William shakespeare hamlet czar

The way he wrestles with these fears and uncertainties touches on issues that remain important to us, making Hamlet unforgettable in the world of literature. Hamlet remains unforgettable because of his clever mind, intense feelings, and the way he struggles with what he truly wants. His sharp thinking often leads him to challenge others and understand the world around him.

Yet, his emotions run deep. He grieves the loss of his father, feels betrayed by his mother, and experiences anger toward his uncle, Claudius. These raw feelings drive many of his actions, but they also make him question himself. His desires are often at odds, like wanting revenge but also fearing the consequences. His relationships add depth to his personality and push the story forward.

His love for Ophelia and his bond with Horatio show his caring side, while his anger toward Gertrude and Claudius exposes his pain and mistrust. Each connection he has with other characters helps shape the decisions he makes and shows different parts of who he is. In these speeches, he lets the audience into his mind, sharing his worries and doubts.

Do you see Hamlet as a tragic hero or just a prince weighed down by grief and self-doubt? On: November 15, Who is Hamlet? When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrive, Hamlet greets his "friends" warmly but quickly discerns that they are there to spy on him for Claudius. Hamlet admits that he is upset at his situation but refuses to give the true reason, instead remarking " What a piece of work is a man ".

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern tell Hamlet that they have brought along a troupe of actors that they met while travelling to Elsinore. Hamlet, after welcoming the actors and dismissing his friends-turned-spies, asks them to deliver a soliloquy about the death of King Priam and Queen Hecuba at the climax of the Trojan War. Hamlet then asks the actors to stage The Murder of Gonzago , a play featuring a death in the style of his father's murder.

Hamlet intends to study Claudius's reaction to the play, and thereby determine the truth of the ghost's story of Claudius's guilt. Polonius forces Ophelia to return Hamlet's love letters to the prince while he and Claudius secretly watch in order to evaluate Hamlet's reaction. Hamlet is walking alone in the hall as the King and Polonius await Ophelia's entrance.

Hamlet muses on thoughts of life versus death. When Ophelia enters and tries to return Hamlet's things, Hamlet accuses her of immodesty and cries "get thee to a nunnery", though it is unclear whether this, too, is a show of madness or genuine distress. His reaction convinces Claudius that Hamlet is not mad for love. Shortly thereafter, the court assembles to watch the play Hamlet has commissioned.

After seeing the Player King murdered by his rival pouring poison in his ear, Claudius abruptly rises and runs from the room; for Hamlet, this is proof of his uncle's guilt. Gertrude summons Hamlet to her chamber to demand an explanation. Meanwhile, Claudius talks to himself about the impossibility of repenting, since he still has possession of his ill-gotten goods: his brother's crown and wife.

He sinks to his knees. Hamlet, on his way to visit his mother, sneaks up behind him but does not kill him, reasoning that killing Claudius while he is praying will send him straight to heaven while his father's ghost is stuck in purgatory. In the queen's bedchamber, Hamlet and Gertrude fight bitterly. Polonius, spying on the conversation from behind a tapestry , calls for help as Gertrude, believing Hamlet wants to kill her, calls out for help herself.

Hamlet, believing it is Claudius, stabs wildly, killing Polonius, but he pulls aside the curtain and sees his mistake. In a rage, Hamlet brutally insults his mother for her apparent ignorance of Claudius's villainy, but the ghost enters and reprimands Hamlet for his inaction and harsh words. Unable to see or hear the ghost herself, Gertrude takes Hamlet's conversation with it as further evidence of madness.

After begging the queen to stop sleeping with Claudius, Hamlet leaves, dragging Polonius's corpse away. Hamlet jokes with Claudius about where he has hidden Polonius's body, and the king, fearing for his life, sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to accompany Hamlet to England with a sealed letter to the English king requesting that Hamlet be executed immediately.

Unhinged by grief at Polonius's death, Ophelia wanders Elsinore. Laertes arrives back from France, enraged by his father's death and his sister's madness. Claudius convinces Laertes that Hamlet is solely responsible, but a letter soon arrives indicating that Hamlet has returned to Denmark, foiling Claudius's plan. Claudius switches tactics, proposing a fencing match between Laertes and Hamlet to settle their differences.

