• Introduction


• 1: Prologue to Some Great Amiss: The Prehistory of Hamlet


• 2: Actions That a Man Might Play: Hamlet on Stage in 1599-1601


• 3: The Play's the Thing: Ideological Contexts of Hamlet in 1599-1601


• 4: The Mirror Up to Nature: Hamlet in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries


• 5: The Very Torrent, Tempest, and Whirlwind of Your Passion: Hamlet in the Nineteenth Century


• 6: Reform It Altogether: Hamlet, c. 1900-1980


• 7: There is Nothing Either Good or Bad But Thinking Makes It So: Postmodern Hamlet


• Notes


• Further Reading


• Index

David Bevington is the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1967. He has published widely on Shakespeare and his contemporaries. His recent books include The Seven Ages of Human Experience (Blackwell, 2005), co-authored with Anne Marie Welsh and Michael L. Greenwald, Shakespeare: Script, Stage, Screen (Pearson Longman, 2006), This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare's Plays in Production, Then and Now (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and Shakespeare's Ideas (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). He is the senior editor of the Revels Student Editions, the Revels Plays, and of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson. He is also senior editor of the Norton Anthology of Renaissance Drama, 2002.

David Bevington demonstrates that the staging, criticism, and editing of Hamlet go hand in hand over the centuries to such a remarkable extent that the history of Hamlet can be seen as a kind of paradigm for the cultural history of the English-speaking world.