Hard Times

"As part of Longman's series of Cultural Editions, Constance Jordan presents William Shakespeare's Hamlet in several provocative and illuminating contexts - cultural, critical, and literary." "Shakespeare's famous tragedy (its text based on the most authoritative of early editions, the Folio, published in 1623) is helpfully annotated and framed within several exciting contexts: contemporary accounts of a spirit world, purgatory, revenge, and suicide, and reports of readers and critics fascinated with the character and dramatic performance of this most famous of Shakespeare's heroes. Elaborating upon the historical setting and the cultural ideas that helped shape Hamlet, Constance Jordan summons the issues and anxieties of the early sixteenth century to show why the play, and especially its hero, speaks so powerfully and so vitally to our own time. This second edition of Hamlet: A Longman Cultural Edition has been completely redesigned and the play reformatted for easier reading."--BOOK JACKET.