For many years interest focused on both Hamlet's inability to avenge his father's death, claiming that "the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought", and, according to none other than Freud, his oedipal fixation with his mother. However, more recently critics have turned their attention to Hamlet's bold theatrical self-reflexivity (most famously reflected in the performance of "The Mousetrap"), its fascination with issues of theology and Renaissance humanism, and its dense, complex poetic language. What is so remarkable about the play is the way in which it tends to uncannily reflect the concerns of different epochs. As a result, Hamlet has been at different moments defined as a romantic rebel, an angst-ridden existentialist, a paralysed intellectual and an ambivalent New Man. Whatever subsequent generations make of Hamlet, they are unlikely to exhaust the possibilities of this most extraordinary play. --Jerry Brotton

I will not attempt any literary criticism here because libraries are already overflowing with books on the subject. The madness of Hamlet is, I suppose, debatable; certainly, his madness is feigned early on, and I have much admiration for his manner of calling forth the guilty conscience of those who wronged his father through his supposed ravings, but one must particularly question his dealings with the lovely and innocent Ophelia. Madness, rage, murder, incest (of a sort), graveyards, sword fighting, poison, love, betrayal--this play has all of these things and more, yet it is the great humanity of Prince Hamlet himself which makes this tragedy foremost among all of the Great Bard's dramas. Good and evil exist in each soul; evil does not always lose, and good does not always win. Shakespeare understood this, and that is why this tragedy will always serve as a literary mirror in which careful readers can peer into the depths of their own souls.