{
  "id": "hamlet",
  "title": "Hamlet",
  "lang": "en",
  "source_lang": "en",
  "summary": "Shakespeare's tragedy (c. 1600) about a Danish prince who must avenge his father's murder; one of the most performed and studied plays in world literature.",
  "category": "arts",
  "subcategory": "literature",
  "type": "work",
  "aliases": [
    "The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark",
    "哈姆雷特"
  ],
  "generated_at": "2026-10-08",
  "model": "pro/claude-haiku-5-5",
  "url": "https://aiwiki.page/en/hamlet/",
  "translations": {
    "zh-Hans": {
      "url": "https://aiwiki.page/zh/hamlet/",
      "json": "https://aiwiki.page/zh/hamlet.json"
    }
  },
  "sections": [
    {
      "heading": "",
      "text": "Hamlet is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, probably written around 1599–1601 and first published in 1603. It follows Prince Hamlet of Denmark, who is told by his father's ghost that his uncle Claudius murdered the old king, seized the throne, and married Hamlet's mother, Gertrude. The play's five acts move from the ghost's demand for revenge through feigned madness, a staged play, accidental and deliberate killings, and a final fencing match that ends in a near-total massacre at the Danish court.\n\nThe play is among the most frequently performed and studied works in the literary canon, and it is best known for its long, introspective speeches, including \"To be or not to be.\" Its central figure, a brilliant and grieving man who delays action while examining his own motives, has become one of the most discussed characters in Western theatre and has shaped later thinking about psychology, philosophy, and the nature of tragic heroism.\n\nThis entry covers the play's composition and sources, its surviving texts, its plot and characters, its verse and language, its major themes, and its stage and critical history. It then turns to adaptations, the reception of the play in Chinese-language contexts, and the questions that remain unsettled among scholars and performers."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Composition and Sources",
      "text": "Most scholars place the writing of Hamlet in a narrow window. A date between late 1599 and early 1601 has emerged as the consensus among modern scholars, with a minority view that argues for earlier composition of an original version. The fixed external limit is a 1602 registration in the Stationers' Register, which describes a play titled The Revenge of Hamlet as lately acted by the Lord Chamberlain his servantes. The Lord Chamberlain's Men had been under the patronage of the Lord Chamberlain since the mid-1590s, and the company became the King's Men in 1603 when King James ascended the throne and became the company's patron.\n\nInternal evidence narrows the date further. In Act 2, Scene 2, the play refers to an eyrie of children, little eyases, a jibe at boy companies that were drawing audiences away from adult troupes. Because such companies were prominent in London in 1601, that year is often treated as the most likely date. A lower bound is harder to fix, since Francis Meres's list of Shakespeare's plays in Palladis Tamia (1598) omits Hamlet, though it also omits several other plays, so the omission proves little on its own.\n\nThe story itself was old. The earliest known version is the legend of Amleth, which was written down by the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus in the twelfth century. In that version the young prince pretends to be a simpleton in order to survive after his uncle kills his father. Saxo's Latin history was first printed in 1514 and is usually dated to around 1200 or later in the twelfth or early thirteenth century. Its hero is far more ruthless than Shakespeare's: Amleth feels no guilt, burns down the hall, kills his uncle, and becomes king.\n\nShakespeare probably did not read Saxo directly. It is unlikely that he saw Grammaticus' latin version firsthand, and he more plausibly knew a reasonably accurate version of Saxo's story published in French by François de Belleforest in 1570 in the Histoires tragiques. Belleforest embellished Saxo's text substantially, almost doubling its length, and introduced the hero's melancholy. An English prose version, The Hystorie of Hamblet, descended from this French text, which is why the Belleforest link matters for the play's tone.\n\nThe Ur-Hamlet and the revenge tradition\n\nBetween the legend and Shakespeare's play lies a lost drama usually called the Ur-Hamlet. Its evidence is indirect. Thomas Nashe, in his 1589 preface to Greene's Menaphon, mocked writers who would afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of Tragicall speeches. In 1596 Thomas Lodge recalled a ghost crying out for revenge, and the phrase \"Hamlet, revenge!\" is the line most often attributed to that lost play, not to Shakespeare's text. A Henslowe diary entry for 1594 may also refer to a Hamlet, but it does not name an author, and whether it means the same play is disputed.\n\nThe lost play is often credited to Thomas Kyd, the author of The Spanish Tragedy, but that attribution rests on inference. Kyd's play supplied the conventions Shakespeare inherited: a murdered king, a vengeful son, a ghost demanding action, and a play-within-a-play. Some scholars even suggest that the Ur-Hamlet was an early draft of Shakespeare's own work, an idea that remains a minority position. Shakespeare's reworking is most visible in the hero. Where earlier versions do not feature an omniscient narrator of events, Shakespeare's prince lacks a clear plan, and the play turns a crude revenge plot into an investigation of thought and delay.\n\nThe company, the playhouse, and Burbage\n\nThe first recorded production was given by the Chamberlain's Men in 1600 or 1601, and the role of the prince is traditionally assigned to Richard Burbage, the company's leading tragedian. Richard Burbage took the role of Hamlet. Tradition also holds that the playwright himself played the Ghost, though this claim has little firm documentary support. The play's first performances took place at the Globe, and the company's resources and audiences shaped it: a long, demanding role suited to a star actor, a sizable cast of players who could stage the court and the travelling troupe, and an audience accustomed to revenge spectacle as well as sharp verbal wit."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Texts and Editions",
      "text": "The three early witnesses\n\nHamlet survives in three early printed texts, abbreviated Q1, Q2, and F1. The First Quarto was printed in 1603 under the title The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke, and it is generally regarded as unauthorised. The play was entered in the Stationers' Register in 1602 by James Roberts, but Q1 was not published until summer or autumn 1603. Q1 is much shorter than the later texts. This version is little more than half as long as the others. It also differs in names and events: Polonius is called Corambis and his servant Reynaldo appears as Montano. Its stage directions are richer than those of the later texts, which has led scholars to suspect that some of them record performance practice.\n\nThe Second Quarto is dated 1604 in some copies and 1605 in others. Its title page presents it as enlarged, and it is the text that most editors treat as the base for Shakespeare's own writing. The First Folio of 1623 is the third witness. The Folio text has some eighty-five or so lines not found in the Second Quarto, but it lacks about two hundred of the Second Quarto's lines. The two versions also differ in hundreds of words. The later quartos (Q3 to Q5, 1611–37) are reprints of Q2 with some changes, so they carry little independent authority.\n\nThe \"bad quarto\" theory\n\nThe label \"bad\" comes from the early twentieth-century bibliographers, who divided the quartos into legitimate and corrupt texts. The dominant explanation for Q1 was memorial reconstruction: an actor or actors pieced the play together from memory, and it was published as a \"pirated\" edition inferior to the enlarged Q2 that appeared the following year. G. I. Duthie's 1941 study was among the most detailed defences of this view, and it was endorsed by a generation of editors. It remained the consensus judgment until a backlash in the late 1980s against the New Bibliography, and especially the work of W. W. Greg, succeeded in discrediting the theory and the whole concept of \"bad\" quartos.