Laertes
Character Profile – At a Glance
- Role: Son to the Lord Chamberlain Polonius, brother to Ophelia, and a foil to Prince Hamlet.
- Key Traits: Passionate, impulsive, protective, traditional, and easily manipulated.
- The Core Conflict: Consumed by grief and rage over the murder of his father and the subsequent madness of his sister, Laertes demands immediate justice but sacrifices his own moral integrity to achieve it.
- Key Actions: Lectures Ophelia on her relationship with Hamlet; leads a popular rebellion against Claudius; fights Hamlet in Ophelia’s grave; conspires to murder Hamlet in a rigged fencing match.
- Famous Quote:
"To hell, allegiance! Vows, to the blackest devil!
Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit!
I dare damnation."
(Act 4, Scene 5) - The Outcome: He is fatally wounded by his own poisoned blade during the duel. In his final moments, he confesses the King’s treachery, exchanges forgiveness with Hamlet, and dies.
The Passionate Foil
Laertes serves as the most direct behavioural foil to Hamlet. While both young men are studying abroad, both return to Elsinore to find their fathers murdered, and both are plunged into a desperate quest for revenge. However, their reactions are diametrically opposed. Where Hamlet is paralysed by philosophical hesitation and theological dread, Laertes is a creature of pure, unthinking action.
Original
Let come what comes; only I’ll be revenged
Most thoroughly for my father.
(Act 4, Scene 5)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
For what will be will be, if I’ve revenge
For my dear father’s death.
Laertes literally bursts through the castle doors with a riotous mob at his back, ready to overthrow the King without a second thought. He publicly discards his allegiance, his conscience, and his fear of damnation. This fiery, melodramatic readiness perfectly highlights exactly what Hamlet lacks, demonstrating the destructive power of action divorced from reason.
The Patriarchal Brother
Before the tragedy consumes him, Laertes is established as a conventional, somewhat overbearing young nobleman. His relationship with his sister, Ophelia, is affectionate but deeply steeped in the patriarchal expectations of the era, directly tying into the play’s exploration of gender. He echoes his father’s cynical view of love and actively dictates how his sister should manage her sexuality and reputation.
Original
Then weigh what loss your honour may sustain,
If with too credent ear you list his songs,
Or lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open
To his unmastered importunity.
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
So think about your damaged reputation
If, gullibly, you’re sucked in by his words,
And lose your heart or, worse, virginity
By his insistent, uncontrolled flirtations.
Laertes views Ophelia’s honour not as her own, but as a commodity tied to the family’s reputation. While his warnings about Hamlet’s princely obligations are politically accurate, his lecturing tone reduces Ophelia to a fragile entity that must be shielded. His profound grief over her subsequent madness and death is genuine, yet it fuels his transition from a protective brother into a ruthless killer.
The Corruption of Honour
The ultimate tragedy of Laertes is the degradation of his honour. He begins as a straightforward, traditional nobleman demanding open justice. However, because he acts on raw emotion rather than intellect, he is incredibly susceptible to deception. King Claudius easily channels Laertes’s rage away from the throne and towards Hamlet, infecting the young man with his own corruption.
Original
I will do’t:
And, for that purpose, I’ll anoint my sword.
I bought an unction of a mountebank,
So mortal that, but dip a knife in it...
(Act 4, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I will do it.
And, for revenge, I’ll consecrate my sword.
I bought a potion from a scallywag
That is so poisonous that, from a knife dip...
By agreeing to use a sharpened, poisoned foil in what is supposed to be a friendly exhibition match, Laertes abandons the chivalric code he claims to hold so dear. He allows his desire for vengeance to completely compromise his morality. It is only when he is dying by his own treacherous weapon that his conscience returns, allowing him to reclaim a shred of his nobility in his final breath.
"Laertes and Fortinbras are evidently designed to throw the character of the hero into relief."
