William Shakespeare

Hamlet: Color Illustrated, Formatted for E-readers William Shakespeare

Publisher Marketing: Unabridged & Original version with all 352 pages Includes: 15 Illustrations and Biography The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, often shortened to Hamlet, is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare at an uncertain date between 1599 and 1602. Set in the Kingdom of Denmark, the play dramatises the revenge Prince Hamlet is instructed to enact on his uncle Claudius. Claudius had murdered his own brother, Hamlet's father King Hamlet, and subsequently seized the throne, marrying his deceased brother's widow, Hamlet's mother Gertrude. Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play and among the most powerful and influential tragedies in English literature, with a story capable of "seemingly endless retelling and adaptation by others." The play seems to have been one of Shakespeare's most popular works during his lifetime[2] and still ranks among his most-performed, topping the performance list of the Royal Shakespeare Company and its predecessors in Stratford-upon-Avon since 1879.[3] It has inspired writers from Goethe and Dickens to Joyce and Murdoch, and has been described as "the world's most filmed story after Cinderella." The story of Hamlet ultimately derives from the legend of Amleth, preserved by 13th-century chronicler Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum, as subsequently retold by 16th-century scholar Francois de Belleforest. Shakespeare may also have drawn on an earlier (hypothetical) Elizabethan play known today as the Ur-Hamlet, though some scholars believe he himself wrote the Ur-Hamlet, later revising it to create the version of Hamlet we now have. He almost certainly created the title role for Richard Burbage, the leading tragedian of Shakespeare's time. In the 400 years since, the role has been performed by highly acclaimed actors from each successive age. Three different early versions of the play are extant, the First Quarto (Q1, 1603), the Second Quarto (Q2, 1604), and the First Folio (F1, 1623). Each version includes lines, and even entire scenes, missing from the others. The play's structure and depth of characterisation have inspired much critical scrutiny. One such example is the centuries-old debate about Hamlet's hesitation to kill his uncle, which some see as merely a plot device to prolong the action, but which others argue is a dramatisation of the complex philosophical and ethical issues that surround cold-blooded murder, calculated revenge, and thwarted desire. More recently, psychoanalytic critics have examined Hamlet's unconscious desires, and feminist critics have re-evaluated and rehabilitated the often maligned characters of Ophelia and Gertrude." Contributor Bio:  Shakespeare, William Keith Hale is author of the novels Clicking Beat on the Brink of Nada and Letters to a Shooting Star. He has edited an anthology of gay literature from antiquity through the First World War (Ode to Boy), a collection of Lord Byron's love poetry for boys (Edleston), a collection of Rupert Brooke's letters that had been sealed for eighty years due to their homosexual themes (Friends and Apostles), a collection of Georgian Poetry, and editions of poetry by Shakespeare, Housman, and Brooke. Hale wrote the first and perhaps only account of gay life in the Balkans before the walls of Communism crumbled in his travelogue In the Land of Alexander, and he explored how the military's ban on gays affected the life of one ROTC cadet in his book Torn Allegiances. Hale is a native of Mayflower, Arkansas, and also has made his home in Austin, Amsterdam, and Guam. Contributor Bio:  Illustrator, Leonardo Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle KStJ, DL (22 May 1859 - 7 July 1930) was a Scottish writer and physician, most noted for his fictional stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, which are generally considered milestones in the field of crime fiction. He is also known for writing the fictional adventures of a second character he invented, Professor Challenger, and for popularising the mystery of the Mary Celeste. He was a prolific writer whose other works include fantasy and science fiction stories, plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction and historical novels.