\n\nThe evidence cuts both ways. In favour of reconstruction, Q1 contains garbled speeches and cuts large sections, and Q1 places the \"To be or not to be\" soliloquy and the Ophelia scene in Act 2 rather than Act 3. Against it, critics such as Eric Sams and Hardin Craig note that there is no reliable historical evidence that actors reconstructed plays from memory. Some scholars also argue that the Q1 passages corresponding to the good texts are closer to F than to Q2, which suggests a source other than Q2. Tiffany Stern has proposed instead that Q1 derives from audience note-takers. Margrethe Jolly argues that the first quarto was indeed written by Shakespeare, while a 2019 study concludes that Q1 was a collective reconstruction by members of the King's Men in 1602. Kathleen Irace's 1998 New Cambridge edition defended the reconstruction view.\n\nConflation and the editorial tradition\n\nFrom the eighteenth century, editors combined the Q2 and F1 texts into a single \"full text\". Since Nicholas Rowe produced the first Complete Works of Shakespeare in 1709, it had been traditional for editors to combine or conflate readings from the quarto and folio traditions. Lewis Theobald's version became the standard for a long time. Harold Jenkins's Arden 2 edition of 1982 is described as the last great hybrid Hamlet, combining the best readings from both texts. The Oxford Shakespeare of 1986 reversed this approach by printing a Folio-based text and placing the Q2-only passages in an appendix, a decision based on the view that the Folio was probably revised for the stage. Philip Edwards's New Cambridge edition (1985) and G. R. Hibbard's Oxford edition (1987) also printed largely Folio-based texts.\n\nConflation has its critics because it can create readings that no version contains. Peter Holland's example shows the problem: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern fawn over Claudius less in F than in Q2, yet only in F does Hamlet accuse them of enjoying their task. Combined, the two texts make Hamlet's accusation seem justified in a way neither version does alone. The most debated lines include the closet scene (3.4.14–15), in which the Q2 punctuation of \"And\" versus F's \"But\" changes the tone of Hamlet's address to his mother.\n\nHow modern editions present the variants\n\nThe Arden Third Series Hamlet (2006), edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, takes a three-text approach. The first volume stands alone and houses the edited Q2 text, while the second volume, which depends on the first, houses the edited Q1 and Folio texts. The editors avoid both kinds of conflation, neither mixing Q and F into one play nor drawing readings from the non-copy text whenever the copy-text seems unsatisfactory. The editors are generous and unprescriptive, seeking to let readers choose among interpretations and even to construct their own text from the three versions.\n\nThe Norton Shakespeare takes a different path. It adopts a conflated text, but the Q2 lines absent from F are indented and italicized so readers can see their status. The Cambridge Irace edition of Q1 includes textual notes that suggest alternative readings for actors and directors. Across these editions, the trend is toward explaining the choice of copy-text openly rather than presenting a single seamless \"Shakespearean\" text."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Plot and Dramatic Structure",
      "text": "The play opens at night on the battlements of Elsinore, where the sentries Bernardo and Marcellus, joined by Horatio, see a figure resembling the recently dead King Hamlet. The ghost refuses to speak to them and vanishes. Prince Hamlet, the old king's son, returns to a court where his uncle Claudius has already taken the throne and married his mother, Gertrude, within weeks of the funeral. In Act 1, Scene 5, the ghost speaks to Hamlet alone. It says Claudius poisoned him in his orchard while he slept, and it commands Hamlet to avenge the murder but to leave Gertrude to heaven. Hamlet swears to obey, and he announces that he will adopt an \"antic disposition,\" a deliberate pretence of madness that lets him watch the court while keeping his purpose hidden.\n\nIn the middle acts, Hamlet's behaviour toward Ophelia and Polonius becomes the court's central puzzle. Polonius concludes that Hamlet's strange conduct is lovesickness, and he uses Ophelia as bait to test this theory while he and Claudius listen in. Hamlet's harsh remarks to her, including the order to \"get thee to a nunnery,\" are read by the court as a sign of distraction, but the audience can see that Hamlet is also testing and wounding those around him. Claudius, growing alarmed, summons Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet's former schoolfellows, to discover the cause of his behaviour. Hamlet recognises their purpose and treats them with openly sardonic suspicion. His doubts about his mother are equally sharp, and his disgust at her hasty remarriage shapes many of his speeches.\n\nHamlet's plan to confirm the ghost's accusation takes shape when a travelling troupe arrives at Elsinore. He has the players perform a play resembling the murder described by the ghost, and he adds lines of his own. Renamed \"The Mousetrap\" by Hamlet, the performance is staged in Act 3, Scene 2, and Claudius's reaction, as he rises and calls for lights, is taken by Hamlet as proof of guilt. Shortly afterward, in the prayer scene, Hamlet finds Claudius kneeling alone with his sword in reach. Hamlet declines to kill him, reasoning that a man killed at prayer would go straight to heaven, and so he postpones the revenge. In the closet scene that follows, Hamlet confronts Gertrude in her private chamber. Polonius hides behind the arras to listen, and Hamlet stabs through the hanging, believing he is killing Claudius. The ghost then reappears, reproaches Hamlet for his delay, and is visible only to him. Claudius responds by sending Hamlet to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and a sealed letter ordering the prince's execution. Hamlet alters the letter so that the two courtiers are put to death instead, and after a pirate attack returns him to Denmark he learns of their fate.\n\nThe consequences spread through the court. Ophelia, bereaved of her father, falls into disordered songs and distributes flowers before she drowns. Gertrude reports that she fell from a willow branch while hanging garlands on it. Laertes returns from France to avenge Polonius, and Claudius manipulates his grief into a plan to kill Hamlet in a fencing match. In the graveyard scene, gravediggers argue over whether Ophelia can receive a Christian burial, and Hamlet holds Yorick's skull. At her funeral, Hamlet and Laertes fight in the grave. Back at court, Osric carries the challenge to a duel, which Hamlet accepts.\n\nThe final duel is staged with a poisoned foil for Laertes and a poisoned cup of wine as a backup for Claudius. Gertrude drinks from the cup and dies, and Laertes is wounded by his own poisoned blade after the swords are exchanged. Before dying, Laertes reveals Claudius's plot, and Hamlet wounds the king with the poisoned foil and forces him to drink the wine. Hamlet then dies, asking Horatio to live on and tell his story. Fortinbras, the Norwegian prince whose army has been crossing Denmark since Act 4, arrives at the end. Hamlet has named him as the successor, and Fortinbras orders military honours for the dead. The closing movement thus turns a private revenge into a question of political succession."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Characters",
      "text": "Hamlet\n\nHamlet is a prince educated at Wittenberg, and his grief, intellect, and irony give the play its emotional center. The text gives only one explicit age. In the gravedigger scene of Act 5, the sexton says he has held the job \"man and boy, thirty years,\" which would make Hamlet about thirty. This is the only precise age marker in the entire play, yet other details pull against it. Hamlet is described on several occasions as \"young\", and he still behaves and studies like a student. Editors and critics therefore differ: some take the gravedigger's figure literally, while others treat Hamlet's youth as the more reliable impression and read the number as a dramatic detail. Hamlet's own requests to return to Wittenberg, the university where Martin Luther had studied, mark him as a student, and his ties to that city are part of his outsider status at court.\n\nClaudius\n\nClaudius has seized the Danish throne by murdering his brother and then marrying the widowed queen. He is nonetheless more than a stock villain. Commentators often note that he at times expresses guilt for killing his brother and does seem to genuinely love Gertrude. In the prayer scene of Act 3, he kneels to confess but cannot bring himself to give up what he gained by the crime, so the scene exposes a conflict between his political competence and his conscience. This inner split is the reason the scene is so often performed as a turning point in his character.