Millions of words in thousands of books and articles have been written on Hamlet. They stand in ironic contrast to Hamlet's final words ‘the rest is silence.’ The character of Hamlet himself has attracted most critical commentary. In the nineteenth century he appealed to the romantic melancholic mood and was interpreted as the noble doomed hero. From the second half of the twentieth century more attention has been given to his contradictions and unpleasantness: a man who can speak great poetry yet revile a young woman, stab her father in a sudden violent moment, and send two old friends to their death without a twinge of conscience.

There is something sponge-like about Hamlet. It absorbs the interests and anxieties of any culture and any age. When ‘squeezed out’ in performance and criticism, it renders back those interests and preoccupations as abstracts and brief chronicles of the time. Just as Hamlet described the purpose of playing as to show ‘the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’, so every society reproduces Hamlet to mirror itself. Thus a German production in the 1970s presented Ophelia as a Bader–Meinhof terrorist. A Romanian production in the late 1980s portrayed Denmark as a totalitarian police state in Eastern Europe. And in 2004 London's Old Vic Theatre presented Hamlet as a contemporary disturbed, neurotic adolescent.

One way of answering the question ‘What is Hamlet about?’ is to think of it as the dramatisation of a story. Denmark is under threat of invasion by Fortinbras of Norway. Young Hamlet, prince of Denmark, is deeply depressed. His father the king has recently died in mysterious circumstances. His mother Gertrude has quickly married his uncle Claudius, whom Hamlet detests. Claudius, not Hamlet, has become king. Hamlet's father returns as a Ghost and tells Hamlet that Claudius is responsible for his murder. Hamlet desires revenge and pretends to be mad to achieve that end. But he is uncertain whether the Ghost is honest, or is an agent of the devil, tempting him to do evil. He delays taking revenge. The visit of a group of travelling actors gives him an idea: he will have them perform a murder before Claudius. If Claudius reacts guiltily, it will prove the Ghost has spoken the truth. And that is what happens.