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What are readers saying about Hamlet (The New Folger Library Shakespeare)?
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-07-28 07:54:25.
(Language: English)
  
I like the fact that there is still controversy over this play. I think people forget that the idea of ghosts at that the time was that they were as real as bridges and the main question was whether the ghost was who (or what) it claimed to be, as an evil spirit or demon could have assumed Hamlet's father's form. And for the people who think he was whining, how would you feel if the supreme ruler of your country murdered your father and shacked up with your mother, and quite possibly could have your head cut off at any time? Hamlets fears are quite justified, as he is murdered by the king's poison in the end.
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andrew posted a review at 2008-09-15 10:41:01.
(Language: English)
Since it’s debut before an English audience, which chose to watch it rather than visit the bear pits next door, Hamlet has become known as an unsolvable enigma of father-son conflict, guilt, rage and vengeance. “The happy hunting ground of many an unbalanced mind” a character in Joyce’s Ulysses calls it, and that book’s hero Stephen Dedalus develops arcane theories that seem to prove the point while foreshadowing the psychological discoveries of Freud. No work more strikingly traces the woven strands of mind and soul than Hamlet.
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-07-27 08:18:53.
(Language: English)
To be or not to be sums up Hamlet's problem: he's indecisive for much of the play. I find him to be whiny, though I appreciate the play more each time I read and teach it. There are some beautiful passages in it, particularly as concerns the famous soliloquy mentioned above. Part of my trouble is that there are few characters I admire. I find Hamlet whiny from the start, the female characters weak, and the other characters to be two-faced or short-sighted.The three-star rating, though, is because the play does ask some good questions: what are our obligations toward avenging family honor? what is the purpose of our lives? what lies beyond this world? Etc. It's very existential in a lot of ways. Riordans will have a much more erudite take on this play. Ask them.
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-02-08 06:31:39.
(Language: English)
Certainly the most studied play in world literature, William Shakespeare's quintessential drama Hamlet goes beyond comparison. More has been written about the character Hamlet than any other figure in history, except Christ, so little can be added some four hundred years after it was written! Shakespeare follows the standard rules for tragedies: The hero has a basic human failure that brings about his downfall and death, but before he dies, he learns an important lesson about his failure and how it destroyed his life (and the lives of those he loved). Shakespeare did not write Hamlet in order to deliver a moral message, but that does not stop us from learning from his play. He fills it with ordinary people, and we can see ourselves in their situations. When the heroes face their tragic ends, we can learn from their mistakes. Hamlet is a classic masterpiece!
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-01-23 12:45:38.
(Language: English)
How can one ’review’ this book? Mr Shake has been dissected more than a few times by pupils, scholars, critics, playwright, poets. After reading extracts back in school, what struck me now after reading Hamlet in its entirety (though without going through all the footnoes in my Arden version) was: Oh my God, what a bloody, as well a satirical, massacre this is. Quite an unhappy family story. Here you will words like daggers, real daggers, drowning, poisoning, stabbing and sword fight, an escalation of northsea conflict, spies, suicide, deceit. I think I will stick to a quick paraphrasing of the story and not pursue any analysis ( I need to let this sink in, and maybe read bits again): Hamlet, has lost his father, the King, who has been poisoned. His uncle, Claudius, takes the throne. The father’s ghost emerges and tells him the uncle did it. The son loses his love, Ophelia, as well who drowns herself. Hamlet mother dies, drinking from the a poisoned glass by mistake. At some point in the complex entanglement between related people there is a play within the play. Towards, the end the brother, Laertes, of Hamlets love Ophelia, fights Hamlet after jumping in Ophelia’s grave. The castle in Elsinore is not a cosy place. In a few pages over the last page everybody dies, after going into sword action with each other. Surely there is something rooten in the state of Denmark. And the Norwegian Fortinbras takes over the throne. Maybe best so. Oh, my God.
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becky posted a review at 2011-08-06 05:43:51.
