Hamlet was  at a university in Germany when he was urgently called back home to Elsinore. His royal father had suddenly died and his mother had already married again. Hamlet was shocked.

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Elsinore castle was full of rumours.

Around midnight on the tower platform a ghost looking like the dead king appeared to Hamlet and said that he had been murdered by his wife’s second husband. Hamlet promised revenge. –

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From then on Hamlet acted as if deprived of reason, kept saying strange things, was insulting towards his mother and sneered at the girl he once loved. Her name was Ophelia.

– Privately he asked some actors to improvise a play where somebody kills a king to marry the queen.

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The shocking public performance brings the drama to a head : Hamlet kills Ophelia’s father who spied on him; Ophelia is demented and kills herself; and the curtain falls on Hamlet and Hamlet’s mother, all dead or dying.

Ophelia’s death  received a lot of romantic attention from  painters and even from some photographers:

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… …??  To the right, are those roaches?

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But Bob Dylan also rhymed something up for her in his “Desolation Row”. The photo is not as recent as the poetry:

Now Ophelia, she is at the window,
For her I feel so afraid
On her twenty-second birthday
She already is an old maid

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Elsinore castle is in fact  Helsingoer  Kronburg in Denmark :

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The film was made in 1996 directed by Kenneth Branagh, who also stars in the title role as Prince Hamlet. It is set in the 19th century, and uses Blenheim Palace for exterior scenes. It co-stars Derek Jacobi as King Claudius, Julie Christie as Queen Gertrude, and

Kate Winslet as Ophelia.

The complete cast is at http://tinyurl.com/bklhfw, but the JPEG has become dark.

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To be or not to be soliloquy + modern English summary reproduced in GIF and Word format:

GIF format… To be or not to be Word. doc format

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Mark Twain’s parody of Shakespeare’s  To be or not to be soliloquy:

Shakespeare’s plays are free online

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Macbeth is the greatest to read. It is short and follows a straight line  from the beginning to the end. The characters are simple.

By comparison, Hamlet is long and complex, meandering, going back on itself, reflecting the hero’s tortured awareness of conflicting ethics.

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