"The Tragedy of Hamlet" is, first and foremost, a text to be performed. William Shakespeare intended for the text to be seen in performance, not read, and all of the early texts have no reliable connection to Shakespeare's editorial authority.

In light of this, from the very earliest printings, editors have chosen to edit the play's text for particular purposes: to make a quick buck, to memorialize a recently deceased friend, to conform to a time period's unique aesthetic, or to attempt to reconstitute what Shakespeare might have intended in an ideal version of the play.

This particular edition is focused on the student who wants to read the play quickly. The edition is unabashedly abridged. "The Tragedy of Hamlet" is a long play, and, in a time of increasingly compressed curricula, a maximal edition can often take a long time to get through in class. Nearly all performances of the play, both on stage and screen, feel empowered to reduce the size of the play. The Zeffirelli film cuts the play's text by half. Moreover, if we use"Romeo and Juliet"s prologue as a guide that most of Shakespeare's plays were approximately two hours in length, then that suggests that "Hamlet," which can easily reach four-hour run-times in a "full-text" version, can be cut in half and still be coherent.

Therefore, this is a performative textual edition. It cuts the text by 50% but doesn't dumb down Shakespeare's language by modernizing spelling or altering the syntax. In particular, this edition has removed the Fortinbras subplot. Teachers and students should be aware that this removes a significant political theme in the play. It also removes a Hamlet soliloquy and a key foil for Hamlet's character.

This edition is based on the 1860 Globe edition because of its free availability. Later editions (both full-text and abridged) might eventually be offered that are based on a critical conflation of early texts in order to arrive at an ideal authorial-intent text.

Importantly, this edition has the advantage of including textual annotations to help the student understand difficult vocabulary, syntax, and cultural allusions. In this last regard, the edition attempts to be more useful than other online texts of the play that might be freely available but lack helpful guidance for the reader.

Other contextual material are provided to help the student understand early appreciations of the play.

Each lecture in this series focuses on a single play by Shakespeare, and employs a range of different approaches to try to understand a central critical question about it. Rather than providing overarching readings or interpretations, the series aims to show the variety of different ways we might understand Shakespeare, the kinds of evidence that might be used to strengthen our critical analysis, and, above all, the enjoyable and unavoidable fact that Shakespeare's plays tend to generate our questions rather than answer them.

This British Library site provides context and scanned images of the 1603 first quarto printing of "The Tragedy of Hamlet." This printing is often called the "bad quarto" because of its dubious provenance; it is likely that one or more of the actors assisted in producing this text as an unapproved piracy.

Many books and university courses, trying to compensate for a history of the neglect or mistrust of plays as performance, use the phrase "from page to stage" to think about the dramatic possibilities of their texts. In fact, for the early modern theatre, the phrase needs to be the other way around--from stage to page. Plays were performances first, and only later, and then only sometimes, books. This section of Great Writers gathers resources--podcasts, eBooks, websites--to explore the two interconnected lives of the early modern play--as an event in time and space on the stage of the Globe or Blackfriars theatre, and as a material printed object, on sale to Elizabethan and Jacobean readers in the booksellers' quarter around St Paul's Churchyard.

This assignment asks students to translate a monologue from Hamlet within its context in the play and understanding the motivations of the character speaking the lines.

Three hundred and eighty years after his death, William Shakespeare remains the central author of the English-speaking world; he is the most quoted poet and the most regularly produced playwright — and now among the most popular screenwriters as well. Why is that, and who "is" he? Why do so many people think his writing is so great? What meanings did his plays have in his own time, and how do we read, speak, or listen to his words now? What should we watch for when viewing his plays in performance? Whose plays are we watching, anyway? We'll consider these questions as we carefully examine a sampling of Shakespeare's plays from a variety of critical perspectives.

This is an edition of Shakespeare's play Hamlet optimized for Pressbooks. It uses heading formats so that users can navigate to different scenes of the play. It can be cloned to other Pressbook environments and can allow for instructors to include student responses to the text.

This is a course on Shakespeare’s career, given at Brandeis University in the spring of 2010, by William Flesch. It covers several representative plays from all four genres: comedy, tragedy, history, and romance. We consider both the similarities and differences among those genres, and how his more and more radical experimentations in genre reflect his developing thought, about theater, about time, about life, over the course of his career. In terms of texts, any complete Shakespeare will suffice, including this free version online from MIT. The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, is also recommended.

ePub version of text The tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke by William Shakepeare, 1564-1616.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Hamlet" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.