(Language: English)
loved it
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-09-19 10:47:14.
(Language: English)
PROCRASTINATION... The most common tragic flaw shared by most of us. Shakespeare's play delves deep into tragic flaws... procrastination and madness being two of the many addressed in this genius play. Hamlet as a play possesses dramatic element required to quicken your pulse. Murder, Incest, Jealousy, Rivalry, Unrequited love, Passion and Suicide... it has it all. Hamlet arrives at his castle Elsinor after he gets the tragic news that his father has been murdered... the suspect being his own father's brother... who is having an affair with Hamlets mother! Hamlet vows to take revenge and pretends to be mad so that no one suspects his moves. Except that by the time he thinks and plans it is too late... Hamlet procrastinates and pays a heavy price. "THE TRAGIC INEEFECTIVENESS OF A SPECULATIVE INTELLECT IN A WORLD OF ACTION!" So don't procrastinate... don't think... just do what you have to do before its too late... Start by reading this play!
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A Reader posted a review at 2011-09-02 07:46:19.
(Language: English)
Finally understood it.
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Lori posted a review at 2012-03-03 08:31:20.
(Language: English)
REQUIRED READ
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-08-01 09:51:27.
(Language: English)
When it comes to Shakespeare's tragedies, this is a close tie with Macbeth, (I'm all about the Blood. Revenge, Lust, and Blood. To quote Stoppard's Player, the blood is essential!) That, and I AM a Fishmonger... I think Hamlet is Shakespeares masterpiece of sorts in terms of writing. The play within the play, and a hero who really doesn't want to be one. The complexity of the plot and the nuances of language are just amazing. But like ALL Shakespeare, I really prefer to experience it in the way it was meant to be: Performed live.
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A Reader posted a review at 2011-06-06 02:01:20.
(Language: English)
What could I say of Hamlet that hasn't already been said? It's place in the literary canon is absolutely necessary. Hamlet, the prince, is the deepest, most complete character in literary history, unsurpassed previously and ever since. What makes Hamlet so special is his ability to see the world around himself, and to question his own existence within that world.
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-12-10 05:31:22.
(Language: English)
Hamlet cares little for his revenge, he has no real passion or drive concerning Claudius – an eggshell, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing. The play’s the thing, and Hamlet, the true writer of ‘Hamlet’, is the greatest playwright of all time precisely because he is the greatest, most encompassing of all audiences. As the most observant, intelligent audience of himself, he is able to beautify every word and every scene to full effect, ensuring the play’s immortality and thus his own immortality – he transcends Shakespeare, usurping death, nature, all. One must only consider his unlimited influence on humanity today to understand that he has forged for himself a Godhood.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-04-08 07:18:01.
(Language: English)
My all time favorite book by my literary lover Shakespeare. No one can tell a tale like him, and this simple tale of revenge has the most in depth look at the human psyche of any book unless you want to read Freud, but I think Shakespeare is a little more accurate. Hamlet encompasses everything you could want in a book from murder to revenge to ghosts to madness to a play within a play to comedic grave diggers to random pirates. What more could you ask from this not really, yet maybe, crazy Prince of Denmark? Every time I read this play i discover something new on every page because there is also so many ways to read this play, every point has validity and every sentence and usually every word tells this huge story of its own. Like Falconry... ~shivers~ Millennium Falconry... teehee, Nate is amazing.
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-08-16 12:34:41.