— A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 1904
Key Quotes
Quote 1
To hell, allegiance! Vows, to the blackest devil!
Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit!
I dare damnation.
(Act 4, Scene 5)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Allegiance, go to hell! I’ll stand with devils!
Good manners and good will, dig in the dirt!
I don’t care if I’m damned.
Quote Analysis: This is the ultimate expression of the revenge tragedy archetype. Laertes openly rejects the political authority of the King ("allegiance") and the religious authority of God ("grace" and "damnation"). He is willing to sacrifice his eternal soul for immediate, earthly vengeance, presenting a stark contrast to Hamlet’s spiritual paralysis.
For Hamlet and the trifling of his favour,
Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood,
A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting...
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
For Hamlet and his foolish faux affection,
Think of it as a passing amorous phase,
A springtime violet blooming whilst it’s young,
A short-lived show, though sweet, it won’t endure...
Quote Analysis: Warning Ophelia against Hamlet’s advances, Laertes uses natural imagery to suggest that the Prince’s love is beautiful but temporary. It establishes Laertes as a pragmatic, protective older brother, while also foreshadowing the floral imagery that will later be associated with Ophelia’s tragic end.
Lay her i’ the earth:
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring! I tell thee, churlish priest,
A ministering angel shall my sister be,
When thou liest howling.
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Lower her down,
And from her kind and innocent remains
May violets bloom! I tell you, spiteful priest,
My sister shall become a heavenly angel
While you will howl in hell.
Quote Analysis: At Ophelia’s funeral, Laertes explodes with grief against the priest who refuses her full Christian rites (due to her suspected suicide). His passionate defence of his sister’s purity demonstrates his deep love for her, but his leap into her open grave also highlights his tendency toward theatrical, unbridled emotion.
Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet:
Mine and my father’s death come not upon thee,
Nor thine on me.
(Act 5, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Please, let’s forgive each other, noble Hamlet;
Mine and my father’s death are not your fault,
Nor is yours mine.
Quote Analysis: In his final moments, having been struck by his own poisoned blade, Laertes’s blinding rage lifts. He recognises that they have both been manipulated by Claudius. By exchanging forgiveness, he breaks the cycle of vengeance and redeems his corrupted honour just before he dies.
Key Takeaways
- The Man of Action: Laertes represents the traditional revenge hero – decisive, passionate, and willing to act without over-analysing the moral consequences.
- The Dangers of Emotion: His character serves as a warning against unchecked passion. Because he does not think critically, he becomes an easy pawn for the manipulative Claudius.
- A Compromised Code: He begins the play lecturing others on honour, but ultimately abandons his own chivalric code by agreeing to use a poisoned, unbated weapon in a sporting duel.
- Redemption in Death: Despite his treachery, Laertes is not fundamentally evil. His final act of exposing the King and forgiving Hamlet restores a measure of his lost nobility.
Study Questions and Analysis
How does Laertes serve as a foil to Hamlet?
The pairing of Laertes and Hamlet is one of the most carefully constructed pieces of dramatic counterpoint in Shakespeare. A. C. Bradley’s 1904 reading – quoted on this page – names the architectural decision with absolute precision.
Bradley’s argument is that Laertes (with Fortinbras) is "evidently designed to throw the character of the hero into relief." The phrase names the foil-relationship as a piece of deliberate dramaturgical engineering rather than as an incidental thematic echo.
The symmetry the play commits to is exact. Each of the two young men has a father killed within the play’s reach. Each is therefore charged, by the period’s code of honour, with the responsibility of avenging the death. Each occupies a different position on the spectrum of possible responses to the charge.
Hamlet’s response, by A3S4, has been four soliloquies of self-accusation, a theatrical performance staged to test the Ghost’s word, a passed-up opportunity to kill Claudius at prayer, and an impulsive killing of Polonius behind the arras. Laertes’s response, by A4S5, has been a return from Paris at the head of an armed mob, the storming of the palace, and a direct confrontation with Claudius demanding "satisfaction" for his father’s death. The contrast is exact. Hamlet has produced four acts of contemplation and one accidental killing. Laertes has produced no contemplation at all and is already in a position to mount a credible coup.
