Writing a Hamlet Essay That Is Yours
The Hamlet essay has a built-in trap. The play is about a man who cannot stop analyzing, and students writing about it tend to catch the same condition: they list every reason Hamlet delays, quote "To be, or not to be" as decoration, and end with a sentence about indecision being tragic. A teacher reads that as a paragraph about the idea of the play; a detector reads its even sentences as the shape of generated text. This guide puts that paragraph beside a close reading of the same soliloquy, then gives you thesis directions, lines to quote, and a process that proves the essay is yours.
The site's Hamlet work guide already argues that the delay is the play's argument rather than its problem, and that language is the real action in Elsinore. This article, part of the Authorship pillar, shows what those readings look like when a student performs one on the page.
In short: A Hamlet essay that is yours quotes one speech with act and scene, notices a word or phrase most readers skip, and builds a claim that could be refused. A generated-style paragraph lists causes of delay and calls indecision tragic. Your marked text, dated drafts, and version history show which one you wrote.
Two paragraphs on the delay, side by side
Every Hamlet essay has to deal with the delay, and most reach for 3.1 to do it. The left column is in the flat, hedging, list-everything register generated text falls into; the right column reads three phrases from the same soliloquy and makes one claim.
| Generated-style paragraph | Close-read paragraph |
|---|---|
| Hamlet is one of Shakespeare's most famous plays, and one of its main themes is Hamlet's delay. Throughout the play, Hamlet struggles to take revenge on Claudius for killing his father. There are many possible reasons for his delay, such as his uncertainty about the ghost, his moral concerns about murder, and his tendency to overthink. His famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy shows his inner conflict. Ultimately, Hamlet's delay leads to the deaths of many characters, including Ophelia, Gertrude, and Hamlet himself. This shows that indecision can have tragic consequences. | The soliloquy in 3.1 never mentions Claudius. Hamlet asks whether it is "nobler in the mind to suffer" or "to take arms against a sea of troubles," and the second phrase is the tell: nobody can take arms against a sea, and Hamlet knows it. The speech then locates the obstacle in knowledge rather than courage. It is "the dread of something after death" that "puzzles the will." When he concludes that "conscience does make cowards of us all," the word carried, in 1600, the sense of consciousness as well as moral scruple. Hamlet is not confessing weakness. He is arguing that anyone who thinks clearly about an irreversible act will hesitate, and the play spends two more acts testing whether he is right. |
The left column cannot be wrong, which is why it is not an essay. The right column can be. A reader might answer that 4.4 shows Hamlet rejecting his own argument when he calls his scruple "thinking too precisely on th' event," and that reply is possible only because a position was taken.
What a teacher sees, what a detector sees, what your drafts show
A teacher sees that the left column names the soliloquy without reading a word of it. Its evidence is a title in quotation marks. Its sentences are all the same length and its verbs are "shows," "leads to," and "struggles." The right column could only come from someone who had the speech open and stopped at "sea of troubles" long enough to notice that the metaphor does not work, then asked whether Shakespeare meant it not to. The lane's comparison of AI writing and human writing lists the features that separate the two columns; the biggest is whether anything in the paragraph could be false.
A detector sees the same difference as arithmetic. It measures perplexity (how predictable each word is given the words before it) and burstiness (how much sentence length varies). The left column's sentences run thirteen to twenty-one words each, and every one ends where a reader expects. The right column has a six-word sentence next to a thirty-five-word one, carries five quotations in early modern English, and uses "tell," "puzzles," and "irreversible" where a model would put "reveals" and "important."
That is not a reason to write the second paragraph. The reason is that the second paragraph is the essay. Detectors are wrong often enough that the 2023 Patterns study by Weixin Liang and colleagues at Stanford found that widely used tools consistently misclassified essays by non-native English writers as machine-generated while passing native writers' work. A score is not evidence. A record is, and close reading makes one automatically: the page with "sea of troubles" circled, the first draft that says "Hamlet delays because he overthinks," the second draft that replaces it with a claim about knowledge. The guide on how to prove you did not use AI explains how to gather and present that trail if anyone asks.
Hamlet essay topics with a thesis inside them
A Hamlet thesis has to name a mechanism and point at a scene. The site's guide to building a thesis that is actually an argument explains the difference between a topic and a claim; each direction below is a claim.
