’s open grave to embrace her; Hamlet follows, and the two grapple over Ophelia’s body. Horatio at last separates them; Hamlet raves, claiming his love for Ophelia was greater than Laertes’s could ever be. At last, he flees, and Horatio follows him.
Act V, Scene 2
A shaken Hamlet tells Horatio the whole story of his adventure on the seas. He recounts opening the commission that Claudius has sent with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and discovering that Claudius has asked the King of England to kill Hamlet as a diplomatic favor. Hamlet rewrote the commission to request instead the execution of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and he sealed it with his father’s ring. The next day, the pirates attacked. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are thus on their way to their deaths even now. Hamlet denies feeling any guilt over this.
Osric, a courtier, arrives; in an aside, Hamlet tells Horatio that Osric is a wealthy braggart. In florid and self-contradictory language, Osric delivers a challenge: Claudius, he says, has laid a heavy wager on Hamlet in a swordfight between him and Laertes. Though Horatio tries to dissuade him, and in spite of his own foreboding, Hamlet agrees to the fight.
Hamlet and Laertes meet to duel in front of Claudius and Gertrude. Hamlet begins by apologizing to Laertes, blaming his madness for the harm he has caused. Laertes seems to accept the apology but cannot fully consider his honor satisfied. They choose their swords, and Laertes is careful to take the poisoned blade.
Hamlet and Laertes begin their combat in the semblance of a civil, formalized game; Osric acts as referee. After Hamlet scores the first hit, Claudius tries to tempt Hamlet to drink from a poisoned glass of wine, but Hamlet puts him off. Hamlet scores another hit on Laertes, and Gertrude, in celebration, unknowingly drinks a toast to him with the poisoned wine. Claudius notices but cannot bring himself to say anything.
Hamlet is winning, and Laertes loses his temper. The fight loses its veneer of civilization and becomes deadly. As Hamlet and Laertes grapple, they accidentally exchange swords, and both are badly wounded by the poisoned blade.
Gertrude cries out. She feels the poison taking effect and understands it is the wine that has poisoned her. A guilt-stricken Laertes confesses: Both he and Hamlet will shortly die of the sword’s poison, and Claudius has masterminded it all. Hamlet turns and stabs Claudius with the same blade, and when Claudius doesn’t die immediately, Hamlet forces the poisoned wine down his throat. Laertes reaches out to exchange forgiveness with Hamlet, and then he dies as well.
Hamlet, dying, asks Horatio to tell his tale. Horatio offers Hamlet the last of the poisoned cup. Before Hamlet can drink, Osric appears, with news that Fortinbras has arrived in triumph after defeating the Poles. Hamlet, with his dying breath, passes the throne of Denmark to Fortinbras. His final words are, “the rest is silence” (5.2.341).
Fortinbras and an ambassador from England enter, amazed and horrified by the carnage. Horatio is the only person left who knows what happened: He tells Fortinbras that he will tell him the truth.
Act V Analysis
Two images dominate this last act of the play: the skull and the poisoned blade.
In the famous graveyard scene, Hamlet, whose short life has been so choked with death, gazes into the empty eye sockets of his family’s old court jester, Yorick. Everything that made Yorick himself, Hamlet finds, has been stripped away. All skulls look more or less alike, and this one could as easily be Alexander the Great as a jester. This sameness is at least one possible response to Hamlet’s questions: The grim physical reality of death is one of the world’s only certainties, and it comes to king and peasant alike.
The final swordfight between Laertes and Hamlet crystallizes the whole mood of the play and the “rotten in the state of Denmark.” The atmosphere is of murderous cruelty beneath a thin veneer of civilization. The swordfight is framed as a mannerly, aristocratic game, with rules and points, but one of the regulation-issue swords is secretly poisoned. Even the goblet of celebratory wine is lethal. Claudius’s poisoned weapons are concrete images of all of Hamlet’s fears. The deceit of their plain exteriors is like the deceit of words, of love, of people, of Denmark itself.
But the very deceit of the swords and the wine lead to a final eruption of truth. Over the course of this battle, the combatants and almost everyone in the room meet with the incontrovertible reality of death. Hamlet’s final words, “the rest is silence” (5.2.341), show that he has come to a point beyond all his anxieties about truth and falsehood. He passes into the undiscovered country, encountering a silence that is both the great answer to his questions and a tremendous question in itself—to be or not to be.
Horatio, the last Dane standing, greets Fortinbras and cedes the kingdom to him. His final act in the play is to vow to tell truthfully the whole story of the fall of Denmark. This truth telling is shown in the last resort to be a complicated thing. Horatio asks that the bodies of the royal family be put on a “stage”—where, of course, they already are, as a watching audience would know. The moment recalls Hamlet’s earlier theorizing about the role of theater. His own story—its complexities, its darkness, its irresolvable riddles—indeed holds the mirror up to nature, and fiction tells a greater truth.
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By William Shakespeare
