Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, written around 1599–1601, is Shakespeare's longest play and probably the most performed and discussed tragedy in the world. A young prince, told by his father's ghost that he was murdered by his own brother, now king, hesitates, feigns madness and stages a play to test the truth, until the revenge ends in a general catastrophe.
The story
At the castle of Elsinore, the ghost of the late King Hamlet appears to his son and tells him that he was poisoned by his brother Claudius, who has taken the crown and married the widowed queen, Gertrude. Prince Hamlet swears revenge but delays, unsure whether the ghost can be trusted.
He feigns madness, rejects Ophelia, the daughter of the king's counsellor Polonius, and has travelling actors perform a play that reproduces the murder, to watch the king's reaction. He then kills Polonius by mistake, is sent to England, and returns to face Polonius's son Laertes in a fencing match that ends with the deaths of almost all the main characters.
Sources and texts
The story goes back to the legend of Amleth, told by the Danish chronicler Saxo Grammaticus around 1200 and retold in French by François de Belleforest in his Histoires tragiques. An earlier English play on the subject, now lost and often called the Ur-Hamlet, was performed in London in the 1590s.
Three early texts survive: a short and garbled First Quarto (1603), a much longer Second Quarto (1604–05), and the version in the First Folio (1623). Modern editions usually combine them, which produces a play of some four thousand lines that is rarely performed uncut.
A play for every age
Hamlet has been read as a tragedy of indecision, of grief, of a son's troubled love for his mother, and of a mind thinking about death and action. Its soliloquies are among the most quoted passages in the English language, and many of its phrases have become proverbs.
Almost every great actor has measured himself against the part, from Richard Burbage, who created it, to David Garrick, Edwin Booth, John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier. The play has been adapted into operas, ballets, many films and countless parodies.
Anecdotes
Shakespeare as the Ghost
According to a tradition recorded by Shakespeare's first biographer, Nicholas Rowe, in 1709, the playwright was not a great actor, and the finest of the roles he played was the Ghost of Hamlet's father, while his colleague Richard Burbage played the prince.
Sarah Bernhardt's Hamlet
Several actresses have played the prince. The most famous was the French star Sarah Bernhardt, who performed Hamlet in a French prose translation in Paris and London in 1899, at the age of fifty-four, and appeared in a short silent film of the duel scene the following year.
Frequently asked questions
When was Hamlet written?
Around 1599–1601. It was first printed in 1603, and the fuller text appeared in 1604–05.
Where is Hamlet set?
At Elsinore, the Danish royal castle known today as Kronborg, in the town of Helsingør, north of Copenhagen.
Is Hamlet Shakespeare's longest play?
Yes. In the combined modern text it runs to about four thousand lines, and the title role is the longest in Shakespeare's works.