Hamlet Characters

(Click the character infographic to download.) What's Up with Hamlet?Hamlet is a teenager... right? After all, he sure acts like one. He's a moody and smart-alecky kid with suicidal tendencies,...

(Click the character infographic to download.) Ghosts are a common element in revenge tragedy (which you can read more about by going to "Genre") so it's not terribly surprising that the specter s...

(Click the character infographic to download.) Uneasy lies the Head that Wears the Crown…Especially if he got it through sibling-cide and quasi-incest. That's our man Claudius, the current king o...

(Click the character infographic to download.) Poor Hamlet. All he wants is a mom who bakes cookies for the PTA bake sale and stays true to his dad's memory—but instead, she marries her dead husb...

(Click the character infographic to download.) A Danish lord, Polonius is the father of Laertes and Ophelia. And he's exactly the kind of dad who's so embarrassing that you don't even want to bring...

(Click the character infographic to download.) Good Girl Gone BadYour parents only wish they had a daughter like Ophelia. When her father orders her to quit seeing Hamlet, she agrees —"I shall ob...

(Click the character infographic to download.) Laertes, a young Danish lord, is the son of Polonius and brother of Ophelia. He spends most of his time off at college, but, like a lot of college stu...

(Click the character infographic to download.) Horatio is Hamlet's closest friend, and he's the only one who really seems to deserve the title. Unlike Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (also Hamlet's ol...

(Click the character infographic to download.) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern seem incapable of functioning independently, so they're basically one character, no matter what they might say. They show...

(Click the character infographic to download.) We like to think it's no coincidence that Fortinbras' name makes a great chant: "FortinBRAS! FortinBRAS." He's a Norwegian prince with a trigger finge...