Hamlet

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Hamlet

William Shakespeare

Drama

Aug 10, 2018

The first of his mature tragedies, Hamlet is also Shakespeare’s longest play. Animated with what seems an endless supply of indelible phrases—from “brevity is the soul of wit” and “to the manner born” to “the lady doth protest too much” and “to thine own self be true”—its more than four thousand lines plumb a bottomless well of human quandaries. Generations of actors, audiences, scholars, readers, critics, psychologists, and philosophers have attempted to fathom the meaning of the work and the motivations of its hero, yet both elude easy definition. So lively is the play’s language, so vital its characters, so cunning its drama, and so enigmatic its central figure that both play and protagonist increase in stature every time they escape our ready understanding. One of the pinnacles of literary art, Hamlet is inexhaustible.

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