Instead, Hamlet discovers this and switches the letter for another, telling the king to kill Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

The title characters are able to make a life-changing decision when they discover that their letter contains an order to kill Hamlet.

Ignoring punctuation, spacing, and capitalization, a monkey typing letters uniformly at random has a chance of one in 26 of correctly typing the first letter of Hamlet.

When Hamlet kills Polonius, Claudius recruits Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to escort Hamlet to England, providing them with a letter for the King of England instructing him to have Hamlet killed.

) Along the journey, the distrustful Hamlet finds and rewrites the letter, instructing the executioner to kill Rosencrantz and Guildenstern instead.

" In his letter to the La Grande Observer, he compared the characterization that the play is about " people drinking in bars and treating women as sex objects " to characterising Shakespeare's ' Hamlet ' as being " about a castle ".

I realized that Hamlet was faced with an entirely different problem, but his agony could have been no greater.

To the horror of the assembled Party officials, however, someone with, " a young and deeply anguished voice ," began reciting Pasternak's banned poem Hamlet.

' Heggy ' Hegazi, an Egyptian forward, was one of the first non-British players to appear in the Football League, though he only played one game for Fulham in 1911, marked with a goal afterwards playing for non-league Dulwich Hamlet.

Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play and among the most powerful and influential tragedies in English literature, with a story capable of " seemingly endless retelling and adaptation by others.

Together, Claudius and Polonius convince Ophelia to speak with Hamlet while they secretly listen.

Hamlet remains uncertain whether the Ghost has told him the truth, but the arrival of a troupe of actors at Elsinore presents him with a solution.

Hamlet arrives with Horatio and banters with one of them, who unearths the skull of a jester whom Hamlet once knew, Yorick (" Alas, Poor Yorick ; I knew him, Horatio .").

A courtier, Osric, interrupts to invite Hamlet to fence with Laertes.

Between bouts, Laertes attacks and pierces Hamlet with his poisoned blade ; in the ensuing scuffle, Hamlet is able to use Laertes's own poisoned sword against him.

In his dying moments, Laertes is reconciled with Hamlet and reveals Claudius's murderous plot.

Hamlet stabs Claudius with the poisoned sword, and then forces him to drink from his own poisoned cup to make sure he dies.

In his final moments, Hamlet names Prince Fortinbras of Norway as the probable heir to the throne, since the Danish kingship is an elected position, with the country's nobles having the final say.

Horatio attempts to kill himself with the same poisoned wine but is stopped by Hamlet, so he will be the only one left alive to give a full account of the story.

This latter idea — placing Hamlet far earlier than the generally accepted date, with a much longer period of development — has attracted some support, though others dismiss it as speculation.

Most scholars reject the idea that Hamlet is in any way connected with Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet Shakespeare, who died in 1596 at age eleven.

Early editors of Shakespeare's works, beginning with Nicholas Rowe ( 1709 ) and Lewis Theobald ( 1733 ), combined material from the two earliest sources of Hamlet available at the time, Q2 and F1.

Though it remained popular with mass audiences, late 17th-century Restoration critics saw Hamlet as primitive and disapproved of its lack of unity and decorum.

Finally, in a period when most plays ran for two hours or so, the full text of Hamlet — Shakespeare's longest play, with 4, 042 lines, totalling 29, 551 words — takes over four hours to deliver.

In his openness to embrace the message of the ghost, Hamlet assuages Horatio's wonderment with the analytical assertion, " There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Confronted with his repressed desires, Hamlet realises that " he himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish ".

Beginning in 1910, with the publication of " The Oedipus-Complex as An Explanation of Hamlet's Mystery: Study in Motive ," Ernest Jones — a psychoanalyst and Freud's biographer — developed Freud's ideas into a series of essays that culminated in his book Hamlet and Oedipus ( 1949 ).

Katherine Duncan-Jones accepts a 1600 – 1 attribution for the date Hamlet was written, but notes that the Lord Chamberlain's Men, playing Hamlet in the 3000-capacity Globe, were unlikely to be put to any disadvantage by an audience of " barely one hundred " for the Children of the Chapel's equivalent play, Antonio's Revenge ; she believes that Shakespeare, confident in the superiority of his own work, was making a playful and charitable allusion to his friend John Marston's very similar piece.

The scene order is more coherent, without the problems of Q2 and F1 of Hamlet seeming to resolve something in one scene and enter the next drowning in indecision.

At one point, as in the Gravedigger scene, Hamlet seems resolved to kill Claudius: in the next scene, however, when Claudius appears, he is suddenly tame.

Hamlet also contains a favourite Shakespearean device, a play within the play, a literary device or conceit in which one story is told during the action of another story.

Hamlet is one of the most quoted works in the English language, and is often included on lists of the world's greatest literature.

Academic Laurie Osborne identifies the direct influence of Hamlet in numerous modern narratives, and divides them into four main categories: fictional accounts of the play's composition, simplifications of the story for young readers, stories expanding the role of one or more characters, and narratives featuring performances of the play.

Even during this time, however, playlets known as drolls were often performed illegally, including one called The Grave-Makers based on Act 5, Scene 1 of Hamlet.

Other New York portrayals of Hamlet of note include that of Ralph Fiennes's in 1995 ( for which he won the Tony Award for Best Actor ) – which ran, from first preview to closing night, a total of one hundred performances.

About the Fiennes Hamlet Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times that it was "... not one for literary sleuths and Shakespeare scholars.

Back in Washington in April, he played the title roles in Hamlet and Richard III, one of his favorites.

His performance in the title role in a Manitoba Theatre Centre production of Hamlet was praised by Roger Lewis, the Sunday Times, who declared Reeves " … one of the top three Hamlets I have seen, for a simple reason: he is Hamlet.

The AP called this " one of the slickest political maneuvers in international athletic history ", and wrote that the Games would now be " like Hamlet without the celebrated Dane in the cast.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern attempt to practice for their meeting with the Prince by one pretending to be Hamlet and the other asking him questions, but they glean no new information from it.

Immortalized as Elsinore in William Shakespeare's play Hamlet, Kronborg is one of the most important Renaissance castles in Northern Europe and was added to UNESCO's World Heritage Sites list on November 30, 2000.

Even if the observable universe were filled with monkeys the size of atoms typing from now until the heat death of the universe, their total probability to produce a single instance of Hamlet would still be a great many orders of magnitude less than one in 10 < sup > 183, 800 </ sup >.