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The text of Hamlet contains approximately 130,000 letters. [e] Thus, there is a probability of one in 3.4 × 10 183,946 to get the text right at the first trial. The average number of letters that needs to be typed until the text appears is also 3.4 × 10 183,946, [f] or including punctuation, 4.4 × 10 360,783. [g]
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, often shortened to Hamlet (/ ˈ h æ m l ɪ t /), is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1599 and 1601. It is Shakespeare's longest play.
What follows is an overview of the main characters in William Shakespeare's Hamlet, followed by a list and summary of the minor characters from the play. [1] Three different early versions of the play survive: known as the First Quarto ("Q1"), Second Quarto ("Q2"), and First Folio ("F1"), each has lines—and even scenes—missing in the others, and some character names vary.
The play opens with Hamlet deeply depressed over the recent death of his father, King Hamlet, and his uncle Claudius' ascension to the throne and hasty marriage to Hamlet's mother Gertrude. One night, his father's ghost appears to him and tells him that Claudius murdered him in order to usurp the throne, and commands his son to avenge his death.
The monologue, spoken in the play by Prince Hamlet to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Act II, Scene 2, follows in its entirety. Rather than appearing in blank verse, the typical mode of composition of Shakespeare's plays, the speech appears in straight prose:
The Hamlet of the supposed earlier play also uses his perceived madness as a guise to escape suspicion. Eliot believes that in Shakespeare's version, however, Hamlet is driven by a motive greater than revenge, his delay in exacting revenge is left unexplained, and that Hamlet's madness is meant to arouse the king's suspicion rather than avoid it.
Terry Sejnowski is laboratory head of the computational neurobiology laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the author of ChatGPT and The Future of AI. What a self-aware ...
"This is that Hamlet the Dane, whom we read of in our youth". [77] One might say, he observes, that Hamlet is just a character in a play: "Hamlet is a name; his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet's brain." [78] Yet Shakespeare gives those sayings a reality in the mind of the reader, making them "as real as our own thoughts." [78]