Laertes will be given a poison-tipped foil, and, if that fails, Claudius will offer Hamlet poisoned wine as a congratulation. Gertrude interrupts to report that Ophelia has drowned, though it is unclear whether it was suicide or an accident caused by her madness. Horatio has received a letter from Hamlet, explaining that the prince escaped by negotiating with pirates who attempted to attack his England-bound ship, and the friends reunite offstage.

Two gravediggers discuss Ophelia's apparent suicide while digging her grave. Hamlet arrives with Horatio and banters with one of the gravediggers, who unearths the skull of a jester from Hamlet's childhood, Yorick. Hamlet picks up the skull, saying "Alas, poor Yorick" as he contemplates mortality. Ophelia's funeral procession approaches, led by Laertes.

Hamlet and Horatio initially hide, but when Hamlet realizes that Ophelia is the one being buried, he reveals himself, proclaiming his love for her. Laertes and Hamlet fight by Ophelia's graveside, but the brawl is broken up. Back at Elsinore, Hamlet explains to Horatio that he had discovered Claudius's letter among Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's belongings and replaced it with a forged copy indicating that his former friends should be killed instead.

A foppish courtier, Osric , interrupts the conversation to deliver the fencing challenge to Hamlet from Laertes. Hamlet, despite Horatio's pleas, accepts it. Hamlet does well at first, leading the match by two hits to none, and Gertrude raises a toast to him using the poisoned glass of wine Claudius had set aside for Hamlet. Claudius tries to stop her but is too late: she drinks, and Laertes realizes the plot will be revealed.

Laertes slashes Hamlet with his poisoned blade. In the ensuing scuffle, they switch weapons, and Hamlet wounds Laertes with his own poisoned sword. Gertrude collapses and, claiming she has been poisoned, dies. In his dying moments, Laertes reconciles with Hamlet and reveals Claudius's plan. Hamlet rushes at Claudius and kills him.

As the poison takes effect, Hamlet, hearing that Fortinbras is marching through the area, names the Norwegian prince as his successor. Horatio, distraught at the thought of being the last survivor and living whilst Hamlet does not, says he will commit suicide by drinking the dregs of Gertrude's poisoned wine, but Hamlet begs him to live on and tell his story.

Hamlet dies in Horatio's arms, proclaiming "the rest is silence". Fortinbras, who was ostensibly marching towards Poland with his army, arrives at the palace, along with an English ambassador bringing news of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's deaths. Horatio promises to recount the full story of what happened, and Fortinbras, seeing the entire Danish royal family dead, takes the crown for himself and orders a military funeral to honour Hamlet.

Hamlet -like legends are so widely found for example in Italy, Spain, Scandinavia, Byzantium, and Arabia that the core "hero-as-fool" theme is possibly Indo-European in origin. The first is the anonymous Scandinavian Saga of Hrolf Kraki. In this, the murdered king has two sons— Hroar and Helgi —who spend most of the story in disguise, under false names, rather than feigning madness, in a sequence of events that differs from Shakespeare's.

Its hero, Lucius "shining, light" , changes his name and persona to Brutus "dull, stupid" , playing the role of a fool to avoid the fate of his father and brothers, and eventually slaying his family's killer, King Tarquinius. Similarities include the prince's feigned madness, his accidental killing of the king's counsellor in his mother's bedroom, and the eventual slaying of his uncle.

According to one theory, Shakespeare's main source may be an earlier play—now lost—known today as the Ur-Hamlet. Possibly written by Thomas Kyd or by Shakespeare, the Ur-Hamlet would have existed by , and would have incorporated a ghost. In Andrew Cairncross suggested that, until more becomes known, it may be assumed that Shakespeare wrote the Ur-Hamlet.

She considers that the hypothesized Ur-Hamlet is Shakespeare's Q1 text, and that this derived directly from Belleforest's French version. However, elements of Belleforest's version which are not in Saxo's story do appear in Shakespeare's play. Most scholars reject the idea that Hamlet is in any way connected with Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet Shakespeare , who died in at age eleven.

Conventional wisdom holds that Hamlet is strongly connected to legend, and the name Hamnet was quite popular at the time. He notes that the name of Hamnet Sadler, the Stratford neighbour after whom Hamnet was named, was often written as Hamlet Sadler and that, in the loose orthography of the time, the names were virtually interchangeable.