The A4S5 speech that anchors the body verse pair "The Passionate Foil" on this page names the difference. Laertes is willing to abandon every constraint Hamlet has been wrestling with – political allegiance to the king, the religious authority of conscience and grace, even the threat of damnation that has restrained Hamlet from the suicide his earlier soliloquies have considered. Laertes has the immediate-action capacity Hamlet lacks. Bradley’s deeper argument is that the play’s interest is precisely in the contrast. The design requires both characters to be present so that the audience can see what Hamlet is and is not doing by reference to a figure who occupies the same position with the opposite temperament.
The harder interpretive question the foil-structure raises is whether the contrast is to Hamlet’s credit or to his discredit.
The Romantic critical tradition – Coleridge, Hazlitt, Goethe – read Hamlet’s contemplative restraint as morally superior to Laertes’s impulsive action. Hamlet’s hesitation, on this reading, is the consequence of a refined moral imagination that recognises the spiritual cost of revenge.
Bradley complicated this position by arguing that Hamlet’s delay is, in the end, the cause of the catastrophe. Laertes’s impulsive action, while morally cruder than Hamlet’s contemplation, is at least operational. The fact that Laertes’s action also fails – he dies before achieving the revenge he had set out to accomplish – is the play’s argument that neither response, on its own, is adequate to the situation.
The verdict the play delivers is exact. Fortinbras gets the kingdom. Laertes and Hamlet kill each other. The avenger who could combine Laertes’s immediate-action capacity with Hamlet’s strategic intelligence – the figure Fortinbras represents – is the one who survives to receive the political reward of the others’ destruction.
Why is Claudius able to manipulate Laertes so easily?
The A4S5 and A4S7 sequence with Claudius is one of the most carefully constructed pieces of psychological manipulation in Shakespeare. The mechanism by which Claudius converts Laertes’s rage into directed energy against Hamlet works by precise calibration to Laertes’s specific psychological vulnerabilities.
The A4S5 setup is exact. Laertes returns from France enraged at his father Polonius’s death and the obscure circumstances of the funeral. He storms the palace at the head of an armed mob. He confronts Claudius with the threat of immediate violent revolution.
Claudius’s immediate response is rhetorical control. "Let him go, Gertrude... / There’s such divinity doth hedge a king, / That treason can but peep to what it would, / Acts little of his will." Claudius isn’t actually protected by any "divinity," but the assertion of royal protection is enough to make Laertes’s immediate violence functionally impossible.
The A4S7 sequence completes the manipulation by working on three distinct psychological registers Claudius has correctly identified.
The first is the flattery register. Claudius’s report of the Lamord conversation – the French nobleman who had described Laertes’s "masterly" fencing to Claudius – engages Laertes’s professional vanity.
He made confession of you,
And gave you such a masterly report
For art and exercise in your defence...
This report of his
Did Hamlet so envenom with his envy
That he could nothing do but wish and beg
Your sudden coming o’er, to play with him.
(Act 4, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
He told me something of you,
And gave you such a glowing commendation
For skill and expertise in self-defence...
And of this feedback,
Our Hamlet was enraged with jealousy,
So much so that he desperately wished
You’d suddenly show up and he could fight you.
Laertes, having had his fencing prowess validated by an authoritative third party and having been told that Hamlet is consumed with envy at the validation, has been given both the professional motivation and the psychological permission to engage in a fencing match he might otherwise have refused.
The second register is the grief-authenticity test. "Laertes, was your father dear to you? / Or are you like the painting of a sorrow, / A face without a heart?" The mechanism is exact. Claudius is offering the rhetorical frame within which Laertes can prove his grief’s authenticity by accepting the plot Claudius is about to propose. By converting the question into one of authentic versus performative grief, Claudius makes the plot’s dishonourable means look like the test by which authentic love can be demonstrated.