\n\nGertrude\n\nGertrude is one of only two female characters in the play, alongside Ophelia. She lacks soliloquies and does not express her feelings or thoughts directly, so her position must be inferred from her actions and from what others say about her. The text never settles whether she knew of the murder or how far she accepted Claudius's rise. Her closet scene with Hamlet in Act 3 is the play's major turning point for her. During it, Hamlet kills Polonius, who is hidden behind the arras, and this act pushes the plot toward the chain of disasters that follows.\n\nOphelia, Polonius, and Laertes\n\nPolonius serves as Claudius's chief counselor and is concerned with appearances rather than with his children's happiness. He issues orders to Ophelia, and when he tells her to stop seeing Hamlet, she does so. She also agrees to arrange a meeting that lets Polonius and Claudius spy on Hamlet. Ophelia's compliance reflects the court's demand for obedience, and she is a foil to Hamlet and Laertes, contrasting and inspiring their behaviour. Laertes is gallant, worldly, hotheaded, and obsessed with his family's honor. Before leaving for France, he receives paternal advice from Polonius, and when he returns after his father's death he leads a mob to storm and take the castle. Where Hamlet broods, Laertes acts quickly, which makes him a second foil to the prince.\n\nHoratio, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Fortinbras\n\nHoratio is Hamlet's most trusted friend. He came to Elsinore from the university at Wittenberg for the funeral of King Hamlet, and he remains at court only as \"Hamlet's friend,\" without an official post. His loyalty makes him the play's steadiest figure, and by the end Horatio is the only main figure left alive, so he is the one who carries Hamlet's story forward. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Hamlet's schoolfellows who are summoned to Elsinore by Claudius and Gertrude, and they act as the king's spies. Hamlet recognizes their role, and after he discovers the letter that Claudius has sent with them to England, he substitutes a new one, which leads to their deaths. Fortinbras, the Norwegian crown prince, offers a counterweight to Hamlet's isolation. He assumes the throne of Denmark after Hamlet's death. Hamlet admires his decisive action, since in Fortinbras's vigorous activity Hamlet finds a model for avenging his father, and Fortinbras's readiness to act highlights Hamlet's hesitation."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Language, Verse, and Soliloquy",
      "text": "Blank verse and prose\n\nHamlet is written mainly in unrhymed iambic pentameter, the blank verse that Shakespeare used for most of his tragedies. It gives the court and the prince their formal, elevated register. Prose appears at the points where the social or emotional register shifts. The gravediggers in Act 5, scene 1 speak prose, which sets them apart as commoners and lets them joke about death in plain, earthy terms. Osric, the affected courtier of Act 5, scene 2, also speaks prose. His fussy, over-polished wording, such as the exchange about wearing a hat, becomes a target of Hamlet's mockery, and the prose gives the scene a brittle, slightly comic surface. Prose is not used only for comic figures. Hamlet's advice to the players in Act 3, scene 2 is also prose, and its plain demands for naturalness, such as speaking \"trippingly on the tongue,\" stand in tension with the artificiality of the court. The shifts therefore work as a signal of rank, but also as a commentary on sincerity and performance.\n\nThe major soliloquies\n\nThe soliloquies are the play's main window into Hamlet's mind, and they are among the most discussed passages in Shakespeare. In the first, \"O that this too too solid flesh would melt,\" the prince wishes for death and expresses disgust at his mother's haste to remarry. It establishes grief and self-disgust before any plot has begun. \"To be, or not to be\" in Act 3, scene 1 turns from the personal to the general, weighing death against the \"slings and arrows\" of life and the unknown after death. Its reasoning is often read as a meditation on suicide, on conscience, and on the paralysis that thought can produce. \"How all occasions do inform against me\" in Act 4, scene 4 comes after Hamlet watches Fortinbras's army march toward a pointless battle. It sets his inaction against the decisive action of others and frames his delay as self-accusation. The speeches are also unreliable as guides to action: Hamlet often reasons at length and then does nothing, which makes the soliloquies central to the play's debate about delay.\n\nWordplay and double meanings\n\nShakespeare's wordplay operates at both comic and serious levels. In the first court scene (Act 1, scene 2), Claudius asks why clouds still hang over Hamlet, and the prince replies that he is \"too much i' th' sun.\" Gertrude then urges him to cast off his \"nighted colour.\" The pun on \"sun\" and \"son\" makes the king's question about Hamlet's mood also a question about his status as a son and an heir, and it reminds the audience that the court is fixated on lineage. Hamlet's aside that Claudius is \"a little more than kin, and less than kind\" uses the same kind of compression: \"kin\" means both relation and family, while \"kind\" means both natural and kindly. Puns and double meanings like these make the language itself unstable, a feature that fits a court where words are used to conceal motives.\n\nImages of disease, rot, and corruption\n\nThe play is saturated with images of decay. The line \"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark\" is spoken by Marcellus in Act 1, scene 4, not by Hamlet, although the phrase is often attributed to the prince. In the same scene the imagery spreads outward: Hamlet's sense that the world is \"an unweeded garden\" in Act 1, scene 2 presents the court as overgrown with rank and gross things. Such images of corruption often connect the body with the state. Claudius's politic reasoning is repeatedly described in terms of worms and carrion, and the play's concern with the body as a site of decay links to its graveyard scene. The recurring vocabulary of disease and rot is therefore not decoration but a way of linking private grief, the murder, the sickness of the court, and the play's moral judgment on what has gone wrong in Denmark."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Major Themes",
      "text": "Revenge and justice\n\nThe ghost's command that Hamlet \"remember\" and avenge his murdered father sets the play's central moral conflict. Hamlet is educated in Wittenberg, a Protestant university, and Christian teaching reserves vengeance for God, so the revenge he is asked to take is one he cannot accept without hesitation. He therefore tests the ghost, seeks proof through the play-within-a-play, and questions whether the spirit is honest or a devil in disguise. The ghost's origin in Purgatory, a place of purging that Protestant theology rejected, adds to this uncertainty. The play also shows that vengeance does not produce clean justice. Claudius's fratricide and his hasty marriage to Gertrude violate natural and divine order, yet Hamlet's own violence spreads outward: he kills Polonius by mistake, and he sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths. In the prayer scene, Hamlet spares Claudius because killing him at prayer would send his soul to heaven. The decision turns the question of justice into a moral problem rather than a mechanical plot device.\n\nMortality and the afterlife\n\nThe graveyard scene in Act 5 is the play's most concentrated meditation on death. The gravediggers' jokes, Hamlet's handling of Yorick's skull, and his memory of the jester who once carried him on his back all set the lives of individuals against the common fate of the body. Hamlet's reflections on great rulers turning into dust extend this theme to the powerful. Ophelia's burial, which is given reduced rites because her death is suspected to be self-inflicted, shows how church judgment shapes the meaning of death in the community. The ghost's account of his suffering in the afterlife, and Hamlet's fear of \"the undiscovered country\" from which no traveller returns, express the play's uncertainty about what follows death. Hamlet's line that \"the readiness is all\" in the final act treats mortality as something to be faced with preparation rather than solved by knowledge.