(Language: English)
This black and white classic Shakespearian story of Hamlet is set in the medieval period, it portrays the story of the young Danish prince Hamlet (Laurence Olivier) who languishes in depressionafter the sudden, unexplained death of his father, the king. His uncle, Claudius (Basil Sydney) remarries his mother, Queen Gertude (Eileen Herlie) almost immediately after the funeral, only compounding his anger at the loss. To add to the emotional fire within, Hamlet is confronted with the ghost of his father, who reveals that it was his uncle Claudius who poisoned him with hemlock, which sent him to an early grave.Hamlet decides to avenge his father’s death, but first he must prove tHamletView next photohat the new King is indeed the culprit. Broken with sadness and besieged by family members who try to convince him he’s crazy, Hamlet has his work cut out for him. However, Hamlet realizes that he does not want to burn in hell and send Claudius to heaven by killing him. Tragically, his reluctance to seek revenge leads to the death of several people in the court, including Queen Gertrude, Ophelia (Jean Simmons), whom he loves, and Hamlet himself.Olivier’s Oscar winning feat on Shakespeare’s story of madness and murder is definitely a perfect balance between stage and cinema. Internal thoughts of characters which are usually presented on stage as monologues have been replaced with voiceovers while use of dizzying camera to show Hamlet’s inner turmoil is an impossibility on stage. The black and white cinematography and the excellent set design give it a darkly gothic touch; add to this the Victorian getup and period costume, you have a perfect feel of stage. The performances are excellent from all actors, which raises this movie to a different scale. On the down side Olivier as Hamlet is too old for the character who is supposedly a young man, while young Eileen Herlie as Hamlet’s mother Queen Gertrude is too young and hence unconvincing.However, Hamlet had won five Oscars; Best Film, Best Costume, Best Art Direction, Best Adoption and lastly Best Actor (Laurence Olivier) at The Academy Awards of 1949. Laurence Olivier’s take on the play is an undeniable classic despite its shortcomings. It is rather lengthy, but generally rewarding for the Shakespeare fan.
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-05-28 12:37:08.
(Language: English)
This is pretty much the pinnacle of Shakespeare's literary powers, and has been regarded as such for centuries. A lot of this is because of the fascination of the central character, advised of his father's murder by his father's ghost, and then taking a troubled but compelling path to vengeance, which ends up not only with his own death but also those of his father's murderer, his mother, Polonius and both his children, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Also, of course, the language is amazing. This play surely has more famous quotes per page than any other, most of them short phrases that neatly bracket some concept - 'a consummation devoutly to be wished', or 'the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune'. It's occasionally rather startling to hear the original context of some commonplace line, though it doesn't really jar the play. Apart from the main plot, I found two interesting themes in the play. One, not surprisingly, is death. Everyone is talking about it, from the king to the gravedigger. Depending on how you count Julius Caesar, this is the first non-historical play with a ghost. We end up with the stage littered with corpses, and I think there are more on-stage killings than in Titus Andronicus - and unlike Titus Andronicus it isn't over the top. (It's also difficult to deny that there must have been some connection in the author's mind between the title character and his own son Hamnet, who had died a few years earlier aged eleven.) The other theme I picked up was the theatre. It's not just the play-within-a-play (though that is more interesting here than the comedy of A Midsummer Night's Dream, let alone the peculiar unfinished framing narrative of The Taming of the Shrew); it's the conversation of the players with Hamlet before the show, and the final discussion between Fortinbras and Horatio about telling the story and displaying the bodies. Shakespeare isn't overdoing it, but he does seem to want to make us think about what the theatre is and what is happening when we are watching (or in this case listening). This must have been one of Arkangel's earlier productions, as Bob Peck, who fluffs some of his lines as Claudius, died in 1999. The other key parts are excellent - Imogen Stubbs as Ophelia, Norman Rodway as Polonius, Jane Lapotaire as Gertrude, and of course Simon Russell Beale as Hamlet. It all hangs together neatly.
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-07-13 07:29:00.
(Language: English)
my favorite piece to teach!! i love hamlet's complexity and temperament-- his intelligence, emotional vulnerability, drive for justice, and struggle to avoid becoming that which he despises most (which of course, he must if he is to revenge the death of his father). "Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not 'seems.' 'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forced breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected 'havior of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, That can denote me truly: these indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play: But I have that within which passeth show; These but the trappings and the suits of woe."
