The play has ten significant figures. Hamlet is the Prince of Denmark, the play's protagonist, and the longest single role in any Shakespearean tragedy. Claudius is his uncle, the new king of Denmark, and the play's antagonist — the man who murdered Hamlet's father to seize the throne. Gertrude is Hamlet's mother and Claudius's new wife, the figure whose hasty remarriage triggers Hamlet's most exposed grief. Ophelia is Polonius's daughter and the woman Hamlet loved, whose madness and death in Acts 4 and 5 are one of the play's most-discussed sequences. Polonius is the chief counsellor to the new regime, father to Ophelia and Laertes, and the figure Hamlet kills behind the arras in 3.4.

Laertes is Polonius's son, Ophelia's brother, and the principal foil to Hamlet as the avenger who acts on impulse rather than reflection. Horatio is Hamlet's closest friend and the play's surviving witness, the Stoic intellectual to whom Hamlet entrusts the responsibility of telling his story. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Hamlet's former university friends, recruited by Claudius to spy on him, and treated by the play as a paired structural unit rather than two distinct characters. Fortinbras is the Prince of Norway, the third avenging son of the play, and the figure who inherits Denmark in the final scene. The Ghost of Hamlet's father is the figure whose 1.5 revelation sets the entire tragic action in motion.

The four central figures — Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, and Ophelia — carry most of the play's verse; the other six figures provide the structural foils, antagonists, and dramaturgical mechanisms through which the play's questions about action, mortality, and political legitimacy operate.

Hamlet is, by every conventional measure, the play's protagonist. He has the longest single role in any Shakespearean play — approximately 1,495 lines, around a third of the play's total — and the most soliloquies of any tragic figure. The famous seven soliloquies of Acts 1-4, from "O that this too too solid flesh would melt" (1.2) through "To be or not to be" (3.1) to "How all occasions do inform against me" (4.4), are the play's principal mechanism for staging interiority, and Hamlet's psychological complexity is the play's central dramatic interest.

The protagonist's tragic arc is, in Bradley's 1904 reading, the study of how reflection disables action — the gap between his understanding of what must be done and his ability to do it. His struggle to avenge his father's murder by his uncle Claudius is complicated by grief, religious doubt about the Ghost's nature, philosophical scepticism about the meaning of revenge, and his characteristic tendency to think when action is required. Coleridge's observation in Table Talk — "I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so" — captured the central recognition that has organised modern criticism: Hamlet's paralysis is not a defect peculiar to him but a condition of intellectual modernity.

T.S. Eliot, in his 1919 essay "Hamlet and His Problems," called the character "the Mona Lisa of literature" — the figure whose ambiguity has organised more critical commentary than any other in the Shakespearean canon. Modern criticism has largely confirmed Hamlet's status as the play's protagonist while continuing to debate the nature of the paralysis that makes his arc tragic rather than triumphant.

Claudius is the play's antagonist by every conventional measure: he is the figure whose actions create the tragic situation Hamlet must respond to, the figure whose continued survival the protagonist needs to undo, and the figure whose 3.3 confession ("O, my offence is rank") gives the audience the moral framework within which his political crime is to be judged. Having murdered his brother (Old Hamlet) by pouring poison into his ear while he slept in the orchard, Claudius has seized the throne and married the queen — the dynastic-incest combination that converts political murder into a multiple violation of Danish moral order.

His political strategy across the play is sequential and increasingly violent. First, surveillance — through Polonius's spying, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's investigation, and his own observation of the players' performance in 3.2. Second, exile — the diplomatic mission to England in Act 4 designed to displace the problem geographically. Third, when exile fails and Hamlet returns, assassination — the poisoned-sword and poisoned-cup plot of 5.2, in which Claudius weaponises Laertes's legitimate grievance against Hamlet for the killing of Polonius.

The structural complication is that Claudius is also a competent ruler — the play's first court scene establishes his command of diplomacy, his political authority, and his rhetorical fluency. He is not a tyrant in the manner of Macbeth, and the play takes some care to distinguish his political crime (regicide-and-usurpation) from his administrative practice (which is, by the play's evidence, broadly effective). The contradiction is one of the play's most carefully managed structural tensions: the antagonist of a revenge tragedy who is, in administrative terms, a more capable king than the protagonist would have made.

The question is the play's most-debated critical puzzle, and modern criticism has produced at least five distinct frameworks for answering it. The first is the moral framework: Hamlet delays because revenge is itself a violation of the moral order he is being asked to defend. The 1.5 demand from the Ghost requires him to commit a murder; his Christian-humanist training has equipped him to recognise this as morally indefensible; the delay is the gap between the demand and his ability to violate his own ethics in response to it.

The second framework is theological: the Ghost may be a demon in disguise, and Hamlet cannot be sure whether the revelation is authentic until he has tested it. The 2.2 "play within a play" scheme — using the players to stage a re-enactment of the murder and observe Claudius's response — is a piece of theological epistemology, not narrative procrastination. Dover Wilson's 1935 What Happens in Hamlet gives the fullest account of this reading; Greenblatt's 2001 Hamlet in Purgatory updates it for modern audiences within the Catholic-Protestant context of the play's composition.

