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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.
Lord Macbeth, the Thane of Glamis and quickly the Thane of Cawdor, is the title character and main protagonist in William Shakespeare's Macbeth (c. 1603–1607). The character is loosely based on the historical king Macbeth of Scotland and is derived largely from the account in Holinshed's Chronicles (1577), a compilation of British history.
[265] Commenting on "the character of Hamlet", he in effect joins a discussion among his contemporaries, adding to the mix of similar assessments by Goethe, [266] Schlegel, [267] and Coleridge [268] his observation that Hamlet "is not a character marked by strength of will or even of passion, but by refinement of thought and sentiment." [80]
Hamlet and Ophelia, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. From its premiere at the turn of the 17th century, Hamlet has remained Shakespeare's best-known, most-imitated, and most-analyzed play. The character of Hamlet played a critical role in Sigmund Freud's explanation of the Oedipus complex. [1]
Macbeth was a favourite of the seventeenth-century diarist Samuel Pepys, who saw the play on 5 November 1664 ("admirably acted"), 28 December 1666 ("most excellently acted"), ten days later on 7 January 1667 ("though I saw it lately, yet [it] appears a most excellent play in all respects"), on 19 April 1667 ("one of the best plays for a stage ...
In this analysis, the essence of Hamlet is the central character's changed perception of his mother as a whore because of her failure to remain faithful to Old Hamlet. In consequence, Hamlet loses his faith in all women, treating Ophelia as if she too were a whore and dishonest with Hamlet.
The madness of Shakespeare's character, according to Eliot, is a result of the inexpressible things that Hamlet feels and the playwright cannot convey. Eliot concludes that because Shakespeare cannot find a sufficient objective correlative for his hero, the audience is left without a means to understand an experience that Shakespeare himself ...
In the early 1850s, in Pierre, Herman Melville focuses on a Hamlet-like character's long development as a writer. [5] Ten years later, Dickens' Great Expectations contains many Hamlet-like plot elements: it is driven by revenge actions, contains ghost-like characters (Abel Magwitch and Miss Havisham), and focuses on the hero's guilt. [5]