\n\nAction and thought\n\nHamlet's soliloquies repeatedly turn from resolve to self-reproach. After watching an actor weep for Hecuba, he calls himself a \"rogue and peasant slave\" for failing to act. In the \"To be or not to be\" soliloquy, he concludes that conscience makes cowards of everyone, so that the natural force of resolution is weakened by excessive reflection. Critics have explained his delay psychologically, as a melancholic or morally scrupulous temperament; dramatically, since the play would end too early without it; or philosophically, as a conflict between knowing and doing. Fortinbras, who marches an army toward a small patch of Polish land, offers a contrast: a man of quick action whose vigor is nonetheless presented without much moral weight. The tension between the two princes raises the question of whether thought is a virtue or a form of paralysis, a question that ties the play to philosophy and to the ethics of responsibility.\n\nAppearance and reality\n\nThe play is preoccupied with seeming, acting, and the gap between what is shown and what is felt. In his first scene with his mother, Hamlet rejects the mourning clothes that merely \"seem\" and insists that he has \"that within which passeth show.\" The court is full of performance: Polonius spies through his children, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern pretend to be friends, Claudius maintains a public face of grace, and Ophelia is used as bait in a surveillance plan. Hamlet's own \"antic disposition\" is also a performance whose sincerity remains uncertain. The \"Mousetrap\" play, which Hamlet uses to force Claudius to reveal himself through his reaction, makes theatre an instrument of truth. Hamlet's advice to the players, that drama should hold \"the mirror up to nature,\" shows how the play reflects on its own medium. These concerns connect to epistemology, the study of how we know what lies behind appearance, and to the self-conscious techniques of the theatre.\n\nPolitical corruption and the state\n\nThe political world of Elsinore is shaped by murder, marriage, and diplomacy. Claudius's usurpation was accomplished through a secret killing and a swift remarriage, and his court responds to threats through spies and negotiation. Voltemand and Cornelius are sent to Norway to halt Fortinbras's invasion, and Claudius plans Hamlet's death in England under the pretext of a diplomatic mission. Hamlet's description of Denmark as a prison captures the sense that the state has become a confined and suspicious space, where the citizens cannot act freely. Claudius's own soliloquy, which admits that his \"offence is rank\" and bears \"the primal eldest curse\" of a brother's murder, shows that he understands the moral cost of his position even as he preserves his power. The succession that ends the play, with Fortinbras taking control of Denmark, suggests that political order is restored by an outsider rather than by any moral renewal from within the court. The theme links the play to broader questions in tragedy about power, legitimacy, and the cost of rule, as explored by william-shakespeare and his contemporaries."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Stage History",
      "text": "Early performance traditions\n\nThe role was written for Richard Burbage, the chief tragedian of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and the play was probably first performed in 1600 or 1601. Burbage's physical business survived in contemporary records. A 1619 tribute recalled him jumping into Ophelia's grave, and the unauthorized 1603 quarto's stage directions show Laertes and then Hamlet leaping into the grave, which suggests a trapdoor in the main stage. Burbage kept acting until his death in 1619, and tradition holds that Shakespeare may have played the Ghost, though that rests on weak evidence.\n\nThe Restoration reshaped the role. Thomas Betterton, who was both the leading actor and a shareholder-manager of his company, first played Hamlet in 1661 and held the part for nearly five decades. Samuel Pepys admired his performance, and a later account says Betterton was trained in the role by William Davenant, who had learned it from an actor who had worked with Shakespeare. Restoration staging brought movable perspective scenery, and following French practice, women began playing Ophelia and Gertrude for the first time. Davenant's company secured Hamlet as the only Shakespearean favourite of the pre-war repertory, while critics of the period complained that the play lacked the unity and decorum they valued.\n\nIn the eighteenth century, David Garrick became the dominant Hamlet of the London stage, playing the role between 1742 and 1776. His reputation rested on his command of the role's emotional range, and the play remained a staple of both the patent theatres and provincial touring companies.\n\nNineteenth-century actor-managers\n\nEarly in the nineteenth century, the most celebrated Shakespearean performances in the United States came from touring London stars, including Edmund Kean, William Charles Macready, and Junius Brutus Booth. Booth settled in America, and his son Edwin became the best-known American Hamlet. Edwin Booth first played the role in New York in 1857, and his run of 100 consecutive nights at the Winter Garden Theatre in the 1864–1865 season is often seen as the start of long-run Shakespeare in America. His 1875 Hamlet was praised for a dreamy, mysterious quality that critics associated with a poem.\n\nIn Britain, the actor-manager tradition shaped the production. Kean is said to have abandoned the heavy regal costume in favour of plain dress and played a more serious and introspective prince, which surprised audiences. Macready, as manager of Covent Garden and Drury Lane, insisted on historically accurate costumes and scenery and on returning to the original texts. His successors, including Samuel Phelps, Charles Kean, and Henry Irving, staged Shakespeare with elaborate sets, and critics often objected that the star's own role was overemphasised. Irving's company included Ellen Terry as Ophelia. The title role became a star vehicle: a performer's reputation was measured by Hamlet, and the production was built around him. Against this trend, William Poel's 1881 staging of the First Quarto used a bare, simple set with red curtains as an early experiment in recreating Elizabethan conditions.\n\nTwentieth-century productions\n\nThe modern-dress Hamlet is usually traced to 1925, when Barry Jackson and H. K. Ayliff staged the play at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Its anti-Romantic approach became a model for later productions. John Barrymore's Hamlets in New York (1922) and London (1925) had already moved the role toward a more modern manner. In Germany in 1926, Leopold Jessner presented Claudius as an autocrat and Hamlet as a rebel, making the play an explicit political critique.\n\nJohn Gielgud, who began his Hamlets at the Old Vic in 1930 at the age of 26, played the role several times across the decade. His 1934 production at the New Theatre ran for 155 performances. Laurence Olivier played the role in 1937 at the Old Vic and at Elsinore Castle, the setting the play names. His 1948 film stressed the character's psychological paralysis. Gielgud later became a director in his own right, and in 1964 he directed Richard Burton on Broadway in a production presented as a dress rehearsal, with actors in street clothes and a bare set. The production divided critics. In 2000 Mark Rylance revived the play at the reconstructed Globe in London, and in 2016 the Royal Shakespeare Company staged a version in which Hamlet was a student returning home, with costumes drawn from contemporary fashion.\n\nUnconventional casting and staging\n\nSarah Bernhardt, who staged a female Hamlet in Paris in 1899, is among the most famous departures from the male-led tradition. Later gender-reversed versions appeared as parody and experiment, such as Ethyl Eichelberger's Hamlette for the Ridiculous Theatrical Company in 1990. Staging choices also changed the play's setting. The Elsinore of the early modern stage has been represented as a sparse platform, a Victorian palace, a military or political state, or a modern institution, and the ghost has been shown in many ways, from a voice or a figure in shadow to a visibly corporeal presence. The play's shifting stage history reflects its adaptability to each period's views on the role, the court, and the nature of power."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Criticism and Interpretation",
