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Who really said it

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark

Written by William Shakespeare 1564–1616 · English playwright & poet
Verified Free to reuse

Genuine Shakespeare, and the wording is exact — the line closes Act 1, scene 4 of Hamlet and is already in print in the earliest edition, the 1603 First Quarto, as “Something is rotten in the state of Denmarke.” The one thing almost everyone gets wrong: the speaker is Marcellus, a watchman, not Hamlet.

Last verified 29 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. — Marcellus (not Hamlet), in William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, scene 4; first printed 1603. The popular "There's something rotten in the state of Denmark" is a misquotation. Verified via Quotle.info.

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Provenance

The source: Hamlet, Act 1, scene 4

Work
Hamlet
Passage
Act 1, scene 4 — spoken by Marcellus to Horatio
First printed
1603 (First Quarto); also in the 1623 First Folio
Translation
None — written in English

HORATIO  He waxes desperate with imagination.
MARCELLUS  Let’s follow. ’Tis not fit thus to obey him.
HORATIO  Have after. To what issue will this come?
MARCELLUS  Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
HORATIO  Heaven will direct it.
MARCELLUS  Nay, let’s follow him. Act 1, scene 4

Modern-spelling text as given by the Folger Shakespeare Library ↗. The 1603 First Quarto prints “Something is rotten in the state of Denmarke”; the 1623 First Folio prints “Something is rotten in the State of Denmarke.”

Facsimile of the 1603 First Quarto
Hamlet: the first quarto, 1603 — photo-lithographic facsimile by William Griggs (London, 1880)
Folger Shakespeare Library — Hamlet, Act 1, scene 4

Paper trail

  • Modern editions place the line at the end of Act 1, scene 4 and assign it to Marcellus, who says it to Horatio just after Hamlet exits following the Ghost — Folger Shakespeare Library ↗.
  • The line is in the play’s earliest printing: the 1603 First Quarto reads “Mar. Something is rotten in the state of Denmarke.” — Internet Shakespeare Editions, Hamlet Q1 ↗.
  • The 1623 First Folio prints it as “Mar. Something is rotten in the State of Denmarke.” — Internet Shakespeare Editions, Hamlet F1 ↗.
  • Outside the theatre, the earliest allusive use documented by Word Histories is dated 18 February 1772, in The Manchester Mercury and Harrop’s General Advertiser, applying the phrase to the real Danish court crisis — Word Histories ↗.
Public domain

Hamlet was first printed in 1603 and reprinted in the 1623 First Folio, so the text — including this line — has been in the public domain in the United States for centuries, and no translation is involved. Only the spelling, punctuation and line numbering of a particular modern edition are editorial choices; the words quoted here are identical in the 1603 quarto apart from the old spelling “Denmarke.”

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

What usually goes wrong

The credit to Shakespeare is sound — this is one of the rare famous lines that survives checking intact. What gets mangled is who says it, and the exact words.

Hamlet Not the prince

The line belongs to Marcellus, one of the watchmen at Elsinore, and is addressed to Horatio immediately after Hamlet has gone off following the Ghost. The Folger Shakespeare text ↗ and the 1603 quarto as first printed ↗ both give it to Marcellus, and Wikiquote ↗ lists it the same way.

“There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark” Common misquotation

Shakespeare’s text has no “there’s.” Wiktionary lists the “there is” form as a common misquotation, alongside the clipped “something is rotten in Denmark,” as variants of the actual line — see Wiktionary’s alternative forms ↗.

A remark about a bad smell Not literal

“State” here is the kingdom, not a condition or an odour. The Cambridge Slow Shakespeare reading of the passage notes how easily a modern ear hears it instead as a state of health — see the University of Cambridge commentary ↗.

Shakespeare wrote it, Marcellus speaks it, and the earliest printed text already reads “Something is rotten in the state of Denmarke” — First Quarto, 1603 ↗.

Context

Why the line stuck

Marcellus is barely a character — a watchman on the platform at Elsinore whose job is to stand in the cold and confirm that yes, the dead king really is walking. He gets six words of diagnosis, delivered as Hamlet disappears into the dark after the Ghost, and they turned into one of the most portable sentences in English: a way of saying the problem is not this one incident, it is the whole institution.

The line also opens the play’s dominant image. From here on Hamlet is thick with rot, ulcers, weeds and things festering out of sight — so the watchman’s offhand remark works as a stage direction for the next four acts. Its afterlife as an idiom started early: by 1772 English newspapers were using it about the actual Danish court, whose queen and royal physician had just been brought down in a palace coup.

The most quoted diagnosis in English drama is delivered by a man whose entire job is standing watch.

The early printings, and the first figurative use

Hamlet survives in three substantially different early texts: the First Quarto of 1603, a Second Quarto (1604), and the 1623 First Folio. This line is not an editorial reconstruction — it is in the 1603 quarto, the very first appearance of the play in print, as “Something is rotten in the state of Denmarke ↗,” and again in the Folio as “Something is rotten in the State of Denmarke ↗.” Modern editions differ from those only in spelling and punctuation.

For the phrase’s life outside the theatre, the earliest allusive use documented by Word Histories is in The Manchester Mercury and Harrop’s General Advertiser of 18 February 1772, reporting the scandal around Queen Caroline Matilda and the physician Struensee — the paper applies Shakespeare’s words to the real state of Denmark. See Word Histories on the phrase’s origin ↗.

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Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Hamlet, Act 1, scene 4 (modern text)folger.edu

The Folger Shakespeare Library's free modern-spelling text, showing the line assigned to Marcellus in the exchange with Horatio.
Hamlet, First Quarto (1603), old spellinginternetshakespeare.uvic.ca

Internet Shakespeare Editions transcription of the earliest printed Hamlet, where the line reads “Something is rotten in the state of Denmarke.”
Hamlet, First Folio (1623), old spellinginternetshakespeare.uvic.ca

Internet Shakespeare Editions transcription of the Folio text, printing “Something is rotten in the State of Denmarke.”
Hamlet — full textgutenberg.org

Project Gutenberg's free public-domain edition; the line appears in Act 1, scene 4 under Marcellus's speech prefix.
Wikiquote: Hamleten.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote's sourced Hamlet page lists the line under Act I, scene iv and credits Marcellus as speaker.
‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’: originwordhistories.net

Traces the phrase to Marcellus in the 1603 quarto and documents an early figurative use in a Manchester newspaper of 18 February 1772.

About the author

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

1564–1616 · English playwright, poet and actor

Shakespeare wrote some three dozen plays for the London stage between roughly the late 1580s and the 1610s, and Hamlet is the most quoted of them. His lines saturate everyday English so thoroughly that many of them circulate with the speaker, the wording, or both quietly rearranged. This is one of those: the words are his, exactly as printed, but the mouth they come out of is a minor soldier’s.

For writers & researchers

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Primary source

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, scene 4, spoken by Marcellus; first printed in The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke (London, 1603) and again in the First Folio (London, 1623). Modern-spelling text: The Folger Shakespeare, Folger Shakespeare Library, folger.edu.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’?” Last verified 29 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/something-is-rotten-in-the-state-of-denmark/

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