Who dies in Hamlet? And how?

If we don't count Hamlet's father, who is murdered before the action begins, the first to go is Polonius, in Act III. He's eavesdropping from behind an arras when, thinking that Hamlet is about to kill the Queen, he cries out, and Hamlet stabs him through the tapestry. Then:

[Lifts up the arras and sees Polonius.]
Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!
I took thee for thy better. Take thy fortune.

His "better" is the king, so an apparent case of mistaken identity. Next up is Ophelia, daughter to Polonius and Hamlet's supposed love interest: her suicide occurs off stage and is reported by the Queen in Act IV. The courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern suffer the next deaths. They are accompanying Hamlet to England and do not know that the sealed instructions they carry to the British throne direct that Hamlet be immediately killed. While they sleep, Hamlet opens the order, reads it, and replaces it with his own composition—the clueless pair now bear orders directing their own executions while Hamlet returns to Denmark. 

The last four deaths, of the King and Queen, Hamlet and Laertes, occur in the last scene. The plan is for Hamlet to be lured into a fencing match with Laertes, who will then kill him with an unbated rapier that has in addition been laced with poison at the tip. The backup, in case Hamlet defends too well, is a chalice holding a poisoned refreshment. In the event, the unknowing Queen, celebrating a point scored by Hamlet in the fencing match, helps herself to the poisoned drink prepared for her son. Before she falls, the match heats up and the reader of the play comes to the stage direction:

[In scuffling they exchange rapiers, and both are wounded with the poisoned weapon.]

The Queen falls to the ground and dies. The repentant Laertes, in his dying speech, brings Hamlet up to speed on the murderous plan gone awry. Hamlet then uses the rapier with the "envenomed point" to stab the king, who dies. Then Hamlet dies. The stage therefore is strewn with the corpses of the King, Queen, Laertes, and Hamlet when a contingent of foreign representatives arrives on the scene. An English ambassador, having delivered himself of the observation that "[t]he sight is dismal," says he had hoped to deliver to Hamlet the news that, in accordance with his directive, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead." 

Adding them up, eight die, which maybe doesn't seem like a big number but it's pretty much everyone excepting Horatio and the extras who here and there are hustled on and off the stage to move things along. Though two of these extras are sacrificed as well.  It's as if the slaughter of all the principals isn't brutal enough: "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead." So:

Polonius—stabbed through the arras because Hamlet thought he was the King. Ophelia—dead by her own hand. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—dutiful courtiers who, ignorant of the large events they are occasionally summoned to participate in, deliver their own death warrants to a foreign court. In the final scene—the two plotters die when the weapon they've poisoned is turned against them, in one case by an oblivious assailant, and in yet another unforeseen accident the Queen drinks poison intended to kill someone else. Before this shit show can commence, the following exchange occurs:

HAMLET
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will—

HORATIO
That is most certain.

Hamlet's exalted sentiment is frequently quoted without acknowledgment that the play functions to undercut it. Of the characters who are on stage any considerable amount, Horatio is the only one who survives, and his final speeches are like an amendment:

And let me speak to th' yet unknowing world
How these things came about. So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause

. . . . let this same be presently performed,
Even while men's minds are wild, lest more mischance
On plots and errors happen.

 

Comments

[Karl Narveson]

Or as Ambrose Bierce put it:

There's a divinity doth hedge a king,
Rough-hew him how we will.