The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is a tragedy by William Shakespeare and one of his best-known and most oft-quoted plays. It was written at an uncertain date between 1600 and the summer of 1602.
Hamlet may be the most frequently produced work in almost every western country, and it is considered a crucial test for mature actors. Hamlet's " To be, or not to be" soliloquy (Act Three, Scene One), the most popular passage in the play, is so well known that it has become a stumbling-block for many modern actors.
Hamlet is one of the world's most famous literary works, and has been translated into every major living language.
Shakespeare's play tells the story of the legendary Danish Prince Hamlet, or Amleth (see: Hamlet (legend)) whose exploits were recorded by Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum around 1200 AD; François de Belleforest adapted Saxo's story in his Histoires tragiques (1570). Shakespeare's main source, however, is believed to be an earlier play about Hamlet (the Ur-Hamlet), which is attributed to Thomas Kyd and is known to have introduced a ghost to the story. Shakespeare may also have taken some elements from Kyd's other play, The Spanish Tragedy, especially the hero's procrastination. The Ur-Hamlet seems never to have been printed, and is now lost.
This earlier play was well known and praised in print as early as 1594. It made the phrase 'Hamlet, revenge!' (which does not appear in Shakespeare's play) famous. While the Ur-Hamlet is usually assumed to have been written by Kyd, it is sometimes suggested that it may have written by Shakespeare himself, and later revised or rewritten into the play as it has been preserved in print.
There are three extant texts of Hamlet from the early 1600s: two quarto editions, and one from the first folio (see Quarto and Folio).
The play first appeared in print in 1603 in a version now known as the 'bad Quarto'. This edition follows essentially the same plot as the play we know as Hamlet but it is much shorter and its language is often very different; for example, where the accepted version reads "To be or not to be, that is the question", the Bad Quarto reads "To be or not to be, aye there's the point". These differences, which usually seem aesthetically weaker than the other versions, have led to the suggestion that the text may have been published without the permission of the playing company, and put together by stenography or by minor actors recalling the lines of others by memory. In particular, the finger has been pointed at the character Marcellus as the likely culprit for the source of the "Bad Quarto" because his scenes and lines are rendered most "accurately" compared to other Quartos and when he is absent from stage the text diverges more. Most modern textual scholars find this theory fanciful, since a minor actor would be unlikely to have memorised the lines of other actors, even inaccurately -- but actors and other theatrical professionals (who often have large portions of plays they work on memorized without even attempting to) would likely dispute this point.