Hamlet
1603
A prince cannot decide whether to act. That is the engine of Hamlet, and it has haunted audiences for four centuries. When young Hamlet sees his father's ghost and learns that his uncle Claudius murdered the king to steal the crown and marry Hamlet's mother, he faces an impossible choice: avenge the murder and restore order, or question whether vengeance serves any purpose at all. What follows is a descent into grief, madness, and moral paralysis that engulfs the entire court of Elsinore. Bodies pile up. Innocents die. The question is never cleanly answered: does action in a corrupt world merely create more suffering, or does inaction make us complicit? This is Shakespeare at his most psychological, his most dangerous. Hamlet is not simply a play about revenge; it is an inquiry into whether meaning can survive the discovery that the world is rigged, that virtue is rewarded with death, and that the people we love most may be the ones who betray us. It endures because every generation faces its own version of Hamlet's paralysis: the moment when knowing the right thing to do is not the same as being able to do it.
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“Doubt thou the stars are fire;Doubt that the sun doth move;Doubt truth to be a liar;But never doubt I love.””
— William Shakespeare
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.””
— William Shakespeare
“This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.””
— William Shakespeare
“To be, or not to be: that is the question:Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to sufferThe slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;No more; and by a sleep to say we endThe heart-ache and the thousand natural shocksThat flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummationDevoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;For in that sleep of death what dreams may comeWhen we have shuffled off this mortal coil,Must give us pause: there's the respectThat makes calamity of so long life;For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,The insolence of office and the spurnsThat patient merit of the unworthy takes,When he himself might his quietus makeWith a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,To grunt and sweat under a weary life,But that the dread of something after death,The undiscover'd country from whose bournNo traveller returns, puzzles the willAnd makes us rather bear those ills we haveThan fly to others that we know not of?Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;And thus the native hue of resolutionIs sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,And enterprises of great pith and momentWith this regard their currents turn awry,And lose the name of action.--Soft you now!The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisonsBe all my sins remember'd!””
— William Shakespeare
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.””
— William Shakespeare
“To die, - To sleep, - To sleep!Perchance to dream: - ay, there's the rub;For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,Must give us pause: there's the respectThat makes calamity of so long life;””
— William Shakespeare
“Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.””
— William Shakespeare
“Listen to many, speak to a few.””
— William Shakespeare
“Brevity is the soul of wit.””
— William Shakespeare
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Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Lex, lex-books.com/book/hamlet-b1d3914b-912a-49ab-b16f-774038eb6486.Shakespeare, W. (1603). Hamlet. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/hamlet-b1d3914b-912a-49ab-b16f-774038eb6486Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/hamlet-b1d3914b-912a-49ab-b16f-774038eb6486.






