The third framework is psychological: Bradley's 1904 reading identifies the condition under which thought disables action; subsequent critics have variously diagnosed melancholy, depression, oedipal complex (Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus, 1949), or political resignation. The fourth is structural — the play needs Hamlet to delay because the tragedy depends on the gap between knowing and acting that the soliloquies dramatise. The fifth is dramaturgical: Shakespeare's revision of the older "Ur-Hamlet" tradition deliberately transformed a straightforward revenge narrative into a meditation on the very possibility of revenge in a world the Reformation has destabilised. The question, as the diversity of frameworks suggests, does not have a single answer — and the play's continued critical productivity is largely because it does not.

Hamlet has three principal foils, and the structural symmetry between them is one of the play's most studied pieces of comparative dramaturgy. Laertes is the first — Polonius's son, Ophelia's brother, and the avenger whose father is killed by Hamlet himself in 3.4. Where Hamlet thinks, Laertes acts: returning from Paris to Denmark in 4.5, raising a faction in the streets, confronting Claudius directly, and entering the duel of 5.2 with murderous intent. The structural contrast is exact — both are young men avenging fathers; both have legitimate grievances; one delays for four acts, the other moves within hours.

Fortinbras is the second foil, and the most structurally distant. The Prince of Norway has his own avenging-the-father plot (the recovery of land lost by his father to Old Hamlet), but Fortinbras pursues it through calculated military strategy rather than personal violence — first attempting reconquest, then accepting diplomatic redirection toward Poland, then arriving in Denmark in 5.2 to find the Danish royal house has destroyed itself. His 4.4 army marching across the stage produces Hamlet's seventh and final soliloquy ("How all occasions do inform against me"), in which Hamlet uses the contrast to indict his own paralysis.

Horatio is the third foil and the structural opposite — not an avenger but a witness, not active but observant, not paralysed but stoic. He is, in Hamlet's own 3.2 description, "a man that fortune's buffets and rewards / Hast ta'en with equal thanks" — the figure Hamlet admires for the equanimity he himself cannot achieve. Where the other two foils show Hamlet what failure of action looks like in different registers, Horatio shows him what successful philosophical composure looks like. He survives the play's catastrophe to deliver Hamlet's story to Fortinbras and the audience — the structural mechanism by which the protagonist's failed life is converted into the play's continuing critical conversation.

The play ends with eight of its named characters dead — the highest body count of any Shakespearean tragedy, and the structural reason it has been studied for four centuries as the genre's defining text. Polonius is the first significant death, killed by Hamlet behind the arras in 3.4 — the moment that converts Hamlet from contemplative protagonist to actual murderer, and that gives Laertes the legitimate grievance the closing duel will weaponise. Ophelia dies offstage between Acts 4 and 5 — whether by accident or suicide is left deliberately ambiguous in 4.7, and the 5.1 gravedigger scene returns to the question.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern die offstage in England, executed under the substituted commission Hamlet has forged on the voyage — a death the play reports almost casually, and which has been the centre of modern criticism's interest in the figures (Tom Stoppard's 1966 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is the canonical creative engagement). Then the closing-scene catastrophe of 5.2: Gertrude dies first, having drunk from the poisoned cup intended for Hamlet; Laertes dies after the duel's poisoned-sword exchange; Claudius dies when Hamlet finally kills him, with both poisoned sword and poisoned cup; Hamlet dies last, from the wound Laertes had given him.

Only Horatio and Fortinbras survive among the named figures — Horatio because Hamlet has explicitly forbidden him from following the protagonist into death, charging him with the responsibility of telling the story; Fortinbras because his army arrives precisely at the moment the Danish royal house has annihilated itself, and his inheritance is the play's structural conclusion. Bradley's 1904 reading frames this structural pattern — the figure who inherits is structurally less than the figure whose death has cleared the way — as the characteristic tragic outcome.

Hamlet has the largest principal cast of any Shakespearean tragedy — ten significant named figures, compared to Othello's eight, Macbeth's eight, or the comparable counts in Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet. The size reflects the play's structural ambition: where the other tragedies operate on a single core relationship (Othello-Iago-Desdemona, Macbeth-Lady Macbeth, Romeo-Juliet), Hamlet stages a complete court — protagonist and antagonist, parents and children, friends and foils, surveillance and reaction — and the size of the cast is the precondition for the play's complexity.

The character set is also unusual in its structural use of parallels. The three avenging-sons (Hamlet, Laertes, Fortinbras) are the most extensively developed foil structure in any Shakespearean tragedy. The play also stages two father-figures (the Ghost and Polonius) and two female-grief patterns (Gertrude and Ophelia), each pairing operating as a piece of structural commentary on the other. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are themselves a paired unit, treated by the play as a single dramaturgical entity — Tom Stoppard's 1966 play recognises this by giving them their own existential register.

The largest principal cast in Shakespearean tragedy supports the largest principal text. Hamlet is the longest of Shakespeare's plays (approximately 4,000 lines in the conflated text), the longest single role (Hamlet himself, at around 1,495 lines), and the play that has accumulated the most extensive critical commentary in the four centuries since its first performance — Bradley, Hazlitt, Coleridge, Goethe, T.S. Eliot, Freud, Jones, Bloom, Greenblatt, and the modern psychoanalytic, historicist, and theological readings have all taken Hamlet as the test case. The character set is the structural mechanism that makes that productivity possible.