William Shakespeare's

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

 Hamlet is a tragedy

Tragedy

Tragedy is a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure. While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of...

, believed written between 1599

1599 in literature

-Events:* Undated - Opening of the Globe Theatre.*June 4 - Middleton's Microcynicon and Marston's Scourge of Villainy are publicly burned, as ecclesiastical authorities crack down on the craze for satire of the past year. The Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury tighten their...

 and 1601

1601 in literature

The year 1601 in literature involved some significant events.-Events:*February 7 - The Lord Chamberlain's Men stage a performance of Shakespeare's Richard II at the Globe Theatre. The performance is specially commissioned by the plotters in the Earl of Essex's rebellion of the following day...

. It tells the story of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark—who takes revenge on the current king (Hamlet's uncle) for killing the previous king (Hamlet's father) and for marrying his father's widow (Hamlet's mother)—and it charts the course of his real or feigned madness. Hamlet is the longest play—and Hamlet is the largest part—in the entire Shakespeare canon. Critics say that Hamlet "offers the greatest exhibition of Shakespeare's powers".

Academic Laurie Osborne identifies the direct influence of Hamlet in numerous modern narratives, and divides them into four main categories: fictional accounts of the play's composition, simplifications of the story for young readers, stories expanding the role of one or more characters, and narratives featuring performances of the play.

Novels and plays

See also References to Hamlet

References to Hamlet

Numerous references to Hamlet in popular culture reflect the continued influence of this play, which is probably the most popular of Shakespeare's plays, judging by the number of productions.-Plays:...

Hamlet is one of the most-quoted

Phrases from Hamlet in common English

William Shakespeare's play Hamlet has contributed many phrases to common English, from the famous "To be, or not to be" to a few less known, but still in everyday English.Also, some occur elsewhere, such as the Bible, or are proverbial...

 works in the English language, and often included on lists of the world's greatest literature. As such, it has proved a pervasive influence in literature. For instance, Henry Fielding's

Henry Fielding

Henry Fielding was an English novelist and dramatist known for his rich earthy humour and satirical prowess, and as the author of the novel Tom Jones....

 Tom Jones

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, often known simply as Tom Jones, is a comic novel by the English playwright and novelist Henry Fielding. First published on 28 February 1749, Tom Jones is among the earliest English prose works describable as a novel...

, published about 1749, merely describes a visit to Hamlet by Tom Jones and Mr Partridge. In contrast, Goethe's

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer, pictorial artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, and polymath. He is considered the supreme genius of modern German literature. His works span the fields of poetry, drama, prose, philosophy, and science. His Faust has been called the greatest long...

 Bildungsroman

Bildungsroman

In literary criticism, bildungsroman or coming-of-age story is a literary genre which focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood , and in which character change is thus extremely important...

 Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship is the second novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, published in 1795-96. While his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, featured a hero driven to suicide by despair, the eponymous hero of this novel undergoes a journey of self-realization...

, written between 1776–1796 not only has a production of Hamlet at its core but also dwells on parallels between the Ghost and Wilhelm Meister's dead father. In the early 1850s, in Pierre

Pierre: or, The Ambiguities

Pierre: or, The Ambiguities is a novel written by Herman Melville, and published in 1852 by Harper & Brothers.The publication of Pierre was a critical and financial disaster for Melville. It was universally condemned for both its morals and its style...

, Herman Melville

Herman Melville

Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd....

 focuses on a Hamlet-like character's long development as a writer. Ten years later, Dickens'

Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...

 Great Expectations

Great Expectations

Great Expectations is a novel by Charles Dickens. It was first published in serial form in the publication All the Year Round from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. It has been adapted for stage and screen over 250 times....

contains many Hamlet-like plot elements: it is driven by revenge actions, contains ghost-like characters (Abel Magwich and Miss Havisham), and focuses on the hero's guilt. Academic Alexander Welsh notes that Great Expectations is an "autobiographical novel" and "anticipates psychoanalytic readings of Hamlet itself".

About the same time, George Eliot's

George Eliot

Mary Anne Evans , better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era...

 The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss is a novel by George Eliot , first published in three volumes in 1860 by William Blackwood. The first American edition was by Thomas Y...

was published, introducing Maggie Tulliver "who is explicitly compared with Hamlet". Scholar Marianne Novy suggests that Eliot "demythologises Hamlet by imagining him with a reputation for sanity", notwithstanding his frequent monologues and moodiness towards Ophelia. Novy also suggests Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book...

 as an influence on Eliot, critiquing "the trivialisation of women in contemporary society".

Hamlet has played "a relatively small role" in the appropriation of Shakespeare's plays by women writers, ranging from Ophelia, The Fair Rose of Elsinore in Mary Cowden Clarke

Mary Cowden Clarke

Mary Cowden Clarke was an English author.She was the eldest daughter of Vincent Novello...

's 1852 The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, to Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Eleanor Atwood, is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is among the most-honoured authors of fiction in recent history; she is a winner of the Arthur C...

's 1994 Gertrude Talks Back—in her 1994 collection of short stories Good Bones and Simple Murders

Good Bones and Simple Murders

Good Bones and Simple Murders is a book by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, originally published in 1994. Although classified with Atwood’s short fiction, it is an eclectic collection, featuring parables, monologues, prose poems, condensed science fiction, reconfigured fairy tales, as well as...

—in which the title character sets her son straight about Old Hamlet's murder: "It wasn't Claudius, darling, it was me!"

Also, because of the criticism of the sexism, American author Lisa Klein

Lisa Klein

Dr. Lisa Klein is an American author known for her Shakesperean works including Ophelia and Lady Macbeth's Daughter. She was an assistant professor of English at The Ohio State University for eight years but left when she was denied tenure...

 wrote Ophelia, a novel that portrays Ophelia

Ophelia

Ophelia is a fictional character in the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare. She is a young noblewoman of Denmark, the daughter of Polonius, sister of Laertes, and potential wife of Prince Hamlet.-Plot:...

, too, as feigning madness and surviving.

Footnotes

All references to Hamlet, unless otherwise specified, are taken from the Arden Shakespeare "Q2" (Thompson and Taylor, 2006a). Under their referencing system, 3.1.55 means act 3, scene 1, line 55. References to the First Quarto and First Folio are marked Hamlet "Q1" and Hamlet "F1", respectively, and are taken from the Arden Shakespeare "Hamlet: the texts of 1603 and 1623" (Thompson and Taylor, 2006b). Their referencing system for "Q1" has no act breaks, so 7.115 means scene 7, line 115.

External links

• Open Source Shakespeare - Hamlet
• Hamlet on the Ramparts — from MIT
  Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
  
  's Shakespeare Electronic Archive
• Hamletworks.org A highly-respected scholarly resource with multiple versions of Hamlet, numerous commentaries, concordances, facsimiles, and more.
• ISE — Internet Shakespeare Editions provides authentic transcripts and facsimilies of the First Quarto, Second Quarto, and First Folio versions of the play.
• Hamlet — plain vanilla text at Project Gutenberg
  Project Gutenberg
  Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks". Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books...
  
  .
• "Nine Hamlets" — An analysis of the play and 9 film versions, at the Bright Lights Film Journal
• "The Hamlet Weblog" — a weblog about the play.
• "HyperHamlet" — A project at the University of Basel