Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

Hamlet, the story of a man trapped in a play. “Who's there?"

Here is a detailed synopsis on Wikipedia.

For those of you who provide parts a scene at a time, this Character Chart shows all the characters' lines in each scene: Hamlet

If your group reads the plays straight through in one sitting and you want to divide up the parts, we have a number of “cast” lists already divided up for you. These are text files that you can edit to suit your group. We always recommend in a straight-through read that each participant take a moment beforehand to mark their parts—then everything proceeds so smoothly.

Because Hamlet is the longest play in the canon, these casts have some splits in the part of Hamlet himself, which is a total of 1,375 lines.

• The first half of the play, cast for 8, plus Stage Directions
• The second half of the play, cast for 8, plus Stage Directions
• Cast for 9, one Hamlet, plus a reader for Stage Directions
• Cast for 10, two Hamlets, plus a reader for Stage Directions

There are three different versions of this play: a quarto (small paperback) printed in 1603, which is quite different from another quarto printed in 1604, which is again different from the version printed in the large, hardbound collected works called the First Folio, published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death. At Internet Shakespeare Editions you can view each of these texts in either original spelling or modern transcription. (Of course, there are no original manuscripts with which to compare the printed versions.)

Back to the Readers' Editions and readers' support page.

This is an audio recording of the play by professional actors with sound effects: