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Written during the first part of the seventeenth century (probably in 1600 or 1601), Hamlet was probably first performed in July 1602. ... He could have taken the story of Hamlet from several possible sources, including a twelfth-century Latin history of Denmark compiled by Saxo Grammaticus and a prose work by the French writer François de Belleforest, entitled Histoires Tragiques.
The raw material that Shakespeare appropriated in writing Hamlet is the story of a Danish prince whose uncle murders the princes father, marries his mother, and claims the throne. ... Shakespeare changed the emphasis of this story entirely, making his Hamlet a philosophically-minded prince who delays taking action because his knowledge of his uncles crime is so uncertain. ... For instance, whether Hamlets mother, Gertrude, shares in Claudiuss guilt; whether Hamlet continues to love Ophelia even as he spurns her, in Act III; whether Ophelias death is suicide or accident; whether the ghost offers reliable knowledge, or seeks to deceive and tempt Hamlet; and, perhaps most importantly, whether Hamlet would be morally justified in taking revenge on his uncle. ... Hamlet is faced with the difficult task of correcting an injustice that he can never have sufficient knowledge of—a dilemma that is by no means unique, or even uncommon. And while Hamlet is fond of pointing out questions that cannot be answered because they concern supernatural and metaphysical matters, the play as a whole chiefly demonstrates the difficulty of knowing the truth about other people—their guilt or innocence, their motivations, their feelings, their relative states of sanity or insanity.
Approximate Word count = 1066
Approximate Pages = 4.3
(250 words per page double spaced)
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