The third register is political-religious. Claudius’s framing of Hamlet’s killing of Polonius as an act of regal injustice ("the king") lets Laertes read his vengeance not as private murder but as the restoration of public-political order.
The deeper reason the manipulation succeeds is that Laertes is operating on emotion rather than reflection. A. C. Bradley’s 1904 reading names the fact directly. Laertes lacks the contemplative capacity that has produced Hamlet’s delay. The same lack makes him susceptible to the rhetorical management at which Claudius excels.
Hamlet, on the play’s evidence, can’t be manipulated by Claudius. The A3S4 closet scene, the A4S4 "How all occasions" soliloquy, and the A5S2 "There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow" all demonstrate Hamlet’s continued capacity to read political situations independently of Claudius’s framings. Laertes possesses no equivalent capacity. The A4S7 plot works by exploiting the absence.
The irony is exact. Laertes, who has been weaponised against Hamlet, ends up dying by the same poison. The over-engineering Claudius committed to as insurance becomes the mechanism by which both of his instruments – and ultimately the king himself – are destroyed. The A5S2 reconciliation between Hamlet and Laertes names the moral fact that Claudius’s manipulation has been retrospectively recognised by its principal victim.
What does the grave-jumping scene reveal about Laertes?
The A5S1 graveyard scene is one of the most carefully calibrated pieces of public-emotional drama in the play. Laertes’s leap into Ophelia’s grave works at several levels the surface action doesn’t always make explicit.
The setup is exact. Ophelia’s funeral has been politically managed to permit Christian burial despite the suicide suspicion the play has documented. The priest performing the service complains that the rites have been "enlarged" beyond what the doubtful death would normally permit. Laertes, witnessing the truncated ceremony, demands further dignities and is refused. The priest’s response – that to grant a requiem would "profane the service of the dead" by treating Ophelia’s death as that of "peace-parted souls" – is the provocation that triggers Laertes’s outburst.
The leap into the grave is the moment at which the scene’s emotional intensity becomes physically visible. Laertes, refusing to accept the limited burial his sister has been given, jumps into the open grave to embrace the body and to be buried alongside her.
Now pile your dust upon the quick and dead,
Till of this flat a mountain you have made,
To o’ertop old Pelion, or the skyish head
Of blue Olympus.
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Now throw your earth upon the dead and living
Until this flat land’s turned into a mountain
Higher than Pelion or lofty heights
Of Mount Olympus!
The classical reference – Pelion and Olympus, the mountains the Titans piled in their war against the gods – names the register. Laertes’s grief is being articulated at the scale of mythic confrontation rather than at the scale of private mourning.
Hamlet’s response to the leap is the play’s clearest evidence of the difference between the two men’s modes of grief. Hamlet, having watched Laertes from concealment, emerges to challenge the rhetorical register, demanding to know whose grief bears such emphasis as to conjure the wandering stars and make them stand "like wonder-wounded hearers." The arrangement is exact. Hamlet objects not to Laertes’s grief but to Laertes’s articulation of grief – the rhetorical excess that converts private mourning into public theatre. Hamlet’s own grief, on his framing, is at least as deep as Laertes’s: forty thousand brothers’ love together, he insists, could not match the sum of his own. The leap into the grave, the rhetorical inflation, the "drink up eisel, eat a crocodile" challenge to Laertes – all are deployed by Hamlet to demonstrate that whatever Laertes can articulate in registers of public grief, Hamlet can articulate in registers more extravagant still.
The argument is that the grave-jumping scene reveals the performative character of Laertes’s grief. The grief is, on the play’s evidence, genuine. Laertes loved his sister and the loss is real. But the public theatricalisation – the leap, the classical references, the demands on the priest – operates by registers the more contained mourning of a Horatio or even of a Gertrude doesn’t require.