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-10-31 07:29:13.
(Language: English)
Whilst younger in my mid teens I remember being very troubled and somewhat puzzled by this story as I had never found any final, complete, and unambiguous meaning to it. As I started to read the story I didn’t think to begin with that Hamlet was a particularly sad Prince and he didn’t seem to me as a teenager very lonely and he certainly wasn’t mad…until one day that all changed! (after his fathers’ ghost, demanding revenge came to visit him). And so, revenge was certainly the dish of the day as Hamlet invited the wandering actors to perform for the ‘new’ King and Queen a play in which he re-created his fathers’ murder. And do you know what it took me years and years to realise that it was the ghost of his father that eventually, (after becoming totally mad), killed him. For he allowed the spirit of trauma into himself, he allowed the demon to invade his memory (with the hurt of his father’s death) which in turn became a part of himself. He was lost I guess…to a very hungry ghost! (Alas Orphelia!) I believe Shakespeare certainly understood the battle to 'let go' and the madness it creates when one fails to do so…By allowing ourselves to be haunted by the past, maybe haunted by our childhood trauma and the emotional difficulties that arise from these times, we inevitably become affected to varying ways of being, and those ways, well I guess they impact upon us, in particular upon our souls. And now twenty-five years later, I can see that Hamlet was without doubt, Shakespeare's MASTERPIECE too! AWESOME!!...xx
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Marcel posted a review at 2009-01-13 06:28:39.
(Language: English)
Someone said that the true test of art -- as opposed to just entertainment -- in art, literature, movie, film, or any creative medium, is that you can view, read, watch, or listen to a work of art many times over and each time you discover something new in it. It keeps opening up before you the deeper you move into it. It's what makes "Hamlet" and "King Lear" so incomparable. All Shakespeare's tragedies make better comedies. If you can find it, check out Kaurismaki's Hamlet Goes Business. As for Olivier, IMO, he was a seriously overrated actor -- he did one of the worst Hamlet's ever, turning the Danish Prince into a flaming wuss, so I don't care about him... I mentioned earlier what we all know -- that philosophers from time immemorial have disliked and distrusted rhetoric as an enemy to ethics, truth, and epistemology. Shakespeare -- who never identified with the mob in any of his plays (and not because he was a reactionary, but, like his hero Sir Thomas More, because he knew that mobs are essentially mindless creatures) -- shared this dislike with philosophers before and since his day, and explored his mistrust of his own ability to persuade not only through such political-rhetoric plays as "Julius Caesar" but through the characters of Iago and Hamlet, Lady MacBeth and Richard III, even in his comedies such as "Love's Labour Lost" where the hollowness of courtly language itself is shown by both the characters in the play who are the best at it and by the play's author. I would suggest that this disjuncture between language and action, the tension and rancidness that lay just under the surface of a comedy ("Love's Labours Lost") and a history-tragedy ("Julius Caesar") -- not to mention every other work of Shakespeare's up to and including "Hamlet" and "King Lear," -- is an even greater problem when it comes to poor and disfunctional rhetoric in the life of nation. (That's all right. The first thing one learns in studying literary criticism is that ALL readings of any text are misreadings. There are "weak misreadings" -- which may be closer to the author's intent, which can never really be known anyway (even by the author, it seems), but which generate little interest from the analysis -- or "strong misreadings," such as Freud's Oedipal misreading of "Hamlet," which are much further away from the probable author's meaning but which generate years and decades of interesting discussion and debate. Harold Bloom later apologized for his chapter on "Hamlet" in SHAKESPEARE: THE CREATION OF THE HUMAN because, he said, he got so carried away talking about the possibility (his theory) that Shakespeare had reworked that earlier staged version of his own HAMLET that he sort of forgot to talk about HAMLET. So he issued a tiny little book, titled (I think) HAMLET, in which he fully addressed the character and play rather than dwelling on the play's origins. The little book is worth adding to one's Shakespeare (or