hamlet · shakespeare

Shakespeare's longest tragedy, from around 1600, gives a prince commanded by his father's ghost to avenge a murder, and follows him through delay, feigned madness and self-interrogation to a catastrophe that takes the whole court. It is the play of interiority: conscience, doubt, mortality, the gap between thought and act, and the question of what the living owe the dead.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, edited by A. R. Braunmuller (Penguin Books, 2016). Read in full, Sophomore Spring at Torrey Honors.