Hamlet

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The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. Set in the Kingdom of Denmark, the play dramatizes the revenge Prince Hamlet exacts on his uncle Claudius for murdering King Hamlet, Claudius’s brother and Prince Hamlet’s father, and then succeeding to the throne and taking as his wife Gertrude, the old king’s widow and Prince Hamlet’s mother. The play vividly portrays both true and feigned madness from overwhelming grief to seething rage and explores themes of treachery, revenge, incest, and moral corruption.

Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest play and among the most powerful and influential tragedies in English literature, with a story capable of «seemingly endless» retelling and adaptation by others.The play was one of Shakespeare’s most popular works during his lifetime and still ranks among his most-performed, topping the Royal Shakespeare Company’s performance 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«.

Shakespeare based Hamlet on the legend of Amleth, preserved by 13th-century chronicler Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum as subsequently retold by       16th-century scholar François de Belleforest. He may also have drawn on or perhaps written an earlier (hypothetical) Elizabethan play known today as the Ur-Hamlet. He almost certainly created the title role for Richard Burbage, the leading tragedian of Shakespeare’s time.

Three different early versions of the play are extant, the First Quarto, the Second Quarto, and the First Folio. Each version includes lines, and even entire scenes, missing from the others. 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.

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 You can see all this information and more at Wikipedia®.

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Academic year 2012/2013
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Aitor Bori Ibáñez
aiboi@alumni.uv.es

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