In 175 meters (roughly ten minutes) of film, it presented a character study of the mentally troubled Prince Hamlet, as seen in glimpses of several famous moments from the play: his encounter with the gravediggers and the skull of Yorick; his meeting with his father's ghost; his betrothed Ophelia, seen in a ghostly vision of her flower-throwing frenzy just before her death; and his final duel with its fatal aftermath.

As gravediggers joke in a cemetery, the melancholy Prince Hamlet contemplates the skull of Yorick, whom he knew in life.

This iconic scene is followed by a series of vignettes showing Hamlet's madness: in his room, he is haunted by hallucinations; he encounters his father's ghost, who exhorts Hamlet to exact vengeance on the current king, his uncle; and he sees a ghostly vision of his beloved, the now dead Ophelia, throwing flowers to him.

The first, his 1901 film The Devil and the Statue, had alluded to Romeo and Juliet by including a balcony scene and Venetian lovers called Roméo and Juliette.

"[2] In his book Shakespeare, Cinema, and Society, John Collick compares Méliès's film to the Expressionist theatrical productions of Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig, saying that Méliès's use of "multiple exposures and dream-like Expressionist imagery … unconsciously recreat[ed] the spirit, if not the intention, of Appia's and Craig's ideas."

Collick also highlights that by condensing the play into a brief succession of fragmentary scenes, Méliès was able to concentrate on the theme of madness in an artistically expressive way.