Bloom) shelf. After all, where would we be if Shakespeare hadn't had the habit of always "returning to his trunk" and reworking that early, flat, cliched (accent there) failure of a an early-career revenge play of his called "Hamlet?" Having said that, I have to confess to my near-lifelong interest (obsession?) with Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln is to history what Hamlet is to literature/theater for me -- i.e. inexhaustable. The more one immerses onself in Lincoln, the more the topic opens and deepens and widens. On the other hand, Shakespeare borrowed old stories, old titles, the names of characters, threadbare popular plots, his rivals' themes and tales, and situations that were literally ripped out of the headlines (if they'd had headlines and newspapers then.)His plots often came from the few books of history he owned, and which were popular in his day, including tomes on English history and Plutarch. In a real sense, almost everything Shakespeare did was a sort of reworking and rewriting of old stuff. (Including, many scholars now believe, in his masterpiece "Hamlet," where he not only stole a story and characters that had been around for centuries, but quite possibly reworked and rethought his own early stage version of "Hamlet" which had been mocked by his contemporaries and competitors. Shylock from "The Merchant of Venice" was an almost direct lifting from Kit Marlowe's "The Jew of Malta" -- and Shylock would have been played in giant false nose and red fright wig, the parodic standard of a Jew onstage in any drama of the era. [The source for today's clown image of round red nose and red wig.] The only difference being, of course, that in Shakespeare's work, the caricature-cartoon-Jew of Marlowe became a complex, living, breathing human being.) Hey, without kidney stones and their pain, we wouldn't have HAMLET. (This is my theory) Montaigne retired from public life and wrote his ESSAYS when he was about 50, due to constant kidney stones. Without Montaigne's essays, which we're sure Shakespeare read, I'm convinced that Hamlet and Lear would not have had the internal monologues and consciousness they did. Yeah, I always get Hamlet and his friend Horatio mixed up. And the father -- the ghost -- is ALSO named Hamlet. Will S. must have missed Scott Card's Rule. One compositor, for instance, always seemed to mistake Shakespeare's handwritten "e's" (which in those days were penned almost identically as "d's") with the "d." No big deal, you say? Well, consider where Laertes is speaking to Claudius in HAMLET . . . is he saying " when thou dids't" or " when thou diest"? Makes a bit of a difference. Especially to Claudius. You need to see some more Kaurismaki. He has a great version of Hamlet called Hamlet Goes Business. Made for 5 billion yen, "Casshern" tries to address the idealistic question proposed in Shakespear's "Hamlet" (Why do people fight with each other?) I'm suggesting that while errors in novels are irritating to everyone, primarily because they threaten our willing suspension of disbelief (and make us distrust the author on larger things as well), there has to be some analogy to the benign code-writing bugs and countless small air travel irritations that offer no threat to crashing the program or aircraft. Shakespeare wrote with such creative energy that his best plays are filled with anachronisms, continuity errors, repetition of dialogue, wrong words scrawled in haste ( i.e. is it "O that this too sullied flesh could melt? Or solid flesh? Or sallied flesh?) confused stage directions (often listing the name of the actor to enter, not the character), historical distortions or inaccuracies, and so forth. Do such things make "Hamlet" crash? I've mentioned elsewhere that part of my deep interest in Lincoln rises from the same source as my never-ending interest in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Lincoln was America's Hamlet in the sense that his life and presidency are a beautiful and complex riddle that become deeper and more complex the more you learn about them. The word "misprision" -- not in the legal definition, but in the lit-crit sense -- comes to mind here: i.e. all strong readings of a text are misreadings (say . . . Freud's creative misreading of "Hamlet"). But so are all weak readings misreadings. Telling them apart is the face that launched a thousand academic canoes. But I didn't mind Gibson's version of Hamlet. Any "mistake" in writing is harmful because it threatens to topple Blake's "willing suspension of disbelief" that is necessary to enjoy any mimetic art -- a novel, a film, theater. But there are mistakes and there are mistakes. In "Hamlet," the prince is obviously a young man of no more than 20 in the opening scenes yet a few weeks later -- in the chronology of the play -- when Hamlet and the Gravedigger (his only worthy interlocutor in terms of wit) are bandying back and forth, the Gravedigger points out that Yorick was buried 23 years before, when Hamlet was a boy of at least 7 and perhaps already a teenager. Where did that extra decade and more come from? And Horatio -- who is a contemporary of Hamlet's as a student -- remembers when Hamlet's father rode forth, dressed in just such armor as the ghost wears, to do battle against the Poles. That would make Horatio in his late 40's, at least. Similarly, in almost every Shakespearean play, there are anachronisms -- errors of things set in the wrong time -- such as, in "Julius Caesar", books having pages, Brutus and Marc Antony preaching from pulpits, etc. Are these "mistakes" that ruin "Hamlet" and "Julius Caesar" comparable to the lack of understanding of viewpoint in The Da Vinci Code? I think you can see why they're not, any more than the disparity in the number of crewmen on the Pequod "ruins" MOBY DICK. In one case -- say the viewpoint idiocy in a bestseller -- the mistake results from the lack of mastery of the craft. It's comparable to beginning writers using what are called "said-bookisms" -- "he pouted," "she growled," "he gritted," etc instead of just "said." (Or better yet, nothing at all.) Often said-bookisms, so encouraged by teachers from 1st grade through high school and invariably the sign of an amateur who doesn't know any better or read very well, devolve into "barnyardisms" -- "he cackled," "she grunted", "he crowed" etc. This is just bad writing. In the other cases -- such as Hamlet's "age" and books having pages in Roman days when books were scrolls and the number of crewmen on the largely metaphorical Pequod -- the "mistakes" arise largely from the fact that the author had moved the writing to a higher level where such attention to time- and place-bound details simply didn't matter that much. Shakespeare left the ending of "Hamlet" rich with ambiguity and closed with silence, but he didn't just drop the lights during the dueling scene. Nor did he leave us with Claudius, Gertrude, Hamlet, Laertes and the others sitting around eating onion rings for ten minutes, despite all the symbolic iconography inherent in onion rings. The key here (in HOW FICTION WORKS) is how writers become Harold Bloom's (or Henry Bloom's, should we listen to a certain genre reviewer) Hamlet who has the ability to overhear his own soliloqueys, thus creating a feedback loop that analyzes and modifies his own thoughts and purposes even as he thinks them.
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-03-14 04:59:56.
(Language: English)
How delightful - this is my all time favorite Shakespeare script to teach. It has it all and the storylines throughout are brilliant for excellent results in terms of text response for my students. While you may have some probs tracking the convolutions within, it is the most terrific tragedy. But then again I'm passionately mad about all of his stuff. "Hamlet" is by far a wonderful script - but please, do me a favour, remember that Shakespeare is not meant to be read- it is meant to be performed - to be seen and heard. So get a good version of it on DVD or video and read along. Just be aware that Gibson's efforts under Zefferelli are heavily edited. The original unedited by Kenneth Branagh is an excellent read along as he is a purist and is true to the tect. Anyway - for all you Shakespeare freaks out there - give it a go. Clearly, by the line up of books on selection, it is the season for the classics. Start cooking the popcorn and get ready for a read along. Enjoy
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-07-04 07:35:02.
(Language: English)
I'm a huge Shakespeare fan.I read three of what I thought would be easier plays to understand before I tackled this one.Not written as a book obviously,it was enacted on stage for over four hundred years and still a major draw in both theatre and film, Hamlet embodies everything about the Elizabethan view of the classic tragic hero.He thinks when action is required of him and he acts when he should think.His response to his father's mysterious death,was he feigning madness or truly insane?The play itself is a perfect example of irony.As influential as it is enduring despite true authorship to Shakespeare being disputed even today,it will remain a classic because of it's timeless theme of the protaganist's inability to achieve his goals,which to the Elizabethan audience it simply means all the major characters die.
