Hamlet — William Shakespeare

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 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, commentators have puzzled 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 his 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 the greatest actors, and sometimes actresses, of each successive
age.

-- Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.