Alongside the King James Bible, Hamlet may be the most influential text in the history of the English language. Even those who have never read nor seen the play have at least a passing familiarity with its most iconic scenes, and with the numerous phrases it has introduced to the popular lexicon, including “primrose path,” “cruel to be kind,” “method in madness,” “to be or not to be,” “woe is me,” “brevity is the soul of wit,” and “to thine own self be true,” to name but a few.
Part of the play’s enduring legacy is that it comments so eloquently on elements that are at the center of the human experience: death and afterlife, love and family, honor and revenge, melancholy and madness....