1. The one soliloquy where Hamlet is wrong about himself
In 4.4 Hamlet blames "thinking too precisely on th' event" and vows that his thoughts will "be bloody or be nothing worth." The work guide reads the delay as a form of integrity. Extend it: argue that 4.4 is Hamlet misdiagnosing himself, since the play has just shown that his caution about the Ghost in 2.2 was sound theology, and that his resolution here produces nothing but more corpses.
2. Ophelia inherits the court's language
In 3.1 Hamlet tells Ophelia "Get thee to a nunnery," knowing Polonius and Claudius are listening. In 4.5 she hands out flowers and announces their meanings. Argue that Ophelia's madness is the court's habit of double speech turned inward: she ends up unable to mean what she says because everyone around her has spent four acts refusing to.
3. Claudius is the only character who answers his own question
"May one be pardon'd and retain th' offence?" he asks in 3.3, and concludes that he cannot. Argue that Claudius's prayer scene is the play's one moment of complete honesty, and that Hamlet's decision not to kill him there, on the grounds that prayer might send him to heaven, is Hamlet performing a theology he does not believe.
4. From "puzzles the will" to "the readiness is all"
In 3.1 the unknown "puzzles the will"; in 5.2 Hamlet says "The readiness is all" and stops asking. Argue that Hamlet never solves the problem the soliloquy poses. He abandons it, and the play declines to say whether that is wisdom or fatigue.
5. The pun as Hamlet's first weapon
His first line, "A little more than kin, and less than kind" (1.2), is an aside. Argue that Hamlet's wordplay is the play's real violence, and track how Claudius fears Hamlet's speech long before he fears his sword. The site's companion piece on writing a Macbeth essay that is yours makes a parallel case about soliloquy as rehearsal, which can sharpen this one by contrast.
Evidence you must quote, with act and scene
Hamlet is public domain. The Folger Shakespeare Library's online edition and the Project Gutenberg text are both reliable. Cite act and scene after each quotation, and quote at least four of the following.
- 1.2: "A little more than kin, and less than kind."
- 2.2: "The spirit that I have seen / May be a devil."
- 3.1: "To be, or not to be" through "lose the name of action."
- 3.3: "O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven."
- 4.4: "How all occasions do inform against me" and "thinking too precisely on th' event."
- 5.2: "The readiness is all" and "The rest is silence."
A process checklist that documents itself
Each step leaves something behind that shows the essay being made.
- Open one soliloquy (3.1 or 4.4) and mark every phrase that does not quite make sense. Date the page.
- Write one claim about a marked phrase that a classmate could reject. Keep it at the top of the document and strike it through when it changes rather than deleting it.
- Draft across three or more sittings. Cloud word processors record each session in version history; save desktop files under a new dated name each time.
- Cut any sentence that says Hamlet "delays" or "overthinks" without a quotation beside it.
- If you used any tool for grammar, brainstorming, or plot summary, add one line at the end saying what you used and for what.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good thesis for a Hamlet essay about delay?
Treat the delay as the argument rather than the problem. For example: Hamlet's hesitation is sound reasoning about unverifiable evidence, and 4.4, where he condemns his own caution, is the one soliloquy in which he misreads himself. That can be disputed with the text, which makes it a thesis.
How should I quote "To be, or not to be"?
Cite it as 3.1 and quote the phrases you are actually reading, not the first line alone. "Sea of troubles," "puzzles the will," and "conscience does make cowards of us all" each carry an argument; the opening line by itself carries only recognition.
What if my Hamlet essay is flagged as AI-generated?
If you wrote it, the flag is a false positive, and those are well documented. Bring your marked text, dated drafts, and version history to your teacher and request the review process your school provides.
Making the Hamlet essay yours
The Hamlet essay that is yours reads a phrase the way Hamlet reads a situation: too precisely, on purpose. It quotes the line, notices the metaphor that fails, makes a claim about why Shakespeare let it fail, and leaves drafts that show the claim being found. The generated-style paragraph is safe and empty, and that emptiness is what makes it look machine-made. Read closely, commit to a position, and keep the record.
The readings on this site are study companions for your own work on the play; they are not coursework to submit.
Sources
- Folger Shakespeare Library, Hamlet (full text): the edition used for act and scene references.
- Project Gutenberg, Hamlet by William Shakespeare: the public-domain text used to check quotations.
- Liang, Yuksekgonul, Mao, Wu and Zou, GPT detectors are biased against non-native English writers (Patterns, 2023): the finding that detectors misclassify non-native writing as AI-generated.
- Google Docs Help, See what's changed in a file: how version history records each editing session.