Hamlet

Hamlet, written around 1600, is Shakespeare's longest and most famous play. Prince Hamlet returns to Elsinore to find his uncle Claudius on the throne and married to his mother; his father's ghost tells him Claudius is a murderer. Feigning madness to test the truth, Hamlet hesitates between thought and action, and the delay ends in slaughter.

No play has been written about more. Its questions about death, revenge, conscience and the limits of action never age, and it contains the most quoted soliloquy in English, 'To be, or not to be'. Arabic readers have known it through many translations, from Khalil Mutran's to Jabra Ibrahim Jabra's.

William Shakespeare (1564–1616), born in Stratford-upon-Avon, actor, playwright and shareholder of a London company, wrote about thirty-seven plays and 154 sonnets.

The tragedies Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and King Lear, and comedies such as A Midsummer Night's Dream, are here in full, with hundreds of editions and studies from HathiTrust.