The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or more
simply Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have
been written between 1599 and 1601. The play, set in Denmark,
recounts how Prince Hamlet exacts revenge on his uncle Claudius, who
has murdered Hamlet's father, the King, and then taken the throne
and married Gertrude, Hamlet's mother. The play vividly charts the
course of real and feigned madness—from overwhelming grief to
seething rage—and explores themes of treachery, revenge, incest, and
moral corruption.
Despite much literary detective work, the exact year of writing
remains in dispute. Three different early versions of the play have
survived: these are known as the First Quarto (Q1), the Second
Quarto (Q2) and the First Folio (F1) Each has lines, and even
scenes, that are missing from the others. Shakespeare probably based
Hamlet on the legend of Amleth, preserved by 13th-century chronicler
Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum and subsequently retold by
16th-century scholar François de Belleforest, and a supposedly lost
Elizabethan play known today as the Ur-Hamlet.
Given the play's dramatic structure and depth of characterization,
Hamlet can be analyzed, interpreted and argued about from many
perspectives. For example, scholars have debated for centuries about
Hamlet's hesitation in killing his uncle. Some see it as a plot
device to prolong the action, and others see it as the result of
pressure exerted by the complex philosophical and ethical issues
that surround cold-blooded murder, calculated revenge and thwarted
desire. More recently, psychoanalytic critics have examined Hamlet's
unconscious desires, and feminist critics have re-evaluated and
rehabilitated the often maligned characters of Ophelia and Gertrude.
Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play and among the most powerful and
influential tragedies in the English language. It provides a
storyline capable of "seemingly endless retelling and adaptation by
others". During Shakespeare's lifetime, the play was one of his
most popular works, and it still ranks high among his
most-performed, topping, for example, the Royal Shakespeare
Company's list since 1879. It has inspired writers from Goethe
and Dickens to Joyce and Murdoch and has been described as "the
world's most filmed story after Cinderella". The title role was
almost certainly created for Richard Burbage, the leading tragedian
of Shakespeare's time. In the four hundred years since, it has
been played by highly acclaimed actors, and sometimes actresses, of
each successive age.
Source: Wikipedia - The Free Encyclopaedia August 13, 2009