Rowse speculated that Polonius's tedious verbosity might have resembled Burghley's. MacCary suggests or ; [ 33 ] James Shapiro offers late or early ; [ 34 ] Wells and Taylor suggest that the play was written in and revised later; [ 35 ] the New Cambridge editor settles on mid; [ 36 ] the New Swan Shakespeare Advanced Series editor agrees with ; [ 37 ] Thompson and Taylor, tentatively "according to whether one is the more persuaded by Jenkins or by Honigmann" suggest a terminus ad quem of either Spring or sometime in The earliest date estimate relies on Hamlet ' s frequent allusions to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar , itself dated to mid In , Francis Meres published his Palladis Tamia , a survey of English literature from Chaucer to its present day, within which twelve of Shakespeare's plays are named.

Hamlet is not among them, suggesting that it had not yet been written. As Hamlet was very popular, Bernard Lott, the series editor of New Swan , believes it "unlikely that he [Meres] would have overlooked The phrase "little eyases" [ 41 ] in the First Folio F1 may allude to the Children of the Chapel , whose popularity in London forced the Globe company into provincial touring.

A contemporary of Shakespeare's, Gabriel Harvey , wrote a marginal note in his copy of the edition of Chaucer's works, which some scholars use as dating evidence. Harvey's note says that "the wiser sort" enjoy Hamlet , and implies that the Earl of Essex —executed in February for rebellion—was still alive. Other scholars consider this inconclusive.

Edwards, for example, concludes that the "sense of time is so confused in Harvey's note that it is really of little use in trying to date Hamlet ". This is because the same note also refers to Spenser and Watson as if they were still alive "our flourishing metricians " , but also mentions " Owen's new epigrams", published in Three early editions of the text, each different, have survived, making attempts to establish a single "authentic" text problematic.

This list does not include three additional early texts, John Smethwick 's Q3, Q4, and Q5 —37 , which are regarded as reprints of Q2 with some alterations. Early editors of Shakespeare's works , beginning with Nicholas Rowe and Lewis Theobald , combined material from the two earliest sources of Hamlet available at the time, Q2 and F1.

Each text contains material that the other lacks, with many minor differences in wording: scarcely lines are identical in the two. Editors have combined them in an effort to create one "inclusive" text that reflects an imagined "ideal" of Shakespeare's original. Theobald's version became standard for a long time, [ 51 ] and his "full text" approach continues to influence editorial practice to the present day.

Some contemporary scholarship, however, discounts this approach, instead considering "an authentic Hamlet an unrealisable ideal. Colin Burrow has argued that. I suspect most people just won't want to read a three-text play Traditionally, editors of Shakespeare's plays have divided them into five acts. None of the early texts of Hamlet , however, were arranged this way, and the play's division into acts and scenes derives from a quarto.

Modern editors generally follow this traditional division but consider it unsatisfactory; for example, after Hamlet drags Polonius's body out of Gertrude's bedchamber, there is an act-break [ 58 ] after which the action appears to continue uninterrupted. Q1 was discovered in Only two copies are extant. According to Jenkins, "The unauthorized nature of this quarto is matched by the corruption of its text.

The major deficiency of Q1 is in the language: particularly noticeable in the opening lines of the famous " To be, or not to be " soliloquy: "To be, or not to be, aye there's the point. New Cambridge editor Kathleen Irace has noted that "Q1's more linear plot design is certainly easier [ Q1 is considerably shorter than Q2 or F1 and may be a memorial reconstruction of the play as Shakespeare's company performed it, by an actor who played a minor role most likely Marcellus.

It is suggested by Irace that Q1 is an abridged version intended especially for travelling productions, thus the question of length may be considered as separate from issues of poor textual quality. Irace, in her introduction to Q1, wrote that "I have avoided as many other alterations as possible, because the differences From the early 17th century, the play was famous for its ghost and vivid dramatisation of melancholy and insanity , leading to a procession of mad courtiers and ladies in Jacobean and Caroline drama.

By the midth century, however, the advent of Gothic literature brought psychological and mystical readings, returning madness and the ghost to the forefront. Before then, he was either mad, or not; either a hero, or not; with no in-betweens. By the 19th century, Romantic critics valued Hamlet for its internal, individual conflict reflecting the strong contemporary emphasis on internal struggles and inner character in general.

Modern editors have divided the play into five acts, and each act into scenes. The First Folio marks the first two acts only. The quartos do not have such divisions. The division into five acts follows Seneca , who in his plays, regularized the way ancient Greek tragedies contain five episodes, which are separated by four choral odes. In Hamlet the development of the plot or the action are determined by the unfolding of Hamlet's character.

