"To be or not to be" confounded by Shakespeare-that is the question. Hamlet is an action-packed thriller with apparitions, murder, revenge, deception, poisons, and diabolical traps. With timeless themes, it explores friendship, relationships, honor, fate, madness, and more. Now you can savor Hamlet in a modern, easy-to-understand translation that makes reading it quick and painless. Other aids make following the action and grasping the meaning a snap: A brief synopsis of the plot and action A comprehensive character list that describes the characteristics, motivations, and actions of each major player A visual character map that shows the relationships of major characters A cycle-of-death graphic that pinpoints the sequence of deaths and includes who dies, how they die, and why Reflective questions that help you understand the themes of the play With Shakespeare on the Double! Hamlet, you'll be enlightened instead of confounded.

One of the most frequently read and performed of all stage works, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is unsurpassed in its complexity and richness. Now the first fully annotated version of Hamlet makes the play completely accessible to readers in the twenty-first century. It has been carefully assembled with students, teachers, and the general reader in mind. Eminent linguist and translator Burton Raffel offers generous help with vocabulary and usage of Elizabethan English, pronunciation, prosody, and alternative readings of phrases and lines. His on-page annotations provide readers with all the tools they need to comprehend the play and begin to explore its many possible interpretations. This version of Hamlet is unparalleled for its thoroughness and adherence to sound linguistic principles. In his Introduction, Raffel offers important background on the origins and previous versions of the Hamlet story, along with an analysis of the characters Hamlet and Ophelia. And in a concluding essay, Harold Bloom meditates on the originality of Shakespeare’s achievement. The book also includes a careful selection of items for “Further Reading.”

"William Shakespeare's tragedy told in the style of texts, tweets, and status posts"--

Graphic novel adaptation of Prince Hamlet's struggle to deliver justice on his own terms.

Passion, romance, drama, humor, and tragedy intertwine in this compulsively readable Hamlet retelling, from the perspective of a strong-willed, modern-day Ophelia. Meet Ophelia, high school senior, daughter of the Danish king's most trusted adviser, and longtime girlfriend of Prince Hamlet of Denmark. She lives a glamorous life and has a royal social circle, and her beautiful face is splashed across magazines and television screens. But it comes with a price--her life is ruled not only by Hamlet's fame and his overbearing royal family but also by the paparazzi who hound them wherever they go. After the sudden and suspicious death of his father, the king, the devastatingly handsome Hamlet spirals dangerously toward madness, and Ophelia finds herself torn, with no one to turn to. All Ophelia wants is to live a normal life. But when you date a prince, you have to play your part. Ophelia rides out this crazy roller coaster life, and lives to tell her story in live television interviews.

The pun is as old as Babel, and inveterate punsters like Shakespeare clearly never lacked translators. This book critically examines the evergreen cliché that wordplay defies translation, replacing it by a theory and a case study that aim to come to grips with the reality of wordplay and its translation. What are the possible modes of wordplay translation? What are the various, sometimes conflicting constraints prompting translators in certain situations to go for one strategy rather than another? Ample illustration is provided from Hamlet and other Shakespearean texts and several Dutch, French, and German renderings. The study exemplifies how theory can usefully be integrated into a description-oriented approach to translation. Much of the argument also rests on the definition of wordplay as an open-ended and historically variable category. The book's concerns range from the linguistic and textual properties of Shakespeare's punning and its translation to matters of historical poetics and ideology. Its straightforward approach shows that discourse about wordplay doesn't need to rely on stylistic bravura or abstract speculation. The book is concluded by an anthology of the puns in Hamlet, including a brief semantic analysis of each and a generous selection of diverse translations.