Hamlet’s challenge in the scene is the play’s most direct evidence of the difference between the two characters’ relationships to public performance. Hamlet has, throughout the play, maintained a distinction between his private interior (the soliloquies) and his public performance (the "antic disposition"). Laertes operates without the distinction, with his interior emotional state directly and theatrically externalised in whatever public setting he encounters.
A. C. Bradley’s 1904 reading names the register at which the contrast operates. Hamlet is the man of reflection. Laertes the man of action. The grave-jumping scene is one of the play’s clearest pieces of evidence on the cost the action-mode imposes on the dignity the reflection-mode preserves.
The deeper question the scene raises is whether Hamlet’s contained mourning is morally superior to Laertes’s theatrical mourning or merely socially superior. The play permits both readings. Modern productions tend to stage the scene as evidence of Hamlet’s continuing inability to recognise the legitimacy of others’ emotional modes. Traditional readings have tended to stage it as evidence of the depth Hamlet’s interior life maintains against the surface noise Laertes produces.
How does Laertes view honour?
Laertes’s relationship to honour is one of the most carefully constructed pieces of moral architecture in the play. The movement from his initial articulation of the honour code to his eventual abandonment of it is one of Shakespeare’s most pointed pieces of writing on the difference between honour as social reputation and honour as ethical practice.
The A1S3 articulation is exact. Laertes’s farewell speech to Ophelia – the body verse pair "The Patriarchal Brother" on this page – is the canonical statement of the conventional aristocratic honour code applied to female sexual conduct. Ophelia’s honour is, in Laertes’s framing, a piece of family property whose preservation is a matter of his and Polonius’s direct concern. The honour-as-reputation register the speech operates within is the conventional Elizabethan-aristocratic understanding. Honour is the public assessment of one’s family’s standing, and the preservation of honour requires the management of the behaviours that would damage that public assessment.
Laertes’s A4S5 demand on Claudius develops the same register in a different application. "How came he dead? I’ll not be juggled with: / To hell, allegiance!... Let come what comes; only I’ll be revenged / Most thoroughly for my father." The honour-code reasoning is exact. A son whose father has been killed is required, by the conventional aristocratic code, to seek satisfaction. The obscure circumstances of Polonius’s burial have further damaged the family’s public standing. The "satisfaction" Laertes demands is the public acknowledgement of the wrong and the public punishment of the wrongdoer.
The A5S1 graveyard scene continues the application. Laertes’s outburst against the priest is the same reputation-protective mechanism deployed in defence of his sister’s funeral rites. The truncated ceremony has damaged the family’s public standing, and Laertes’s protest is an attempt to restore the public dignity the religious authorities have refused.
The A4S7 collapse of the code is the turning point. Claudius proposes the unbated rapier. Laertes volunteers the poison. Laertes, in the name of avenging his family’s honour, has agreed to commit the most dishonourable act available within the period’s chivalric vocabulary – assassination by stealth in what is publicly presented as a sporting contest.
The argument is that Laertes’s honour-as-reputation framework has, at the moment of crisis, proved incapable of generating the principled refusal that honour-as-ethical-practice would have required. The poisoned-sword plot violates every articulated principle of the chivalric code Laertes has been deploying as the rhetorical justification of his vengeance. The unbated weapon violates the fencing convention. The poisoned tip violates the prohibition on stealth assassination. The public-private deception – the plot is being executed under the guise of a friendly match – violates the principle of open confrontation the honour code most fundamentally requires.
The A5S2 dying recognition completes the movement.
I am justly killed with mine own treachery.
(Act 5, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’m rightly dying by my own betrayal.
The line is Laertes’s first articulation of honour-as-ethical-practice rather than honour-as-reputation. His death by his own poison is "just" not because it preserves any public assessment of his family’s standing (his public standing, by this point, has been destroyed) but because it accurately matches the moral category his actions have placed him within.