The soliloquies do not interrupt the plot, instead they are highlights of each block of action. The plot is the developing revelation of Hamlet's view of what is "rotten in the state of Denmark. The contrast between appearance and reality is a significant theme. Hamlet is presented with an image, and then interprets its deeper or darker meaning.

Examples begin with Hamlet questioning the reality of the ghost. It continues with Hamlet's taking on an "antic disposition" in order to appear mad, though he is not. The contrast appearance and reality is also expressed in several "spying scenes": Act two begins with Polonius sending Reynaldo to spy on his son, Laertes. Claudius and Polonius spy on Ophelia as she meets with Hamlet.

In act two, Claudius asks Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet. Similarly, the play-within-a-play is used by Hamlet to reveal his step-father's hidden nature. There is no subplot, but the play presents the affairs of the courtier Polonius, his daughter, Ophelia, and his son, Laertes—who variously deal with madness, love and the death of a father in ways that contrast with Hamlet's.

The graveyard scene eases tension prior to the catastrophe, and, as Hamlet holds the skull, it is shown that Hamlet no longer fears damnation in the afterlife, and accepts that there is a "divinity that shapes our ends". Hamlet's enquiring mind has been open to all kinds of ideas, but in act five he has decided on a plan, and in a dialogue with Horatio he seems to answer his two earlier soliloquies on suicide: "We defy augury.

There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows aught, what is't to leave betimes. The First Quarto text of Hamlet contains 15, words, the Second Quarto contains 28, words, and the First Folio contains 27, words.

Counting the number of lines varies between editions, partly because prose sections in the play may be formatted with varied lengths. It might require more than four hours to stage; [ 92 ] a typical Elizabethan play would need two to three hours. That Q1 is so much shorter than Q2 has spurred speculation that Q1 is an early draft, or perhaps an adaptation, a bootleg copy, or a stage adaptation.

On the title page of Q2, its text is described as "newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much again as it was. Much of Hamlet ' s language is courtly: elaborate, witty discourse, as recommended by Baldassare Castiglione 's etiquette guide, The Courtier. This work specifically advises royal retainers to amuse their masters with inventive language.

Osric and Polonius, especially, seem to respect this injunction. Claudius's speech is rich with rhetorical figures—as is Hamlet's and, at times, Ophelia's—while the language of Horatio, the guards, and the gravediggers is simpler. Claudius's high status is reinforced by using the royal first person plural "we" or "us" , and anaphora mixed with metaphor to resonate with Greek political speeches.

Of all the characters, Hamlet has the greatest rhetorical skill. She gives the example of Hamlet's advice to Ophelia, "get thee to a nunnery", [ 99 ] which, she claims, is simultaneously a reference to a place of chastity and a slang term for a brothel, reflecting Hamlet's confused feelings about female sexuality. The context of the scene suggests that a nunnery would not be a brothel, but instead a place of renunciation and a "sanctuary from marriage and from the world's contamination".

Hamlet's first words in the play are a pun; when Claudius addresses him as "my cousin Hamlet, and my son", Hamlet says as an aside: "A little more than kin, and less than kind. An unusual rhetorical device, hendiadys , appears in several places in the play. Examples are found in Ophelia's speech at the end of the nunnery scene: "Th' expectancy and rose of the fair state" [ ] and "And I, of ladies most deject and wretched ".

One explanation may be that Hamlet was written later in Shakespeare's life, when he was adept at matching rhetorical devices to characters and the plot. Linguist George T. Wright suggests that hendiadys had been used deliberately to heighten the play's sense of duality and dislocation. Hamlet's soliloquies have captured the attention of scholars.

Hamlet interrupts himself, vocalising either disgust or agreement with himself and embellishing his own words. He has difficulty expressing himself directly and instead blunts the thrust of his thought with wordplay. It is not until late in the play, after his experience with the pirates, that Hamlet is able to articulate his feelings freely.

William shakespeare hamlet czar

Written at a time of religious upheaval and in the wake of the English Reformation , the play is alternately Catholic or piously medieval and Protestant or consciously modern. The ghost describes himself as being in purgatory and as dying without last rites. This and Ophelia's burial ceremony, which is characteristically Catholic, make up most of the play's Catholic connections.

