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book1603

Hamlet

Disciplines:
britain
tragedy
theater
english literature/shakespeare

Summary

Shakespeare's 1603 tragedy — following Prince Hamlet's paralysis after his father's murder by his uncle — the most performed play in history and the supreme literary treatment of consciousness, indecision, and mortality.

Core Contribution

Creates the literary representation of consciousness — Hamlet's soliloquies are the most complete representation of a thinking mind in Western literature before the modern novel; 'To be, or not to be' is not just a suicide meditation but the first sustained literary examination of the relationship between consciousness and action.

Historical Influences

Saxo Grammaticus Thomas Kyd Montaigne

Intellectual Lineage

Shakespeare Globe Theatre First QuartoSecond QuartoFolio

Allied Works

King Lear Macbeth Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Contemporaries & Peers

No recorded contemporaries.

Minds Influenced

Western drama Modern novel

Intellectual Posterity

Hamlet 'To be, or not to be'Yorick's skullOpheliaModern novel's interiority

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Hamlet

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