      "text": "Romantic readings\n\nRomantic critics moved the play's centre from the court and the ghost to the prince's mind. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare, including a Hamlet lecture published in 1818, described a man whose intellectual activity is so strong that he feels little pull toward action. In Coleridge's account, Hamlet's perceptions pass through his reflections and take on a form of their own, so that he is brave yet hesitates and delays out of thought. His reading gave the \"Hamlet as thinker\" tradition its basic shape. Goethe's treatment of the prince in Wilhelm Meister (1795–96) belongs to the same line, and Freud later noted that the Goethean view of a man paralysed by an overdeveloped intellect was still the prevailing one. Later critics objected that this reading turns a public and political problem into a private psychological one. Goldstein, for example, argued that it ignores the new ethics of revenge and the politics of an absolute monarchy.\n\nPsychoanalytic readings\n\nSigmund Freud brought Hamlet into The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) by setting the play beside Oedipus Rex. He argued that both works draw on the same emotional material, the child's wishes concerning its parents, but that Shakespeare's treatment reflects a later stage of repression. Freud held that the text offers no explicit motive for Hamlet's hesitation, and that the difficulty lies in the task itself: Claudius carries out the very wish that Hamlet has buried in himself. The Hamlet discussion first appeared in a footnote in the first three editions of the book and was moved into the main text in the fourth edition (1914). Ernest Jones developed the argument in a 1910 article, \"The Oedipus-complex as an explanation of Hamlet's mystery,\" and later in the book Hamlet and Oedipus (1949). Jones explained the prince's procrastination as a product of an Oedipal conflict, and argued that repressed feeling keeps Hamlet from understanding his own nature. Critics of these readings have questioned how far a theory of unconscious motives can be tested against a text that is silent about those motives.\n\nTwentieth-century approaches\n\nA. C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) treated the play as a tragedy of character. Bradley located the cause of Hamlet's delay in his melancholy temperament and in the demands of the situation, and he judged the hero through the lens of individual psychology rather than abstract theory. T. S. Eliot's essay \"Hamlet and His Problems\" (1919, reprinted in The Sacred Wood in 1920) reversed the emphasis. Eliot called the play \"most certainly an artistic failure\" and placed the fault in Shakespeare's construction rather than in the prince. He introduced the term \"objective correlative\" for a set of objects, events or situations that evokes a given emotion in the audience. Hamlet's disgust at his mother, Eliot argued, exceeds anything she has done, and because the play supplies no adequate external equivalent for that feeling, it poisons Hamlet's life and blocks his action. Lady Macbeth's state of mind served Eliot as his model of a successful correlative. The term's origin is usually traced to the painter and writer Washington Allston, and Eliot himself later said he was surprised by its vogue in criticism.\n\nRecent feminist, postcolonial and performance-based readings\n\nFrom the 1970s onward, feminist critics have reread Gertrude and Ophelia as figures whose options are limited by a patriarchal court, rather than as passive or morally flawed characters. Elaine Showalter's 1985 essay \"Representing Ophelia\" examined how stage and critical traditions had turned Ophelia's madness into a spectacle shaped by assumptions about women and insanity. Postcolonial and political readings place the play within Denmark's relations with Norway and with Fortinbras's claim to power, and read the succession as an instance of how states are built on violence and diplomacy. Performance-based criticism, in turn, treats the text as a script whose meaning changes with each production, so that the same lines may read as scruple, weakness or defiance depending on who speaks them and where. These approaches often overlap with the older psychoanalytic and character-based readings, and they tend to reopen the questions that earlier critics had considered settled, such as the motives behind Gertrude's marriage and Ophelia's death."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Adaptations and Legacy",
      "text": "Because the unabridged script runs to about four hours in performance, filmmakers have usually had to compress it. Most film adaptations are heavily cut, sometimes by removing entire characters. Cutting decisions are therefore a central part of the screen record. Fortinbras can be excised with minimal textual difficulty, so whether to include him is a major decision for any director.\n\nLaurence Olivier's 1948 film was the first major English-language sound version. Olivier adapted, directed and starred in it, and it was the first British film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Olivier also won Best Actor, and the film received the Golden Lion at the 9th Venice International Film Festival. Shakespearean purists objected that the cuts removed roughly an hour and a half of material from the four-hour play. Accounts of the reduction differ: one source puts the cut at about 40% of the unabridged version, including all scenes featuring Fortinbras, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, while another reports that the film dropped Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Fortinbras and the Second Gravedigger. Among other major films, Grigori Kozintsev's 1964 Soviet version and Franco Zeffirelli's 1990 film also differ in their treatment of the play's political frame: Fortinbras makes no appearance in Olivier's and Zeffirelli's versions, while in Kozintsev's and Branagh's films he is a major presence.\n\nKenneth Branagh's 1996 film took the opposite approach. It uses a conflated text, which editors create by combining sections of the Second Quarto with portions of the First Folio text. Many Shakespeare scholars questioned this practice, since it adds a layer of editorial intervention and produces a version that audiences of Shakespeare's time would never have heard. Branagh set the action in the nineteenth century, which adds an external political dimension to the palace intrigue. The complete cut ran 242 minutes, but a shorter wide-release version of about two and a half hours was also prepared, and after critical backlash the full version was released everywhere in the US while the shorter one went to some overseas territories.\n\nLiterary responses have often moved to the margins of the play. Tom Stoppard's <i>Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead</i> (1966) was first staged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966. It follows two courtiers who, in the play, are summoned to Elsinore at the behest of the King of Denmark, and it treats their offstage experience as the main story. Stoppard later wrote and directed a 1990 film version, which won the Golden Lion at the 47th Venice International Film Festival. John Updike's <i>Gertrude and Claudius</i> (2000) follows the same impulse by returning to the royal couple's earlier history, as do other retellings that reimagine secondary characters and events before the play opens.\n\nThe story has also moved into other media. Ambroise Thomas's opera <i>Hamlet</i> (1868) set the plot for the operatic stage. Film and television critics have often compared the play's pattern of a dead king, a usurping brother and a returning heir to later works such as The Lion King. In everyday language, the title role has become a benchmark for the play's star part: the phrase \"Hamlet without the Prince\" is used in theatre reviews of productions in which the lead is weak or absent, while the play's best-known speeches are widely parodied and quoted outside the theatre."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Chinese Translation and Reception",
