HamletAuthor: William Shakespeare Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s great tragedies and possibly the most mis-quoted. It deals with the psychological torment of a young Danish prince, Hamlet himself, who is racked with murderous intent. Hamlet’s Father, the King of Denmark, is dead and the King’s brother (Hamlet’s uncle), Claudius, has married the widowed Queen, Gertrude. Hamlet is disgusted and cannot bear that his mother has betrayed his father’s memory in what he considers to be an incestuous manner. When the ghost of the dead King appears to Hamlet and fills him with a powerful desire for revenge, Hamlet becomes more and more desperate to destroy Claudius and avenge his father’s memory. However, despite this desire to kill his stepfather, Hamlet struggles to achieve his purpose and a series of disastrous events ensue. He mistreats his Love, Ophelia, who is so distraught by the change in Hamlet’s manner towards her that she is driven to insanity, the beautiful yet tormented soliloquies engaged in by Hamlet become increasingly desperate as Hamlet’s rage and despair strengthen, and Gertrude’s belief that Hamlet is mad with grief is apparent when Gertrude and Hamlet Speak together in Act IV. Hamlet is Shakespeare’s greatest tragic hero and, while the end of the Play is inevitable, the unravelling of the story is a wonder. Each scene is rendered in words of poetic beauty that simultaneously delight and horrify. The play is still as relevant today as it was when it was first written and performed as society is still troubled with political intrigue and deception, the hunt for bloody revenge, the tortures of a doomed love, and the cruelty of bereavement and loss. It is because Shakespeare speaks for humanity as a whole that makes Hamlet, like so many of his plays, universal. Hamlet is not bound by its time but transcends this boundary to speak to people just as powerfully as it did four hundred years ago.
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