[ Naxos Audio Books / 4 CD Box Set ]
Release Date: Tuesday 20 March 2007
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Hamlet, which dates from 1600-1601, is the first in Shakespeare's great series of four tragedies, the others being Othello (1603), King Lear (1605) and Macbeth (1606). In writing this extraordinary play, Shakespeare effectively re-invented tragedy after an interval of roughly two thousand years -we have to go back to the Greek dramatists of 5th century Athens to find anything of comparable depth and maturity.
Certainly Shakespeare had already dealt with tragic themes and situations in plays such as Romeo and Juliet, Richard II and Julius Caesar, but in Hamlet he found himself able to fuse with complete artistic success the conflicting concerns of the private individual and the public state of which he is a member, or for which he may indeed be responsible-Hamlet is, after all, Prince of Denmark. This is a quintessentially Renaissance theme: it is no longer enough to appeal to an accepted moral or religious system, but instead each man must find out for himself a moral path through the 'unweeded garden' of life.