The deeper argument the play commits to is that Laertes’s honour code, while genuine in its articulated form, lacks the principled core that would have prevented its collapse under pressure. Coleridge’s 1818 maxims-vs-principles distinction (developed for Polonius) names the same problem here. Laertes, like his father, operates by inherited maxims of conduct rather than by principles that carry knowledge within themselves. When the maxims are challenged by circumstances they haven’t anticipated, the operational framework collapses, and the actions Laertes takes in the resulting vacuum are the ones his stated principles had been designed to prevent.
What is the significance of Laertes owning the poison?
The A4S7 disclosure that Laertes has personally acquired the poison for the planned assassination is one of the play’s most carefully constructed pieces of moral evidence. The significance of his ownership of the murder mechanism works at several distinct levels.
The textual evidence is exact. Claudius proposes the structural mechanism of the plot – an "envenomed" sword combined with the unbated rapier – and Laertes responds by volunteering an additional and more dangerous component. The body verse pair "The Corruption of Honour" on this page records the opening lines of his response. The passage then continues into the poison’s extended lethality.
Where it draws blood no cataplasm so rare,
Collected from all simples that have virtue
Under the moon, can save the thing from death
That is but scratched withal...
(Act 4, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And cut that draws some blood, there is no cure,
Not even from the finest plants collected
Around the world, can save a thing from dying
If scratched by it.
The arrangement is exact. The poison is not provided by Claudius. Claudius proposes the use of poison but doesn’t provide it. Laertes is the one who reveals he has already acquired the lethal compound.
The "I bought" is the pivot. Laertes has, at some earlier moment in the play (the text doesn’t specify exactly when), purchased a poison from an unlicensed apothecary – the "mountebank" of the speech – without specific reference to its intended use.
The premeditation question is one of the most carefully constructed pieces of moral evidence in the play. The "mountebank" purchase suggests pre-existing intent. A man who has already purchased a lethal compound has, by the fact of the purchase, been preparing for a moment at which the compound would be required. Whether Laertes had purchased the poison before learning of his father’s death (in which case the purchase is independent evidence on Laertes’s moral character) or after (in which case the purchase is evidence that he had been planning the assassination before the A4S7 conversation with Claudius) is left deliberately ambiguous by the play. Either way, Laertes is, at the moment of the A4S7 conversation, more prepared for the assassination than Claudius had anticipated.
The significance of the ownership is multiple.
The first level is complicity. Laertes is no longer merely a tool deployed by Claudius. He is a willing co-conspirator who has contributed independent resources to the planned murder. The A4S7 conversation is, on this reading, not the moment at which Claudius corrupts Laertes but the moment at which Laertes confirms that his corruption has already been accomplished.
The second level is moral architecture. The chivalric honour code Laertes has been articulating throughout the play – at A1S3 to Ophelia, at A4S5 to Claudius, at A5S1 at the graveyard – has been definitively abandoned at the moment of the A4S7 disclosure. A man who has personally acquired stealth-assassination poison can’t, on any conceivable reading of the period’s honour code, be operating within its strictures. The disclosure is the evidence that Laertes has crossed the moral threshold the code had been designed to prevent.
The third level is dramaturgical poetic justice. Laertes dies by the poison he has personally provided. The Renaissance dramatic convention – that a villain’s mechanism of crime becomes the mechanism of his punishment – operates here in its most fully realised form. Claudius dies by the poison Claudius engineered. Laertes dies by the poison Laertes acquired. The symmetry is exact, and the play’s commitment to the convention is one of the clearest pieces of evidence on the moral architecture the play is working within.
The A5S2 dying speech – the single-line verse pair carried in the previous FAQ on this page – names the moral category Laertes has finally placed himself within. The killing is "just" because the mechanism that has killed him is the mechanism he himself provided. The "treachery" is "his own" because the poison and the unbated sword have both been instruments he personally controlled rather than merely instruments imposed on him by Claudius.
