Hamlet William Shakespeare, Burton Raffel

The "Annotated Shakespeare" series allows readers to fully understand and enjoy the rich plays of the world's greatest dramatist. One of the most frequently read and performed of all stage works, Shakespeare's "Hamlet" is unsurpassed in its complexity and richness. This fully annotated version of "Hamlet" makes the play completely accessible to readers in the 21st century. It has been carefully assembled with students, teachers and the general reader in mind. Eminent linguist and translator Burton Raffel offers 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. In his introduction, Raffel offers important background on the origins and previous versions of the Hamlet story, along with an analysis of the characters of Hamlet and Ophelia. And in a concluding essay, Harold Bloom meditates on the originality of Shakespeare's achievement.

Burton Raffel is Endowed Chair in Arts and Humanities and professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Among his many edited and translated publications are Poems and Prose from the Old English, Yvain, and Perceval, all published by Yale University Press, and Beowulf, The Story of the Grail, The Annotated Milton, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English at New York University, is the author of many books, including The Western Canon, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and, most recently, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited.

- The Annotated Shakespeare General Editor: Burton Raffel