Adult Upgrading English 012 - Hamlet

Three times, the ghost of Denmark’s dead king has stalked the battlements of Elsinore Castle. On the fourth night, Horatio, Hamlet’s friend, brings the thirty-year-old prince to the battlements to see the specter of his father. Since his father’s untimely death two months earlier, Hamlet has been grief-stricken and exceedingly melancholy. The mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of his father perplex him, and his mother has married Claudius, the dead king’s brother, much too hurriedly to suit Hamlet’s sense of decency.

Settings used in the Shakespeare's play.

A chapter from the E-Book version of Oxford Companion to Shakespeare on Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The one Shakespearian tragedy from which almost every speaker of English can quote at least one or two phrases, Hamlet is also one of the most difficult to date. The Revenge of Hamlet Prince [of] Denmark, ‘lately acted by the Lord Chamberlain his servants’, was entered in the Stationers’ Register in July 1602, and printed in quarto in 1603 as The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: this edition attributes the play to Shakespeare but is drastically shorter than either a subsequent quarto (1604/5, 1611, 1622, 1637) or the play as printed in the Folio (1623).