Plot Summary
Pip and Herbert attend a London performance of Hamlet in which their old acquaintance Mr. Wopsle plays the title role under the stage name "Mr. Waldengarver." The production is disastrous from the start: the Danish court sits on a kitchen table, the ghost carries a manuscript and keeps losing his place, and the Queen of Denmark is so laden with brass ornamentation that the audience dubs her "the kettledrum." A single actor in oversized boots plays the seaman, gravedigger, clergyman, and fencing judge, provoking the crowd to pelt him with nuts. The gallery shouts commentary throughout, turning Hamlet's soliloquies into a rowdy debating society and calling for "Rule Britannia" when Wopsle picks up a recorder.
The churchyard scene proves Wopsle's greatest trial, with the audience heckling him as an undertaker and shouting "Waiter!" when he dusts his fingers on a napkin. Ophelia's slow descent into madness tests everyone's patience, prompting a gallery member to call for supper. After the performance, Pip and Herbert are intercepted backstage by Wopsle's dresser, who leads them to a cramped dressing room. Wopsle — still calling himself Waldengarver — receives their polite compliments with patronizing dignity, while his dresser critiques his leg positioning and boasts of coaching the previous Hamlet with red wafers on his shins. Feeling sorry for Wopsle, Pip invites him home to supper at Barnard's Inn, where Wopsle sits until two in the morning reviewing his "success" and outlining grand plans to revive — and ultimately crush — the Drama. Pip goes to bed miserable, thinking of Estella, and dreams that his expectations are cancelled and he must play Hamlet before twenty thousand people without knowing twenty words of it.
Character Development
This chapter deepens the parallel between Mr. Wopsle and Pip. Wopsle has pursued his lifelong theatrical ambition to London, reinventing himself as "Waldengarver," yet his performance is laughably inadequate and he remains utterly blind to his own failure. Pip recognizes this self-deception — he and Herbert lie to spare Wopsle's feelings — yet cannot see the same pattern in his own life. Pip's "great expectations" are as much a performance as Wopsle's Hamlet, built on assumptions about Estella and his benefactor that may prove equally delusional. Pip's compassion for Wopsle, inviting him to supper despite the embarrassment, reveals a core decency that persists beneath his acquired snobbery.
Themes and Motifs
Self-deception and ambition: Wopsle's catastrophic Hamlet mirrors Pip's own pursuit of impossible expectations. Both men have remade themselves — Wopsle as Waldengarver, Pip as a gentleman — yet neither transformation is convincing. Performance and identity: The chapter is saturated with theatrical imagery that extends beyond the stage. Everyone is performing: Wopsle acts Hamlet, Pip and Herbert act the role of admiring friends, and the dresser performs the role of devoted retainer. Class pretension: Wopsle's aspirations to high art echo Pip's aspirations to high society, and both are met with the indifference or mockery of those around them. The audience's irreverent disruption of Shakespeare suggests that culture cannot simply be adopted as a costume.
Literary Devices
Satire and comic irony: Dickens uses the terrible Hamlet production as an extended satirical set piece, with the gap between Wopsle's tragic aspirations and the audience's comic response generating sustained irony. Parallelism: The Wopsle-as-Hamlet subplot functions as a mirror for Pip's own narrative — both are playing roles they are unequipped to sustain. Foreshadowing: Pip's nightmare about cancelled expectations and performing Hamlet without knowing the words hints at future revelations that will dismantle his assumptions. First-person retrospective narration: The older Pip's wry, self-aware tone — "I laughed in spite of myself" — signals a distance between the narrator and his younger self, suggesting hard-won wisdom about the follies described.