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Zhuo posted a review at 2009-03-17 05:25:10.
(Language: English)
Hamlet is a wonderful tragedy written by the famous author; William Shakespeare. It is so popular that a Chinese director, Feng Xiaogang adapted the content of the book into a script of a movie called Banquet, which earns a box office of over one hundred million RMB, to show his respect to the novel. Hamlet was a prince in Denmark. His father used to be the king of the kingdom. However, his uncle and his mother murdered his father together and his uncle became the king. One night, the fetch of his father appeared, and he told Hamlet that it were his uncle and his mother who had murdered him and how they did that, he asked Hamlet to avenge, but only to his uncle, to give apology to his mother. Hamlet was not sure about what the fetch said, he decided to make sure if the words of the fetch were true .He lost himself in thinking of a way all the day, ignoring her girlfriend, which made her very unhappy. However, when the girl complained of that to Hamlet, he seemed to neglect her as well, which disappointed the girl. Hamlet then came up with a good idea. He made a play himself to show exactly what his father said. From the play, a man's brother murdered the man by putting poison into his ear. After seeing this part, Hamlet's uncle's face seemed to be pale and stopped the play after a while, this let Hamlet make sure that it was his uncle who murdered his father and then he decided to take revenge. After the play, he rushed into his mother's room to ask her why she did that to his father, his mother could not answer, angrily, Hamlet wanted to find and kill his uncle at once. But when he saw his uncle praying to the Jesus, he decided to kill him later as he thought it impolite to kill a person in front of the god. However, he killed his boyfriend's father by mistake. His uncle knew that Hamlet was going to avenge, so he sent him to England and decided to kill him there, but Hamlet escaped and came back to Denmark. Then he found that his girlfriend died due to the sadness to his father, he was sorry about that too. But his girlfriend’s brother wanted to kill Hamlet, so the king asked the two to have a duel. Being willing to kill Hamlet, the king asked Hamlet's rival to put poison on the sword. At first Hamlet was advanced in the duel, but he drank the poisonous wine made by his uncle by mistake, and then hit by the poisonous sword. At the last gasp, he reminded his father's fetch's words, which encouraged him to try his best to kill his uncle, and then his enemy. Not willing to forgive his mother, he killed her as well and they died together. Hamlet was a tragedy with fluctuating plot and wonderful description of the characters. It is really worth appreciating.
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A Reader posted a review at 2012-01-15 12:26:54.
(Language: English)
Love Love Love
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-03-04 07:38:33.
(Language: English)
Far from being an "artistic failure" as my favourite poet T. S. Eliot describes it, Hamlet is my favourite play of all time. Perhaps the best thing about this masterpiece, in addition to Shakespeare's very well-known mastery of language and fantastic characterization, remains to be how it raises an endless number of questions. And, contrary to what one might expect, the more you read it, the more questions you end up with. I always remember certain lines of it, and every time I read it or watch it I cry when Horatio says: "Good night, sweet prince,/And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!" I still repeat to myself the famous soliloquy "To be, or not to be" when I'm bored. Perhaps one of the best characteristics of Shakespeare's works is universality, and there are many examples of it in Hamlet. The soliloquy which talks about making a choice between life and suicide is one example, but there are many others that I can never forget. One of my favourite examples is when Guildenstern tries to tell Hamlet what to do and the latter replies: "Will you play upon this pipe?" Although Guildenstern says very clearly that he does not know how to play this instrument, Hamlet insists annoyingly. When Guildenstern finally says that he doesnot have the skill, Hamlet shows him what a big mistake he is committing when he assumes to know how the mind of another human being works, while he cannot even know how to play a simple instrument. Sometimes I cannot believe that this play was written between 1599 and 1601; I think this masterpiece is an example of how dramatists can be more creative than any inventor. Another astonishing example is how Hamlet explains to the King everything about diet, after he kills Polonius by mistake. The Prince shows how a man may eat a fish that has eaten a worm which actually fed on the corpse of a king. Thus he reaches the conclusion that: "a king may go a progress through/the guts of a beggar." But let me go back to the questions that reading this