Hamlet

By William Shakespeare

1603

Tragedy

Shakespeare's longest play and one of the most influential works in Western literature. The prince of Denmark, told by his father's ghost that his uncle Claudius murdered him to seize the throne and marry his mother Gertrude, spends five acts agonizing over whether to take revenge. The play has given English more famous lines than any other single text — "to be, or not to be," "the lady doth protest too much," "alas, poor Yorick" — and gave Freud the cleanest case study for the Oedipal complex he could have asked for. By the final scene almost every named character is dead and a foreign king is walking in to claim the throne.