Hamlet
A prince is told by his father's ghost that he was murdered, and then spends four acts not doing anything about it. The play's power comes from that gap: Hamlet is intelligent enough to see every reason for delay and honest enough to despise himself for finding them.
It is also a play about surveillance. Almost everyone is watching someone else, and the soliloquies are spoken by a man who suspects he is being overheard. Read the second quarto text if you can; the Folio is shorter and some of the most famous lines are arranged differently.
Public-domain status
First published in 1603. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; William Shakespeare died in 1616, so this work has been free to republish there since 1687.
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- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 1524 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
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Keep reading
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- Stratford-upon-Avon — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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