Written around 1600 and first printed in 1603, Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest and most searching tragedy, set in the cold halls of Elsinore Castle in Denmark. Young Prince Hamlet returns home from his studies to find his father dead, his mother Gertrude already remarried to his uncle Claudius, and the crown that should have been his resting on another man's head.
When the ghost of the late king appears and names Claudius as his murderer, Hamlet is charged with a terrible duty: revenge. Yet the prince is a thinker before he is an avenger, and what follows is less a race to vengeance than an agonized meditation on doubt, conscience, and the difficulty of acting in an uncertain world. Feigning madness to mask his intent, Hamlet circles his prey while the court watches, drawing those around him — the counsellor Polonius, his daughter Ophelia, the loyal Horatio — into the widening consequences.
Through soliloquies that have become bedrock of the English language, the play interrogates mortality, corruption, madness, and the gulf between thought and deed. Its ending is among the most famous in all of drama. Four centuries on, Hamlet endures as the definitive portrait of a mind at war with itself.