Some scholars have observed that revenge tragedies come from Catholic countries such as Italy and Spain, where the revenge tragedies present contradictions of motives, since according to Catholic doctrine the duty to God and family precedes civil justice. Much of the play's Protestant tones derive from its setting in Denmark—both then and now a predominantly Protestant country, [ b ] though it is unclear whether the fictional Denmark of the play is intended to portray this implicit fact.

Dialogue refers explicitly to the German city of Wittenberg where Hamlet, Horatio, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern attend university, implying where the Protestant reformer Martin Luther nailed the Ninety-five Theses to the church door in Hamlet is often perceived as a philosophical character, expounding ideas that are now described as relativist , existentialist , and sceptical.

For example, he expresses a subjectivistic idea when he says to Rosencrantz: "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so". Hamlet reflects the contemporary scepticism promoted by the French Renaissance humanist Michel de Montaigne. Hamlet's " What a piece of work is a man " seems to echo many of Montaigne's ideas, and many scholars have discussed whether Shakespeare drew directly from Montaigne or whether both men were simply reacting similarly to the spirit of the times.

Freud does not offer over-all interpretations of the plays, but uses the two tragedies to illustrate and corroborate his psychological theories, which are based on his treatments of his patients and on his studies. Productions of Hamlet have used Freud's ideas to support their own interpretations. He says that "in their amorous or hostile attitude toward their parents" neurotics reveal something that occurs with less intensity "in the minds of the majority of children".

Freud explores the reason " Oedipus Rex is capable of moving a modern reader or playgoer no less powerfully than it moved the contemporary Greeks". He suggests that "It may be that we were all destined to direct our first sexual impulses toward our mothers, and our first impulses of hatred and violence toward our fathers. These ideas, which became a cornerstone of Freud's psychological theories, he named the " Oedipus complex ", and, at one point, he considered calling it the "Hamlet complex".

Hamlet is able to perform any kind of action except taking revenge on the man who murdered his father and has taken his father's place with his mother—Claudius has led Hamlet to realize the repressed desires of his own childhood. The loathing which was supposed to drive him to revenge is replaced by "self-reproach, by conscientious scruples" which tell him "he himself is no better than the murderer whom he is required to punish".

Freud suggests that the character Hamlet goes through an experience that has three characteristics, which he numbered: 1 "the hero is not psychopathic, but becomes so" during the course of the play. The audience identifies with the character of Hamlet, because "we are victims of the same conflict. Freud points out that Hamlet is an exception in that psychopathic characters are usually ineffective in stage plays; they "become as useless for the stage as they are for life itself", because they do not inspire insight or empathy, unless the audience is familiar with the character's inner conflict.

Freud says, "It is thus the task of the dramatist to transport us into the same illness. John Barrymore 's long-running performance in New York , directed by Thomas Hopkins, "broke new ground in its Freudian approach to character", in keeping with the post-World War I rebellion against everything Victorian. Influenced by Jones's psychoanalytic approach, several productions have portrayed the "closet scene", where Hamlet confronts his mother in her private quarters, in a sexual light.

Ophelia's madness after her father's death may also be read through the Freudian lens: as a reaction to the death of her hoped-for lover, her father. Ophelia is overwhelmed by having her unfulfilled love for him so abruptly terminated and drifts into the oblivion of insanity. In the Bloom's Shakespeare Through the Ages volume on Hamlet, editors Bloom and Foster express a conviction that the intentions of Shakespeare in portraying the character of Hamlet in the play exceeded the capacity of the Freudian Oedipus complex to completely encompass the extent of characteristics depicted in Hamlet throughout the tragedy: "For once, Freud regressed in attempting to fasten the Oedipus Complex upon Hamlet: it will not stick, and merely showed that Freud did better than T.

Eliot, who preferred Coriolanus to Hamlet , or so he said. Who can believe Eliot, when he exposes his own Hamlet Complex by declaring the play to be an aesthetic failure? Joshua Rothman has written in The New Yorker that "we tell the story wrong when we say that Freud used the idea of the Oedipus complex to understand Hamlet ". Rothman suggests that "it was the other way around: Hamlet helped Freud understand, and perhaps even invent, psychoanalysis".

He concludes, "The Oedipus complex is a misnomer. It should be called the 'Hamlet complex'. In the s, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan analyzed Hamlet to illustrate some of his concepts. His structuralist theories about Hamlet were first presented in a series of seminars given in Paris and later published in "Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet ".

