Hamlet
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Shakespeare’s best known, most quoted and longest play, written c1599 - 1602 and rewritten throughout his lifetime. It is the story of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, encouraged by his father’s ghost to take revenge on his uncle who murdered him, and is set at the court of Elsinore. In soliloquies, the Prince reveals his inner self to the audience while concealing his thoughts from all at the Danish court, who presume him insane. Shakespeare gives him lines such as ‘to be or not to be,’ ‘alas, poor Yorick,’ and ‘frailty thy name is woman’, which are known even to those who have never seen or read the play. And Hamlet has become the defining role for actors, men and women, who want to show their mastery of Shakespeare’s work.
→ Listen on BBC Sounds website
Guests
- Sir Jonathan Bate
16 episodes
Provost of Worcester College, University of Oxford -
Carol Rutter No other episodes
Professor of Shakespeare and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick -
Sonia Massai No other episodes
Professor of Shakespeare Studies at King's College London
Reading list
-
Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
A. C. Bradley Google Books → -
Hamlet: Shakespeare in Performance
Anthony B. Dawson Google Books → -
What Happens in Hamlet
John Dover Wilson Google Books → -
Hamlet versus Lear
R. A. Foakes Google Books → -
Shakespeare and Violence
R. A. Foakes Google Books → -
Prefaces to Shakespeare: Hamlet
Harley Granville-Barker Google Books → -
Hamlet without Hamlet
Margreta de Grazia Google Books → -
Gertrude and Claudius
John Updike Google Books → -
Hamlet in Purgatory
Stephen Greenblatt Google Books → -
Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction
Tony Howard Google Books → -
Ophelia
Lisa Klein Google Books → -
Shakespeare our Contemporary
Jan Kott Google Books → -
Hamlet After Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text
Zackary Lesser Google Books → -
Everybody's Shakespeare
Maynard Mack Google Books → -
Shakespeare is Hard, but so is Life: A Radical Guide to Shakespearean Tragedy
Fintan O'Toole Google Books → -
Enter the body: Women and representation on Shakespeare's Stage
Carol Chillington Rutter Google Books → -
Hamlet
William Shakespeare (eds. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor) Google Books → -
Hamlet
William Shakespeare (eds. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen) Google Books → -
Shakespeare and Masculinity
Bruce Smith Google Books →
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Programme ID: b09jqtfs
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09jqtfs
Auto-category: 822.33 (English drama)
Hello (First sentence from this episode)
Hello. William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, his longest play, around 1599.