You cannot beat Hamlet: both the character and his drama are irresistible. In just over four centuries, the tragic story of the Prince of Denmark has attracted the attention of major writers and philosophers, such as Goethe, Hegel, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Freud, Joyce and Thomas Mann. And the plot is also elusive: reading the text, one discovers contradictions, disproportionate occurrences, and secondary streets that the narrative takes and soon abandons. And yet it remains a unique invention, with scenes capable of making one’s hair stand on end, moving one to tears, or causing dark laughter: a terrible ghost at the beginning, a sweet girl’s madness and watery death, a hilarious yet dark dialogue between two gravediggers in a cemetery. Not to mention the protagonist’s meditative monologues, his hesitations, doubts, questions... The author of this book performs a meticulous analysis of the original text and its interpretations over time, thus outlining Hamlet’s extraordinary intellectual adventure in European culture and unveiling the secrets and mysteries of Shakespeare’s craft.

Piero Boitani is professor emeritus at the Sapienza University in Rome. In 2016 he won the Balzan Prize for Comparative Literature.