The deeper argument the play commits to is that Laertes’s ownership of the poison is the clearest evidence of the difference between being manipulated and choosing to be manipulated. Claudius has manipulated Laertes. But Laertes, at the moment of the A4S7 disclosure, has chosen to convert the manipulation into a collaboration he is actively contributing to. The moral verdict the A5S2 death enacts is the acknowledgement that Laertes’s death is the consequence not of his having been used by Claudius but of his having allowed himself to be used.
Does Laertes forgive Hamlet?
The A5S2 mutual forgiveness between Laertes and Hamlet is one of the play’s most carefully constructed pieces of moral redemption. The significance of Laertes’s specific articulation works at levels the surface narrative doesn’t always make explicit.
The textual evidence is exact. Laertes, fatally wounded by his own poisoned sword, lies dying alongside Hamlet (who has also been wounded by the same blade). Gertrude has just died from the poisoned cup. Claudius is moments away from his own death at Hamlet’s hands. Laertes’s dying speech – preserved as Key Quote 4 on this page – is one of the most pointed pieces of writing in the play’s final scene.
The arrangement is exact. The forgiveness is mutual. Laertes asks Hamlet to forgive him, and offers his own forgiveness to Hamlet in return. The symmetry works at the level of the play’s moral architecture. Each of the two men has killed a member of the other’s family. Hamlet has killed Laertes’s father Polonius. Laertes has, by collaborating in the poisoned-sword plot, killed Hamlet. The mutual forgiveness is the acknowledgment that each has produced the cause of the other’s death.
The "Mine and my father’s death" formulation is the most carefully calibrated piece of the speech. Laertes is asking Hamlet to absolve him not merely of the assassination plot (which is the recent injury) but of "my father’s death" – the acknowledgment that Polonius’s killing, while produced by Hamlet’s hand, has been retrospectively converted by Laertes’s vengeance into a piece of moral arithmetic the two men can now jointly cancel. The "Nor thine on me" completes the arrangement. Hamlet’s responsibility for Polonius’s death is released by Laertes. Laertes’s responsibility for Hamlet’s death is, by symmetry, released in return.
The function of the forgiveness in the play’s moral architecture is multiple.
The first register is private-personal. The two young men, having both been instruments of Claudius’s manipulations, have arrived at the recognition that their conflict has been the consequence of the king’s design rather than of any genuine grievance between them. The A5S2 "He is justly served; / It is a poison tempered by himself" – Laertes’s identification of Claudius as the actual author of the catastrophe – confirms the recognition.
The second register is theological-spiritual. Laertes’s forgiveness operates as the absolution Hamlet has been unable to receive for the killing of Polonius. The A3S4 killing produced, on Hamlet’s part, no remorse and no confession. The A5S2 absolution by Polonius’s son is the dramatic equivalent of the priestly absolution Hamlet has not sought from any religious authority.
The third register is political-public. Laertes’s forgiveness is the public moral verdict on Hamlet’s killing of Polonius. With Polonius’s son having absolved Hamlet on his deathbed, the public record of the killing has been retrospectively recategorised. Not murder but the tragic consequence of Claudius’s manipulations, with the moral responsibility being borne by the king rather than by Hamlet.
The deeper argument the play commits to is that Laertes’s forgiveness is the clearest single piece of evidence on the moral capacity Laertes retained beneath the corrupted operational mode he had been operating in for the previous two acts. The A4S7 plot to assassinate Hamlet with the poisoned sword had appeared to mark the definitive collapse of Laertes’s moral character. The A5S2 dying speech demonstrates that the collapse had been operational rather than fundamental. Laertes’s moral capacity had been overridden by his grief and Claudius’s manipulation rather than destroyed.