      "text": "Before 1921, most Chinese audiences knew Shakespeare second-hand. Loose retellings of Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare circulated, and the early wenmingxi (civilized drama) stage versions worked from plot outlines, so they kept the story but lost most of the language. Before then, the only Shakespeare available to Chinese speakers came as loose translations and stage adaptations based on the Lambs' book. Early Shakespeare performances in China were improvised around story summaries, with little fixed dialogue.\n\nFirst complete translations\n\nTian Han's Hamlet is usually credited as the first complete Shakespeare play in Chinese, and as the first rendered in vernacular prose. Sources differ on the date: one gives 1921, when it appeared in the periodical Shaonian Zhongguo, while another notes that the book edition came out in November 1922. The finished translation was published in book form in November 1922 in the Young China Association series. Tian's long sentences and Western syntax made the text hard to follow aloud, which explains why his translation was never fully used on stage.\n\nZhu Shenghao (朱生豪, 1911–1944) became the most influential translator of the play. He died young, after finishing about thirty-one and a half of Shakespeare's plays. Twenty-seven of his translations were first published by the Shanghai World Publishing House in 1947. Zhu tried to render the verse as verse wherever he could, and he sometimes reordered lines and changed vocabulary to carry the sense rather than the literal wording. Bian Zhilin's verse version is often named the strongest poetic rendering, while the prose versions of Zhu and Liang Shiqiu are the most widely read. Hamlet has attracted more Chinese translators than any other Shakespeare play, with twelve Mandarin translations published since 1922.\n\nNames and the title\n\nThe Chinese transliteration of the name changed across periods. Tian Han used 哈孟雷特, Zhu's version is studied under the title 汉姆莱脱, and the 1978 People's Literature Press edition appeared as 哈姆莱特. The form 哈姆雷特 is now common, and the Beijing People's Art Theatre's 2025 staging uses it. These variants reflect differing transliteration choices in each period rather than different readings of the character.\n\nStage traditions\n\nSpoken drama (话剧, huaju) developed alongside Shakespeare's reception in China. Lin Zhaohua's Hamlet (1990) is central to this history: Lin directed several Shakespeare adaptations, including Richard III and Hamlet, with his Lin Zhaohua Drama Studio, founded in 1989. Scholars treat the production as a landmark of modernist Chinese theatre, which combined modern theatre techniques with traditional Chinese theatre. Later productions, such as Li Liuyi's 2018 version made with the Royal Shakespeare Company, cast veteran actor Pu Cunxin as Claudius and the ghost of the late king. The 2025 Beijing People's Art Theatre production breaks the traditional narrative timeline and uses flashbacks.\n\nTraditional opera also took up the play. In 2005 the Shanghai Peking Opera Theatre created 《王子复仇记》 for a Danish festival in Kronborg, the castle associated with Hamlet's story. Its audiences in Denmark queued for long periods before performances and gave long applause. At home the production drew criticism for its mixture of forms, but abroad that mixed quality became the main draw for foreign audiences. Earlier, Liang Qichao's 1902 traditional-style script New Roman Romance had already placed Shakespeare on a Chinese chuanqi stage. In the prologue, Shakespeare descends on clouds to appear. A 2023 Shanghai musical by Xu Jun took a different route, with symphonic music and a touch of rock. Xu presents Hamlet as a noble and learned man rather than a flawed figure unable to make up his mind.\n\nInfluence on modern Chinese drama\n\nShakespeare's plays are often credited with helping to shape spoken drama in China, a form that was new to Chinese stages. The Chinese reception of Hamlet also reflects a wider pattern: the play is repeatedly reread against local theatrical forms, and Chinese productions have tended to foreground performance and the staging of language over the Western problem of indecision that dominates criticism elsewhere."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Debates and Open Questions",
      "text": "Why Hamlet delays\n\nFew questions in the play have been argued over as persistently as why its hero waits so long. The character himself is harshest on his own inaction in the fourth act, where he swears that only bloodied thinking would be worth anything. His self-reproach reaches an apex in Act IV, scene iv. Critics divide on where the cause lies. The dramatic explanation is that the revenge plot needs its delay: E. E. Stoll reads the wait as a structural necessity, since Hamlet must verify that Claudius is indeed the murderer that the Ghost has declared him to be before he strikes. A related point concerns stage time. The interval between learning of the murder and avenging it would be about three hours at most, which makes the supposed delay look much smaller in performance than in summary.\n\nInterpretations that place the cause inside the protagonist come in several forms. Robert Hapgood argues that Hamlet's problem is a kind of inertia, a difficulty both in beginning action and in stopping it, and he objects that many earlier critics have brushed aside his self-accusations of delay while stressing external obstacles. Psychoanalytic readings go further. Ernest Jones, for example, is reported to have traced the paralysis to an unconscious identification with Claudius, a reading that treats the hesitation as neurotic inhibition rather than intellectual doubt (this internal conflict manifests as neurotic inhibition rather than mere intellectual doubt). Earlier, Samuel Taylor Coleridge had attributed the hesitation to a deep melancholy. The result is that the question remains open: the delay may be psychological, dramatic, moral, or some combination, and the text supports more than one ranking of these causes.\n\nFeigned or real madness\n\nHamlet announces his strategy early. After the Ghost's command, he warns his friends that he may hereafter find it expedient to put on an antic disposition. Readers who take the madness as a tactic point to the way he disorients the court's spies and says of himself that he is only \"mad north-north-west\", a remark that signals the performance is partly a joke at the expense of those watching him.\n\nOther readings hold that the performance slides toward real derangement. One commentary suggests that this feigned madness does at times edge into actual madness, as acted emotion always approaches genuine feeling. Freud's account moves in a different direction, treating the madness as a disguise, much as dreams disguise unconscious material (Hamlet's madness merely disguised the truth in the same way dreams disguise unconscious realities). Ophelia's collapse is often set against Hamlet's behaviour, since her madness is generally read as unfeigned and it sharpens the question of what in his conduct is performance.\n\nGertrude's knowledge\n\nThe text gives little direct evidence about what Gertrude knew. In the closet scene, when Hamlet accuses Claudius of the murder, she responds with an expression of disbelief, \"As kill a king?\", which can be read as shock at the accusation, as evasion, or as a sign that she has suspected more than she admits. Her later conduct, including her report of Ophelia's death and her drinking from the poisoned cup, does not settle whether she was an innocent widow who married the murderer, a willing accomplice, or someone who chose not to ask. Because the play never shows her thinking, every reading of her complicity depends on how the audience and critics fill that silence.\n\nOphelia's death\n\nWhether Ophelia died by suicide or by accident has been debated for generations. Gertrude's account describes a broken willow branch, a fall into a brook, and Ophelia singing while her clothes drag her down. Ophelia's drowning is ambiguous, with elements of accident and suicide. Readers who favour accident emphasise the report of the branch breaking, and brooks are typically small and shallow, so Ophelia should have been able to save herself, which may be taken as evidence that she made no effort to. Other readers stress the passivity and the grim gravedigger exchange that follows, in which the question of Christian burial turns on whether she willfully sought her own salvation, and the coroner's ruling still allows her that burial. Some critics add her rejection by Hamlet, her father's death, and a possible pregnancy as cumulative causes (her rejection by her boyfriend, her father's murder, and her possible pregnancy). Because Ophelia's death happens offstage, the staging and the performer's choices in her last moments often decide where an audience places the judgment.\n\nTextual and chronological uncertainties\n\nSeveral points remain open because the early texts do not agree or do not add up. The gravedigger's scene supplies a series of numbers: his own length of service, Hamlet's age, and the time since Yorick's burial. These figures are not easily reconciled, and the Second Quarto and First Folio do not always match in the surrounding lines. Editors therefore disagree over which version to follow, and their choices affect how old Hamlet appears to be and how long the events have taken. The question of which text has authority, the Quarto or the Folio, is itself unresolved, so arguments about the play's chronology and character can depend on which witness an editor privileges."
