The chilly nights of Elsinore are haunted by a spectre who demands to speak to the heir to the throne, young Hamlet. When Hamlet understands that the ghost is his father, murdered by his brother who later married his widow, Hamlet decides to avenge the late king. This is the beginning of the end, the motive for the best-known and best-loved revenge tragedy in Western literature. Written at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at the end of Elizabeth I's reign and at the time of a deep religious and social change, Hamlet is Shakespeare's play that more than any other recounts the waning of the ancient world and the dawning of a modern consciousness. A whirling sequence of action and thought, of spectres and mirrors, Shakespeare's masterpiece of the abyss is a founding myth of our culture.
Full edition with an interactive table of contents.
