Hamlet

There is little need to review the actual text: it is undoubtedly (along with many other of Shakespeare's plays) an extremely influential work of the human mind, and very well may be the best work of literature ever written, period. The actual presentation and annotation of the text is rather indivdual as well. Whereas most annotated texts of Shakespeare place annotations on the other side of the page, here they are at the bottom. Considering your eyes spend much more time across the lines and down the page, instead of the small amount of time your eyes take jumping to another page, this annotation makes for a very fluid and efficient way of reading. I think this is the best annotation I've ever seen of Shakespeare. The quality isn't just present in form, however: the substitutions and explanations are always accurate and almost never redundant (to the average reader, not the average professor =]). The introduction by Burton Raffel and the concluding essay by the legendary Harold Bloom only add to the benefits the book presents, and help to understand the book from a wider perspective once your ideas and feelings reconcile with theirs. All in all, a great product for anyone who loves Shakespeare, literature, or expanding their minds!

The Pelican Hamlet is an attractive, straightforward, inexpensive paperback edition for readers already familiar with Shakespeare. The text is based primarily on the second quarto edition with some additions from the Folio; a section at the beginning includes the lines from the Folio that were not incorporated in the text. (These include the "Denmark is a prison" remarks in Hamlet's conversation with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.) The scholarly introductory matter is rather dry but provides the usual information about the theater in Shakespearian England, etc. Glosses are adequate for those who have read the Bard before. Less experienced readers may find them a little skimpy.

William Shakespeare's "Hamlet" is arguably the most famous play ever written in the English language; it presents the world with questions and characters that have been the subject of thespian and scholarly debate ever since the Prince of Denmark's first appearance on the stage of London's Globe Theatre. Probably written and first performed in 1601 (estimates vary between 1600 and 1602), the play draws on Saxo Grammaticus's late 12th/early 13th century chronicle "Gesta Danorum," which includes a popular legend with a similar plot centering around a prince named Amleth; as well as several more contemporaneous sources, primarily Francois de Belleforest's "Histoires Tragiques, Extraicts des Oeuvres Italiennes de Bandel" (1559-1580), which expands on the story told in the "Gesta Danorum," and a lost play known as the "Ur-Hamlet" (i.e., original "Hamlet"), sometimes also attributed to Shakespeare, but equally likely written by a different author a few decades earlier. Another work frequently cited in this context is 16th century playwright Thomas Kyd's "Spanish Tragedie." Pursuant to Shakespeare's wishes and like all of his works, "Hamlet" was not immediately published, and the original manuscript did not survive. However, in the absence of copyright laws or other forms of protection of what today would be called the playwright's intellectual property rights, first bootleg copies (so-called quartos) based on transcripts made during or after performances began to appear in 1603. Yet, it would not be until 1623 - seven years after Shakespeare's 1616 death - that his former fellow actors John Hemmings and Henry Condell published 36 of his plays (including this one) in a collection known as the First Folio. As no print version of any of Shakespeare's plays has a bona fide claim to its author's first-hand blessings, ever since the Bard's death the world is left with numerous questions about his characters' motivations and psychological makeup; first and foremost, in this particular case: who is this Prince of Denmark anyway, and what's driving him - is he a reluctant suicide or reluctant avenger? A Renaissance man? Wrecked by Freudian guilt? Genuinely mad, or merely putting on a clever act of deception? Or is he someone else entirely? - Indeed, we're even left in doubt as to what exactly it was that Shakespeare meant his characters to say, with all attendant interpretative consequences: Does the Prince wish for his "too too sullied" or his "too too solid" flesh to "melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew" in his first major soliloquy (Act I, Scene 2)? Does he really contemplate "the stamp of [that] one defect" which may fatally taint the perception of a man's other virtues, "be they as pure as grace," before meeting his father's ghost (I, 4)? Does Polonius, when sending Reynaldo on a spying mission after Laertes, refer to his scheme as "a fetch of wit" or "a fetch of warrant" (II, 1)? Do Hamlet's musings in "To be, or not to be" (III, 1) concern "

Bravo to the writers, editors, and publishers of the entire No Fear Shakespeare series. Rendering Shakespeare into prosaic, colloquial American English not only explains what Shakespeare was saying, but reveals how much better he said it! Here's a few examples from HAMLET: Hamlet sees the Ghost, but his mother doesn't. In modern lingo, she says, "This is only a figment of your imagination." That's a cliche. In the original, she says, "This is the very coinage of your brain." That's vivid. Rosencrantz tells Hamlet in modern lingo, "You're not doing yourself any good by refusing to tell your friends what's bothering you." Sounds like a reprimand. The original line sounds like a threat: "You do surely bar the door upon your own liberty if you deny your griefs to your friend." Hamlet remembers his mother's relationship with his father: "She would hang on to him, and the more she was with him the more she wanted to be with him; she couldn't get enough of him." Sounds good, but the original sounds disturbing: "Why, she would hang on him / As if increase of appetitite had grown / By what it fed on . . ." Change the word "she" to "it" and you have the image of a parasite. That alone says a lot about Hamlet's view of women and sex. I know of no better guide to reading, understanding, and appreciating Shakespeare than Spark Notes' No Fear Shakespeare series.

Man, I wish I would've had this book 25 years ago! I've always been interested in Shakespeare but it's been hard introducing anyone else I know to the greatness of his plays: the language is just too hard for most people to follow. Thankfully, the No Fear Shakespeare books have come along, and I've been buying them for myself as well as others. It's wonderful to have a side-by-side comparison of the Bard's original lines with a modern translation that makes the play easy to read. I hope the publishers do this with all of Shakespeare's plays!