Though it is one of Shakespeare's greatest and most beloved plays, Hamlet has been repeatedly misunderstood. This is partly because audience assumptions about the nature of reality have undergone huge changes between Shakespeare's time and ours. In the name of those different assumptions, modern scholars, play directors, and film producers have often wrenched Shakespeare's play out of its intended meaning. The result is that for most people what this great play is really about has been almost entirely obscured.

Founded on the best scholarship of the past, William Shakespeare's Hamlet not only provides precise glosses on the meanings of particular words and phrases as they would have been understood by Shakespeare's audience and specific suggestions for actors and directors. More importantly, it clarifies the profound dramatic through-line of the play. The commentary in the annotation demonstrates that the story of Shakespeare's Hamlet is not of a man "who could not make up his mind," or who thinks too much to act, or who exhibits the relativity of all values, or who is Oedipally in love with his mother, or who melancholically wishes he were dead. These and other non-Shakespearean interpretations superimposed on the play in the last hundred years vanish into insignificance in the face of the actual story of Hamlet as revealed in the original meanings of its speeches and their interrelation. That story is of a man who, in a dangerous and paradoxical moral situation-which stands for the situation of every one of us-becomes guilty of a tragic moral fall and then undergoes a spiritual turning leading to redemption.

This edition is uniquely structured in a side-by-side format-text on the left and annotation on the right, with line numbers between them for ease of reference to both. It features an introductory essay providing an overview of the play's meaning as detailed in the annotation. William Shakespeare's Hamlet will be valuable to all serious students of the play: general readers, college and graduate students, teachers and scholars, actors, directors, and literary critics.