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    A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's Hamlet
    A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's Hamlet
    A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's Hamlet
    Ebook58 pages50 minutes

    A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's Hamlet

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's "Hamlet," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Shakespeare for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Shakespeare for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 21, 2015
    ISBN9781535824415
    A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's Hamlet

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      A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's Hamlet - Gale

      1

      Hamlet

      William Shakespeare

      1599

      Introduction

      Two years passed between Hamlet's being entered in the Stationers' Register, a journal kept by the Stationers' Company of London in which the printing rights to works were recorded, and the play's being printed. In 1602, James Roberts entered A booke called the Revenge of Hamlett Prince Denmarke as yt was latelie Acted by the Lord Chamberleyne his servantes in the Stationers' Register; when the quarto text of the play was published in 1604, the title page read as follows:

      The Tragicall Historie of HAMLET, Prince of Denmarke. By William Shakespeare. Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect Coppie. At London, Printed by I.R. [James Roberts] for N.L. [Nicholas Ling] and are to be sold at his shoppe vnder Saint Dunstons Church in Fleetstreet. 1604.

      In fact, sometime after Roberts initially registered Hamlet but before he printed it, Nicholas Ling published a pirated edition of the play, with the text assembled from memory by actors who had played in touring companies that took Hamlet to Oxford and Cambridge. This pirated edition is called the first quarto and is a corrupt text. The 1604 quarto, called the second quarto, seems to be based on Shakespeare's own papers, but it is marred by printer's errors and by corrupt interpolations from the pirated text. A third and a fourth quarto were subsequently printed, both based on the second. In 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death, his friends and fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell assembled his plays in a single folio-sized volume, called the 1623 Folio. The text of Hamlet in the Folio is substantially different from that of the play's second quarto; the Folio text is thought to have come from the prompt book of Shakespeare's acting company, the King's Men, and to be a revision of the second quarto by Shakespeare himself. The later text is shorter than the second quarto by two hundred lines and contains passages not in that quarto.

      Scholars are uncertain as to when before 1602 Hamlet was written. The best evidence for a date before which Hamlet could not have been written is found within the play itself, as Hamlet discusses how the rise of children's acting companies has driven the established adult acting companies out of business. Through Hamlet, Shakespeare is understood to be referring to the War of the Theaters, which took place during the years 1599 and 1601, setting the date of Hamlet's composition between 1599 and 1602.

      Since its first appearance, Hamlet has been immensely popular, as evidenced by the number of times it was reprinted in the seventeenth century and by its performance history. Even during the Puritan Interregnum, between 1649 and 1660, when the theaters were closed and performances outlawed, the gravediggers scene from Hamlet was performed by actors standing alone, illegally, as a droll, or a short comic sketch with music and dance. When the theaters were reopened upon the restoration of the monarchy, Hamlet was performed frequently. A gentleman named Samuel Pepys noted in his diary that he saw the play performed in 1661, 1663, and 1668. John Downes, the bookkeeper for the acting company of which the popular seventeenth-century actor Thomas Betterton was the principal, noted that between 1662 and 1706, no tragedy got more Reputation, or Money to the Company than Hamlet. In 1695, two rival acting companies each presented performances of Hamlet on the same nights.

      For those living in the second half of the seventeenth century, the plot of Hamlet could be read to parallel events in England's immediate past—such as the beheading of Charles I, the years of the Commonwealth, and the restoration of the monarchy—as the play tells the story of a usurper who kills the rightful king and is finally overthrown himself. Beyond historical considerations, in 1698, Jeremy Collier, in his Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English

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