Hamlet

Shakespeare's most powerful work, To Be or Not to Be – Hamlet's famous question still divides opinions. No other literary character embodies the archetype of the doubter like Shakespeare's Prince of Denmark. He promised the ghost of his murdered father to take revenge for his death, yet all attempts to fulfill his vow only lead him and his loved ones further into misfortune. William Shakespeare's tragedy, written around 1600, is perhaps his best, certainly his most impactful play: countless adaptations and film versions testify to the timelessness of the material.

• The greatest of all literary works (Alfred Tennyson)
• One of Shakespeare's showcase pieces (BR2)
• Hamlet is timeless - a revenger, thinker, procrastinator, and revolutionary all at once.
• So astonishingly modern – relevant to all eras, and different for every generation (SRF)
• At times, Hamlet presents himself as a protester against the realpolitik of the old, at other times as a sensitive melancholic (BR2)
• Ophelia, caught between femininity, madness, water, and death, remains the most famous woman in world literature, a projection surface for aesthetic artistic fantasies, and a victim of patriarchal structures, eternally fascinating
• Perhaps Hamlet is indeed a world figure: not just a white man from the cultural West, but a global figure of thought. He has the potential for it – because he is so excitingly versatile. Because the crises he faces are so universal. This makes him provocative (SRF)
• So much has already been said about Shakespeare that it may seem as if there is nothing left to say, yet this is the nature of the spirit, that it continually stimulates the mind (Johann Wolfgang Goethe).