Hamlet Revision. Revenger's Tragedy Family Tree. Hamlet. Hamlet. Hamlet. 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.
"[1] 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".[4] Characters[edit] Women In Hamlet. I pictured Ophelia to myself as the motherless child of an elderly Polonius.
His young wife had first given him a son, Laertes, and had died a few years later, after giving birth to the poor little Ophelia. The son takes much after his father, and, his student-life over, seeks his pleasures in the gayer life of France; fond of his little sister in a patronizing way, in their rare meetings, but neither understanding nor caring to understand her nature. The baby Ophelia was left, as I fancy, to the kindly but thoroughly unsympathetic tending of country-folk, who knew little of "inland nurture. " Think of her, - sweet, fond, sensitive, tender-hearted, the offspring of a delicate dead mother tended only by roughly-mannered and uncultured natures! When we first see her, we may fairly suppose that she has been only a few months at court. Hamlet, Tragedy and Multiple Views of Madness « blastedgoat. William Shakespeare’s Hamlet reflects on the social and religious movements of the 16th and 17th centuries, a transitory time in England’s history.
Society was slowly switching from a medieval mindset to a more modern one. Hamlet is a “Renaissance man,” the educated son of a medieval king.