hamlet was written by william shakespeare

Could beauty my Lord have better commerce That if you bee honest and faire, you should admit no discourse to your beauty. Rich gifts waxe poore when givers prove unkind. Take these againe: for to the noble minde My honour'd Lord, you know right well you did,Īnd with them words of so sweet breath composedĪs made these things more rich: their perfume lost, How does your honour for this many a day? With this regard their currents turne awry,Īnd lose the name of action. Is sicklied ore with the pale cast of thought:Īnd enterprises of great pitch and moment, The undiscover'd Countrey, from whose borneĪnd makes us rather beare those ills we have,

With a bare bodkin? who would fardels beare,īut that the dread of something after death, That patient merit of th' unworthy takes, The pangs of despised love, the Lawes delay, Th' oppressors wrong, the proud mans contumely, When we have shuffled off this mortall coyleįor who would beare the whips and scornes of time, To sleep perchance to dreame, I there's the rub,įor in that sleep of death what dreames may come, That flesh is heire to 'tis a consummation

The heart-ake, and the thousand natural shockes Or to take armes against a sea of troubles,Īnd by opposing end them: To dye to sleepe The slings and arrowes of outragious fortune, Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer To be, or not to be, that is the question: These concepts are perhaps explored most eloquently in the famous soliloquy that begins 'To be or not to be'. Hamlet is unpredictable, manipulative, misogynistic ('Frailty, thy name is woman'), indecisive, testing his relationships with his mother and Ophelia to destruction and yet he is capable of deep contemplation on the nature of human existence, examining the relationships between life and death, action and inaction, fear and fury, inward emotion versus physical violence, and performance versus reality. The fact that Hamlet continually delays taking revenge for his father's murder is the key that opens up Hamlet's inner thoughts to the audience. The suspense is built upon a central question: when will Hamlet take revenge for his father's murder? But the prince, throughout the play, seems emotionally paralysed and, in turn, tortured by his inability to take action. Claudius has subsequently married Hamlet's mother and claimed the throne. In the first Act, the ghost of Hamlet's father appears to him, revealing that he has been murdered by Hamlet's uncle, Claudius. It is a revenge tragedy that revolves around the agonised interior mind of a young Danish prince. Written between 15, Hamlet is widely recognised as one of the most powerful plays in the history of English theatre.

Hamlet was written by william shakespeare