The redemption arc the speech enacts is one of Shakespeare’s most carefully constructed pieces of moral writing. A character who has, by the play’s evidence, descended into stealth-assassination villainy is restored, in his dying moment, to the noble register the A1S3 farewell speech had originally articulated. The verdict is exact. Laertes dies with his moral capacity reasserted, his complicity acknowledged, and his forgiveness extended. The death is the play’s clearest evidence of the resources for moral recovery that the most catastrophic operational failures can leave intact.
Are Polonius and Laertes similar?
The pairing of Polonius and Laertes is one of the play’s most carefully constructed pieces of family counterpoint. The similarities and differences between father and son are one of Shakespeare’s most pointed pieces of writing on the relationship between generational temperament and inherited social position.
The similarities are exact. Both men occupy the same political-administrative class – the senior nobility whose function is the operational management of the regime’s authority rather than its strategic direction. Both deploy Ophelia as an instrument of their own social-political projects. Polonius positions her as bait in the A3S1 nunnery scene to elicit evidence of Hamlet’s mental state. Laertes positions her, in the A1S3 farewell speech, as the bearer of family honour whose sexual conduct must be managed for the family’s reputational benefit. Both operate within the conventional Elizabethan aristocratic framework that treats women as instruments of male political-social ambition rather than as autonomous agents.
Both are killed by their own engagement with the regime. Polonius dies behind the arras in A3S4 while performing the surveillance function that has constituted his operational mode. Laertes dies in A5S2 from the poisoned sword he had personally provided for the assassination plot.
The differences are equally exact. Polonius is a man of words. Laertes is a man of action. The A2S2 announcement to Claudius and Gertrude that Hamlet is mad is the canonical example of Polonius’s mode – extended verbal performance that buries substantive content under layers of rhetorical embellishment. The A4S5 storming of the palace is the canonical example of Laertes’s mode – immediate physical confrontation with no rhetorical mediation at all.
The temperamental contrast operates at every level of the play’s dramatic register. Polonius’s intelligence is retrospective – the man of maxims Coleridge’s 1818 reading identified – organised around the management of past patterns and the application of accumulated court-experience to present situations. Laertes’s intelligence is, by contrast, present-tense only. Directed at the immediate situation in front of him with no apparent capacity for the retrospective-comparative analysis Polonius’s mode requires.
The argument is that they represent two operational phases of the same family character. The older generation expressing its political instincts through rhetorical-administrative management. The younger generation expressing the same instincts through direct physical action.
The deeper question the pairing raises is whether Laertes has inherited Polonius’s limitations or has merely transposed them into a different operational register. A. C. Bradley’s 1904 reading would suggest the second. Laertes, like Polonius, lacks the contemplative capacity the play’s tragic action requires. The difference is that Polonius’s lack expresses itself through retrospective verbal management while Laertes’s lack expresses itself through impulsive physical action. The underlying limitation is the same in both.
The verdict the play delivers confirms the family resemblance. Both Polonius and Laertes die in the service of the same political project – the maintenance of Claudius’s regime against the disruption Hamlet represents – and both are killed by the structural consequences of that service. Polonius dies by Hamlet’s sword while spying on Hamlet for Claudius. Laertes dies by his own poisoned sword while attempting to assassinate Hamlet for Claudius.
The family’s operational dependence on the regime has been, in both cases, the mechanism of its destruction. The deeper political-allegorical reading is that the entire Polonius family – Polonius, Laertes, and Ophelia – is the play’s clearest evidence of the institutional cost of serving an illegitimate regime. The A5S1 graveyard scene, in which the surviving members of the family are reduced to a single mourner (Laertes) burying the only female member of the family (Ophelia), is the structural conclusion of the trajectory both Polonius and Laertes have been collaborating in throughout the play.
The family that operated as the regime’s principal instrument of operational management is, by A5S1, entirely destroyed. The arrangement is the play’s most pointed piece of writing on the consequences of conflating personal loyalty with institutional service.