After Hamlet's sentries and his friend Horatio encounter the ghost of King Hamlet, they vow to tell his son what they have witnessed. Hamlet is fraught with grief and anxiety. Making matters more complicated is the young Ophelia who seeks Hamlet's attention. Hamlet is determined to see his father's ghost for himself and seeks him out only to get the confirmation that he has been called upon to avenge King Hamlet's death.

Though still uncertain about the validity of his father's ghostly apparition, Hamlet vows to avenge his father's death. Sensing Hamlet's unease and hearing complaints of Hamlet's erratic behavior towards Ophelia, King Claudius and his new wife Gertrude solicit help from two of his friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to get to the bottom of his strange behavior.

Hamlet senses his friends have been sent as spies and is resentful. He accuses Ophelia of immodesty and assembles the court to watch a play that he has commissioned. Yorick, the dead jester whose skull Hamlet holds during this scene, is said to have been in the earth "three-and-twenty years", which would make Hamlet no more than seven years old when he last rode on Yorick's back.

This view of Hamlet's age is supported by the fact that Richard Burbage , the actor who originally played the role, was thirty-two at the time of the play's premiere. However, a case has been made [ 4 ] that at an early stage in Hamlet —with its apparent history of multiple revisions—Hamlet was presented as a sixteen-year-old. Several pieces of evidence support this view.

Hamlet attends the University of Wittenberg , and members of the royalty and nobility Elizabethan or medieval Danish did not attend university at age Additionally, a year-old Prince Hamlet would clearly have been of ruling age. Given his great popularity mentioned by Claudius , this would raise the question of why it was not he, rather than his uncle, who was elected to succeed to the throne upon the death of King Hamlet.

The line about the length of the Gravedigger's career does not appear in the First Quarto of Hamlet ; in that text Yorick is said to have been in the ground only twelve years. Furthermore, in Belleforest , possibly one of Shakespeare's sources for the story, it is said that Amleth has "not attained to man's estate". And in the original spelling of the First Folio F1 text, one of the two authoritative texts for the play, the Gravedigger's answer to how long he has "been a grave-maker" reads "Why heere in Denmarke: I haue bin sixeteene heere, man and Boy thirty yeares.

But modernizing the punctuation—a normal practice in modernized texts—renders "Why heere in Denmarke: I haue bin sixeteene heere—man and Boy thirty yeares. According to this logic, then, it is the Gravedigger who is thirty, whereas Hamlet is only sixteen. However, the difference between a sexton and a grave digger must also be taken into account.

A sexton oversees many different jobs around the church and surrounding areas. A grave digger simply digs graves. There are sextons who also dig graves and some that do not. It is completely possible that the Gravedigger has been a sexton for 30 years, but has not been digging graves for that entire time. This could be another example of the character's very round-about way of speaking.

However, this reading has the disadvantage that in the Folio the length of time Yorick has been in the ground is said to be twenty-three years, meaning that he had been dead seven years by the time Hamlet was born. Another theory offered is that the play was originally written with the view that Hamlet was 16 or 17, but since Shakespeare wrote his plays to be performed, and not read, these lines were likely changed so Burbage who was almost always the protagonist in Shakespeare's plays could play the role.

The day we see Hamlet die in the theatre, something of him dies for us. He is dethroned by the spectre of an actor, and we shall never be able to keep the usurper out of our dreams. In the comic book series Kill Shakespeare , Hamlet is the central character. After he is exiled from Denmark, his ship is attacked and he washes up on England. He tells Hamlet that he must find and kill the wizard William Shakespeare and retrieve his quill.

He goes off, but is relentlessly pursued by assassins from Richard and his lieutenant, Iago. He is eventually captured by the fool known as Falstaff , who helps him get out of the woods after an encounter with a being known as a Prodigal. He is shot in the leg by Iago, but is saved by Juliet Capulet and Othello. Hamlet stops Othello from killing Iago, but is taken captive by Juliet and her resistance army.

After going with them into a town and seeing the cruelty of Richard, Hamlet flees into the woods, where he is forced to face the ghost of his father. He defeats the ghost and is eventually picked up by two travellers: Lysander and Demetrius. The Northman , Amleth is the Norseman, whose father is murdered by his uncle. This film follows the story of Hamlet, set in the Viking era.

Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikidata item. Character in Hamlet. For earlier versions of the character, see Amleth. Fictional character. Portrait of Hamlet by William Morris Hunt , c.