    }
  ],
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    "literature",
    "theatre",
    "psychology",
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  "sources": [
    {
      "title": "The Date of Composition",
      "url": "http://triggs.djvu.org/global-language.com/ENFOLDED/HUTCHINGS/DateofComposition1-04.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "Lord Chamberlain%27s Men",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Chamberlain%27s_Men"
    },
    {
      "title": "Dates and sources",
      "url": "https://www.rsc.org.uk/hamlet/about-the-play/dates-and-sources"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet Context Guide: History, Religion & Sources for Students",
      "url": "https://www.shakespeareretold.com/hamlet-context"
    },
    {
      "title": "\"Hamlet\" Origins: The Legend of Amleth - San Francisco Shakespeare Festival",
      "url": "https://sfshakes.org/hamlet-origins-the-legend-of-amleth/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Sources of Hamlet",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sources_of_Hamlet"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet by William Shakespeare: Notes and MCQs",
      "url": "https://englishfolio.com/upessc/assistant-professor-english/british-drama/hamlet"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet: A History of Performance :: Internet Shakespeare Editions",
      "url": "https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Ham_PerfHistory/index.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet Play History: Shakespeare's Hamlet and the Chamberlain's Men",
      "url": "https://www.shakespeare-online.com/playanalysis/hamletplayhistory.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "1601 in literature",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1601_in_literature"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet - New World Encyclopedia",
      "url": "https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Hamlet"
    },
    {
      "title": "Ur-Hamlet",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Hamlet"
    },
    {
      "title": "Shakespeare's Sources for Hamlet: Ur-Hamlet, Revenge tragedy, and the Danish Tragedy",
      "url": "https://www.shakespeare-online.com/sources/hamletsources.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet: Sources and Analogues :: Internet Shakespeare Editions",
      "url": "https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Ham_Sources/complete/"
    },
    {
      "title": "The Sources of Hamlet",
      "url": "http://triggs.djvu.org/global-language.com/ENFOLDED/ABOUT/HamletSource-12-11-09.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "About Hamlet",
      "url": "https://www.marlowe-society.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/jl09_02_gortazar_about_hamlet_dates.pdf"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet Q1",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_Q1"
    },
    {
      "title": "An Introduction to This Text: Hamlet",
      "url": "https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/hamlet/an-introduction-to-this-text/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Shakespeare’s Badass Quarto",
      "url": "https://www.chronicle.com/article/shakespeares-badass-quarto/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Q1 Hamlet",
      "url": "https://shaksper.net/archive/2019/835-march/32910-q1-hamlet"
    },
    {
      "title": "Bad quarto",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_quarto"
    },
    {
      "title": "Project MUSE - <i>The First Two Quartos of ‘Hamlet’: A New View of the Origins and Relationship of the Texts</i> by Margrethe Jolly (review)",
      "url": "https://muse.jhu.edu/article/636480"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet: A Critical Reader 9781472571380, 9781472571373, 9781472571410, 9781472571403 - DOKUMEN.PUB",
      "url": "https://dokumen.pub/hamlet-a-critical-reader-9781472571380-9781472571373-9781472571410-9781472571403.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "Colin Burrow · Conflationism: 'Hamlet' as you like it",
      "url": "https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n12/colin-burrow/conflationism"
    },
    {
      "title": "Shakespeare: Editions and Textual Studies - Gabriel Egan",
      "url": "http://gabrielegan.com/publications/Egan2008h.htm"
    },
    {
      "title": "The Texts of Hamlet, or, Why Kenneth Branagh's Movie Is So !*@%ing Long",
      "url": "https://www.shakespeareflix.net/2015/03/the-texts-of-hamlet-or-why-kenneth.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet :: Internet Shakespeare Editions",
      "url": "https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/Texts/Ham/"
    },
    {
      "title": "The First Quarto of Hamlet",
      "url": "https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/first-quarto-of-hamlet/F84C98ED00211D35A567DFF040494BE9"
    },
    {
      "title": "Memorial reconstruction",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_reconstruction"
    },
    {
      "title": "The three Hamlets - The Argumentative Old Git - WordPress.com",
      "url": "https://argumentativeoldgit.wordpress.com/2013/02/10/the-three-hamlets/"
    },
    {
      "title": "How Old Is Hamlet in the Play? The Surprising Answer",
      "url": "https://williamshakespeareinsights.com/how-old-is-hamlet-in-the-play/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet’s Age",
      "url": "https://www.shaksper.net/archive/2017/786-january/31825-hamlet-s-age"
    },
    {
      "title": "Character Analysis in Hamlet - Owl Eyes",
      "url": "https://www.owleyes.org/text/hamlet/analysis/character-analysis"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet: Characters - Analysis of Main Characters & Quotes",
      "url": "https://custom-writing.org/blog/hamlet-characters"
    },
    {
      "title": "Ophelia",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophelia"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet Character Analysis",
      "url": "https://www.litcharts.com/lit/hamlet/characters"
    },
    {
      "title": "Laertes (Hamlet)",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laertes_(Hamlet)"
    },
    {
      "title": "Horatio (Hamlet)",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_(Hamlet)"
    },
    {
      "title": "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosencrantz_and_Guildenstern_Are_Dead"
    },
    {
      "title": "Characters in Hamlet",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characters_in_Hamlet"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet - Act 2, scene 2",
      "url": "https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/hamlet/read/2/2/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet: Character List",
      "url": "https://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/hamlet/characters/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead",
      "url": "https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/rosencrantz-and-guildenstern-are-dead"
    },
    {
      "title": "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's role, fate, and perceptions by Hamlet and Horatio - eNotes.com",
      "url": "https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/what-role-do-rosencrantz-guildenstern-play-what-5169"
    },
    {
      "title": "The Gravediggers Character Analysis in Hamlet",
      "url": "https://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/hamlet/character/the-gravediggers/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Language in Hamlet - Hartford Stage",
