Includes date of composition, the text, the source, the play: an introduction to Interpretations, list of characters, summaries and commentaries, review questions and selected bibliography.

A guide for high school students studying the classic Shakespearian tragedy, Hamlet.

Presents the original text of Shakespeare's play with discussion questions, role-playing scenarios, and other study activities.

"Two years. 193,000 miles. 190 countries. One play. For the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth the Globe Theatre undertook an unparalleled journey, to take Hamlet to every country on the planet, to share this beloved play with the entire world. The tour was the brainchild of Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of the Globe, and in Hamlet Globe to Globe, Dromgoole takes readers along with him. From performing in sweltering deserts, ice-cold cathedrals, and heaving marketplaces, and despite food poisoning in Mexico, the threat of ambush in Somaliland, an Ebola epidemic in West Africa and political upheaval in Ukraine, the Globe's players pushed on. Dromgoole shows us the world through the prism of Shakespeare-what the Danish prince means to the people of Sudan, the effect of Ophelia on the citizens of Costa Rica, and how a sixteenth-century play can touch the lives of Syrian refugees. And thanks to this incredible undertaking, Dromgoole uses the world to glean new insight into thi

Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness is a radical new interpretation of the most famous play in the English language. By exploring Shakespeare's engagements with the humanist traditions of early modern England and Europe, Rhodri Lewis reveals a Hamlet unseen for centuries: an innovative, coherent, and exhilaratingly bleak tragedy in which the governing ideologies of Shakespeare's age are scrupulously upended. This book establishes that life in Elsinore is measured not by virtue but by the deceptions and grim brutality of the hunt. It also shows that Shakespeare most vividly represents this reality in the character of Hamlet: his habits of thought and speech depend on the cultures of pretence that he affects to disdain, ensuring his alienation from both himself and the world around him. Lewis recovers a work of far greater magnitude than the tragedy of a young man who cannot make up his mind. He shows that in Hamlet, as in King Lear, Shakespeare confronts his audiences with a universe that

"This lively and informative guide reveals Hamlet as marking a turning point in Shakespeare's use of language and dramatic form as well as addressing the key problem at the play's core: Hamlet's inaction. It also looks at recent critical approaches to the play and its theatre history, including the recent David Tennant / RSC Hamlet on both stage and TV screen"--

In this insightful interpretation, philosopher Critchley (The Faith of the Faithless) and psychoanalyst Webster (The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis) offer their take on Hamlet, using as touchstones the work of analysts such as Freud and Jacques Lacan, philosophers like Walter Benjamin and Nietzsche, and writers such as James Joyce, all of whom have written about the play. The authors discuss Hamlet's bizarre obsession with his mother, his inability to kill Claudius, as well as the oppression caused by the near-constant spying on others, among other topics. Of the theories presented to explain Hamlet's failure to avenge his father, the most interesting is Hegel's suggestion that with his experience with death, he becomes disgusted with humanity, and no longer cares to engage in the world except in an absurd, punning way; "the wrong man" for the job, he dies as a result of his own hesitation and external circumstance. Ophelia's situation is also explored; used by Hamlet, Polonius, Laer