A morbid tragedy about mortality, madness, and murder, Hamlet follows the eponymous Prince of Denmark as he plots to avenge his father's murder at the hands of Claudius, Hamlet's uncle and the current king, who married Hamlet's mother, Gertrude. Haunted by a ghost and arguing with his girlfriend Ophelia, Hamlet struggles to take revenge, as delay and feigned insanity preoccupy him. Rounding out the cast are other famous figures, like Horatio, and Polonius, and of course, the Gravedigger, who finds the skull of "poor Yorick." Perhaps Shakespeare's most popular play, Hamlet.
Every reader is an actor according to Rosenberg. To prepare the actor-reader for insights, Rosenberg draws on major intepretations of the play worldwide, in theatre and in criticism, wherever possible from the first known performances to the present day. The book is rich and provocative on every question about the play.
Passion, romance, drama, humor, and tragedy intertwine in this compulsively readable Hamlet retelling, from the perspective of a strong-willed, modern-day Ophelia. Meet Ophelia, high school senior, daughter of the Danish king's most trusted adviser, and longtime girlfriend of Prince Hamlet of Denmark. She lives a glamorous life and has a royal social circle, and her beautiful face is splashed across magazines and television screens. But it comes with a price--her life is ruled not only by Hamlet's fame and his overbearing royal family but also by the paparazzi who hound them wherever they go. After the sudden and suspicious death of his father, the king, the devastatingly handsome Hamlet spirals dangerously toward madness, and Ophelia finds herself torn, with no one to turn to. All Ophelia wants is to live a normal life. But when you date a prince, you have to play your part. Ophelia rides out this crazy roller coaster life, and lives to tell her story in live television interviews.
One of the most frequently read and performed of all stage works, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is unsurpassed in its complexity and richness. Now the first fully annotated version of Hamlet makes the play completely accessible to readers in the twenty-first century. It has been carefully assembled with students, teachers, and the general reader in mind. Eminent linguist and translator Burton Raffel offers generous help with vocabulary and usage of Elizabethan English, pronunciation, prosody, and alternative readings of phrases and lines. His on-page annotations provide readers with all the tools they need to comprehend the play and begin to explore its many possible interpretations. This version of Hamlet is unparalleled for its thoroughness and adherence to sound linguistic principles. In his Introduction, Raffel offers important background on the origins and previous versions of the Hamlet story, along with an analysis of the characters Hamlet and Ophelia. And in a concluding essay, Harold Bloom meditates on the originality of Shakespeare’s achievement. The book also includes a careful selection of items for “Further Reading.”
Shortlisted for the 2017 National Translation Award in Poetry and the 2017 Best Translated Book Award in Poetry Before his tragic death, Szilárd Borbély had gained a name as one of Europe's most searching new poets. Berlin-Hamlet—one of his major works—evokes a stroll through the phantasmagoric shopping arcades described in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, but instead of the delirious image fragments of nineteenth-century European culture, we pass by disembodied scraps of written text, remnants as ghostly as their authors: primarily Franz Kafka but also Benjamin himself or the Hungarian poets Attila József or Erno Szép. Paraphrases and reworked quotations, drawing upon the vanished prewar legacy, particularly its German Jewish aspects, appear in sharp juxtaposition with images of post-1989 Berlin frantically rebuilding itself in the wake of German reunification.
For decades, the small, quiet town of Hamlet, North Carolina, thrived thanks to the railroad. But by the 1970s, it had become a postindustrial backwater, a magnet for businesses in search of cheap labor and almost no oversight. Imperial Food Products was one of those businesses. The company set up shop in Hamlet in the 1980s. Workers who complained about low pay and hazardous working conditions at the plant were silenced or fired. But jobs were scarce in town, so workers kept coming back, and the company continued to operate with impunity. Then, on the morning of September 3, 1991, the never-inspected chicken-processing plant a stone's throw from Hamlet's city hall burst into flames. Twenty-five people perished that day behind the plant's locked and bolted doors. It remains one of the deadliest accidents ever in the history of the modern American food industry. Eighty years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, industrial disasters were supposed to have been a thing of the past in the United States. However, as award-winning historian Bryant Simon shows, the pursuit of cheap food merged with economic decline in small towns across the South and the nation to devalue laborers and create perilous working conditions. The Hamlet fire and its aftermath reveal the social costs of antiunionism, lax regulations, and ongoing racial discrimination. Using oral histories, contemporary news coverage, and state records, Simon has constructed a vivid, potent, and disturbing social autopsy of this town, this factory, and this time that exposes how cheap labor, cheap government, and cheap food came together in a way that was destined to result in tragedy.
When a ghostly figure appears to Prince Hamlet, he discovers the dreadful truth about his father's death. His quest for revenge leads him into a world of mayhem, madness and murder. An exciting retelling of Shakespeare's classic play, specially written for children growing in reading confidence and ability. Includes links to recommended websites for children to find out more about Shakespeare and the play. "Crack reading and make confident and enthusiastic readers with this fantastic reading programme." - Julia Eccleshare