Hamlet - William Shakespeare

This is Shakespeare’s longest play, and of all Shakespearean characters, and Hamlet himself has more words in this play than any other Shakespeare character. It’s one of the most performed of his plays, and is one of the most quoted plays – I’m sure we’ve all heard ‘To be, Or not to be …’ even if perhaps not all have us have read Hamlet. Hamlet is a tragedy, and the main themes are revenge and death – in the play, we get to see the feelings of five sons who have lost their fathers through murder, and in the famous to be or not to be speech, Hamlet grapples with the concept of death. At another point, he also confronts the effects of death on the body ad he ...  Read the complete review

"Hamlet" is undoubtedly my favourite of Shakespeare's tragic plays, and as a piece of tragedy is particularly powerful. It draws on the revenge tragedy genre, popular back in Shakespeare's day. (Usually they are far more hideous, graphic and weird than Hamlet, which is a much more human telling of the revenger's plot than most.) Hamlet is a troubled young man, teetering on the brink of madness, watching all that he cares for slip away from him. His tale rings especially true with teenage readers, and I spent a lot of time quoting some of his suicidal soliloquies during my youth! The plot then. Hamlet is son of the King of Denmark, but very ...  Read the complete review

Imagine the scene: returning to grieve for your dead father (who also happened to be the King of Denmark), you discover your uncle has already married your mother and taken your father’s throne. These events would be strange enough on their own, but add to this reports of a ghostly figure walking the grounds of the Royal castle and you’d be fully justified in having suspicions of foul play. Well, this is exactly the situation faced by Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, in William Shakespeare’s most famous of plays. The ghost in question is none other than Hamlet’s recently deceased father, who has a tale to tell of "murder most foul" on ...  Read the complete review

How do you define brilliance? For me Hamlet by William Shakespeare is the greatest play in the English language, a tour de force of raw emotions set in a distant land but so relevant today. Hamlet was written by Shakespeare in and around 1599, he was a well established play wright by this time but in and around 1599 he would pen some of the greatest works of literature ever, Henry V, As You Like it, Julius Caerser and Hamlet all can about in an incredibly productive year. Hamlet is comfortably Shakespeares longest play at around 4000 lines in the famous folio version of 1623, thats over 800 lines longer than King Lear his next longest play. This is ...  Read the complete review

Literary critics frequently write that a text has an "unconscious". William Shakespeare's "Hamlet", written between 1599 and 1601, is perhaps the greatest literary instance of the unconscious permeating through the work pervasively. This makes it one of the most important literary works of all time, given our reliance on the studies of psychologists in the modern world. The idea of the unconscious was first proposed by Sigmund Freud, who claimed that there are three levels of the mind - the conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious. The conscious is comprised of those thoughts at the present focus of our attention, the preconscious ...  Read the complete review