      "url": "https://www.hartfordstage.org/stagenotes/hamlet/language"
    },
    {
      "title": "All speeches (lines) and cues for Osric in \"Hamlet\" :|: Open Source Shakespeare",
      "url": "https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/characters/charlines.php?CharID=osric&WorkID=hamlet&cues=1"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet"
    },
    {
      "title": "Betterton, Thomas",
      "url": "https://www.encyclopedia.com/reference/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/betterton-thomas"
    },
    {
      "title": "Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the charisma of acting",
      "url": "https://theshakespeareblog.com/2013/12/shakespeares-hamlet-and-the-charisma-of-acting/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Richard Burbage",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Burbage"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet in performance",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_in_performance"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet Overseas. The Acting Technique of Edwin Booth",
      "url": "https://skenejournal.skeneproject.it/index.php/JTDS/article/view/285"
    },
    {
      "title": "William Charles Macready",
      "url": "https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Charles-Macready"
    },
    {
      "title": "Further Reading: Hamlet",
      "url": "https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/hamlet/further-reading/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Chapter 6 Reform It Altogether: Hamlet, c. 1900–1980",
      "url": "http://ard.uchicago.edu/email/event/images/HistofHamlet-Chapter6.pdf"
    },
    {
      "title": "The Gielgud-Burton Hamlet: Notes on a First Night",
      "url": "https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1964/05/14/the-gielgud-burton-hamlet-notes-on-a-first-night/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet (1948 film)",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_(1948_film)"
    },
    {
      "title": "Royal Shakespeare Company — Google Arts & Culture",
      "url": "https://artsandculture.google.com/story/royal-shakespeare-company-royal-shakespeare-company/EgUhMwJO5020Lw?hl=en"
    },
    {
      "title": "Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Excerpt from \"Lecture on Hamlet\" (1818)",
      "url": "https://sites.broadviewpress.com/lessons/DramaAnthology/ColeridgeOnHamlet/ColeridgeOnHamlet_print.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet (Vol. 44) - Psychoanalytic Interpretations",
      "url": "https://www.houseofideas.com/mscornelius/resources/hamlet/hamlet_vol_44__psychoanalytic_interpretations_277205-.pdf"
    },
    {
      "title": "Sigmund Freud, Excerpt from \"The Interpretation of Dreams\" (1900)",
      "url": "https://sites.broadviewpress.com/lessons/DramaAnthology/FreudOnHamlet/FreudOnHamlet_print.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "The Tragedy of Hoemdiplet: Freud’s Fusion of Oedipus and Hamlet",
      "url": "https://camws.org/sites/default/files/meeting2018/panels/Oedipus.02.pdf"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet and Oedipus",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_and_Oedipus"
    },
    {
      "title": "From Flibbertigibbet to Ernest Jones and Ernst Simmel: Nightmares under Analysis",
      "url": "https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/pah.2020.0335"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet and His Problems",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_and_His_Problems"
    },
    {
      "title": "Objective correlative",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective_correlative"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet on screen",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_on_screen"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet (United Kingdom, 1948)",
      "url": "https://www.reelviews.net/reelviews/hamlet_2184"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet (1948)",
      "url": "https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/hamlet-1948/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Kenneth Branagh's Movie Version of Hamlet",
      "url": "https://study.com/academy/lesson/kenneth-branaghs-movie-version-of-hamlet.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet 1996",
      "url": "https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/culture-magazines/hamlet-1996"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet (1996 film)",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_(1996_film)"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet (1996) ⭐ 7.7",
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    },
    {
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    },
    {
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    },
    {
      "title": "Chinese production of Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' set for stage in November - Chinadaily.com.cn",
      "url": "https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201811/05/WS5bdf8917a310eff303286759.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet（A stage play by Beijing People's Art Theatre in 2025, directed by Feng Yuanzheng and Yang Jiayin, starring Zheng Yunlong.）_Baiduwiki",
      "url": "https://baike.baidu.com/en/item/Hamlet/101095"
    },
    {
      "title": "京剧《王子复仇记》轰动哈姆雷特的故乡丹麦",
      "url": "https://www.mct.gov.cn/whzx/whyw/201112/t20111201_707429.htm"
    },
    {
      "title": "新编京剧《王子复仇记》海外走红 国内曾受争议-中新网",
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    },
    {
      "title": "ARTICLE",
      "url": "https://www.binghamton.edu/centers/ctac/thea-comm/issues/vol3/liuhaocn.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "Chinese version of Hamlet to hit stage",
      "url": "https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202305/05/WS64542cb9a310b6054fad119a.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "Universiteit Leiden MA Thesis When Shakespeare encounters China:",
      "url": "https://studenttheses.universiteitleiden.nl/access/item:2658874/view"
    },
    {
      "title": "HAMLET：朱生豪、梁实秋、孙大雨、方平和辜正坤六译本对比鉴赏_一鸣_新浪博客",
      "url": "https://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_517d4f5e0102w35n.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "翻译目的论视角下《哈姆雷特》汉译对比研究_参考网",
      "url": "https://m.fx361.com/news/2021/0906/8819633.html"
    },
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    },
    {
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      "url": "https://www.enotes.com/topics/hamlet/characters/hamlet"
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    {
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      "url": "https://grokipedia.com/page/Critical_approaches_to_Hamlet"
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    },
    {
      "title": "Insanity and Madness",
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    },
    {
      "title": "Ophelia's Death: Accident or Suicide?",
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    },
    {
      "title": "In Hamlet, does Ophelia drown herself by accident? - eNotes.com",
      "url": "https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/in-hamlet-does-ophelia-actually-drown-herself-by-462502"
    },
    {
      "title": "Hamlet's Ophelia: The Changing Perceptions of Suicide, Death, and Madness in the Elizabethan and Victorian Periods",
      "url": "https://digitalcommons.winthrop.edu/honorstheses/78/"
    }
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
}