Hamlet is commonly, regarded as one of the greatest plays ever written. Drawing on Danish chronicles and the Elizabethan vogue for revenge tragedy, Shakespeare created a play that is at once a philosophic treatise, a family drama, and a supernatural thriller. In the wake of his father's death, Prince Hamlet finds that his Uncle Claudius has swiftly taken the throne and married his mother, Queen Gertrude. The ghost of the dead king then, appears and...

The most famous of all of Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet tells the story of the ghost of the King of Denmark who tells his son Hamlet, to avenge his murder by killing the new king, Hamlet's uncle. Hamlet pretends to be affected by madness, contemplates life and death, and seeks revenge. His uncle, fearing for his life, also devises plots to kill Hamlet.

This production of Shakespeare's masterpiece from Britain's renowned Royal Shakespeare Company was filmed on location rather than in the theatre. No recent stage production in Britain has attracted the excitement and nearly unanimous critical praise as this Hamlet. Dynamic, exciting, and contemporary, it breathes new life into Shakespeare's greatest play.

A dramatization of five of Shakespeare's tragic plays, featuring some of Britain's most distinguished actors and directors.

"As part of Longman's series of Cultural Editions, Constance Jordan presents William Shakespeare's Hamlet in several provocative and illuminating contexts - cultural, critical, and literary." "Shakespeare's famous tragedy (its text based on the most authoritative of early editions, the Folio, published in 1623) is helpfully annotated and framed within several exciting contexts: contemporary accounts of a spirit world, purgatory, revenge, and suicide,...