play raise, for these are the main reason why so many studies have been written with numerous theories to justify them. In the play, a ghost appears to tell the Prince of Denmark, Hamlet, that he is actually the spirit of his late father, and that he should take revenge, because the King's brother killed Hamlet's father to marry his wife and become King. The ghost serves as what is called a catalyst in the play, for he is the one that causes action to move forward. The ghost imposes on Hamlet the line of action that he should follow, although the Prince appears to be the kind that would never kill anybody. This is the first question that you will be faced with as you read or watch the play: would you accept, as a modern reader, to have a supernatural element in the play? Would you prefer to think of the ghost as a reality, or simply consider it to be imaginary? How was Hamlet and the guards able to see it, while the Queen couldn't? Where was the ghost at the time of the play, and how was he able to come back although Hamlet says clearly in his soliloquy that death is "The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn/No traveller returns"? These are only some of the numerous questions and complications you will be faced with when you read the play, and now let me mention something about the theories based on it. The most famous theory has to be what Freud wrote in his The Interpretation of Dreams when he connected Hamlet with Oedipus Complex: "Hamlet is able to do anything--except take vengeance on the man who did away with his father and took that father's place with his mother, the man who shows him the repressed wishes of his own childhood realized." In other words, because Hamlet associated himself with his uncle who made his dreams come true, when he killed the father and married the mother, Hamlet hesitates to kill him. This association was later developed by several psychoanalysts, and it actually explains certain mysteries like the bedroom scene in which Hamlet attacks his mother using sexual terms. Again, that was only an example of the countless theories on Hamlet, but let's move from the point when Hamlet attacks his mother to the famous nunnery scene, and ask: was Hamlet a misogynist? As Hamlet's beloved one, Ophelia, tries to talk some sense into the apparently confused Prince, he insults her by saying: "Get thee to a nunnery" and he keeps repeating this to the meek girl whose only fault, for me, was not knowing how to tame him. A feminist approach to the play might raise questions like: Can we attribute Hamlet's misogynistic statements to his confused state of mind? And, what are the features of the mysterious character of Gertrude? Do we tend to accuse her of unfaithfulness basing our conclusions on nothing but Hamlet's point of view? To conclude, all these complications are the reason why this play remains to be the best play ever written for many people. I add to that another aspect which not many readers are aware of; namely, the true story of Prince Hamlet. The plot of Shakespeare's play is based on the true story of a Prince called Amleth. It would be interesting for the reader to find out how Shakespeare transformed the Prince who not only stabs the courtier (as Hamlet stabs Polonius) but also dismembers him and throws the pieces into the sewer, and how he (Shakespeare) then created the probably neurotic character called Hamlet which we all identify ourselves with.
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-06-30 03:52:52.
(Language: English)
There is a willow grows aslant a brook, That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream; There with fantastic garlands did she make Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them: There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke; When down her weedy trophies and herself Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide; And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up: Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes; As one incapable of her own distress,Or like a creature native and indued Unto that element: but long it could not be Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay To muddy death.
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-06-24 06:08:45.
(Language: English)
FAVORITE QUOTES: "Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel..." "Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, show me the steep and thorny way to heaven, while, like a puffed and reckless libertine, himself the primrose path of dalliance treads and recks not his own reed." "Ay, springes to catch woodcocks!" "I am but mad north-north-weat. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw." "Purpose is but a slave to memory, of violent birth, but poor validity, which now, like fruit unripe, sticks on the tree, but fall unshaken, when they mellow be..." "'Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes between the pass and fell incensed points of mighty opposites."
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