The play abounds in questions from Bernardo's opening query, ‘Who's there? ’, to Hamlet's famous ‘To be or not to be’ formulation to the Gravedigger's puzzlement: ‘Is she to be buried in Christian burial, when she willfully seeks her own salvation? ’ (5. Hamlet, like the late-Elizabethan age it reflects, is set in the interrogative mood. And it appeared precisely as the sixteenth century, dominated by the energies released by the Reformation and the rise of the nation-state, gave way to individual self-fashioning and scientific scepticism. The play was conceived at a moment of transition in the life of its creator, in the culture he helped to shape and fashion and in the political dynamics of the English monarchy.
The play's cultural history is as protean and enigmatic as its fascinating but elusive central figure. Hamlet is the most read, discussed, and performed work in the Western literary canon.
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