Summary of the notes dated 13 February 2014.

The Shakespearean tragedy, which has as its protagonist Prince Hamlet of Denmark, can take various interpretations depending on the point of view of those who read the work and their culture. For some it is a metaphor for man forced to confront heroic situations, according to the romantics it is a symbol of their pain, for the decadents it indicates their boredom, while the critics of the twentieth century consider it the emblem of neurosis and alienation.

However, all these are conjectures, since the manipulations of centuries not allow us to understand what the real meaning of the tragedy was. The only sure thing is the objective data on which it is based, the characteristics of the historical period in which it was written:

-          The tragedy was written between 1599-1600, during the period when it began the decay of Elizabeth before her death, characterized by intrigues and conspiracies;

-          The transition between the Middle Ages and Renaissance determines a time of crisis in which the certainties of religion fail; an ideological crisis also fuelled by new geographical and scientific discoveries;

-          The order determined by the feudal system collapses under the pressure of the men of the revolution, called Puritans.

The signs of all these changes that have occurred in the age of Shakespeare can already be felt in the tragedy composed before this: "The Tragedy of Julius Caesar." In the drama, Brutus, the son of the Roman commander, continually places a question: whether it is right to act implementing the conspiracy or comply with the fundamental pillars of the Roman tradition. In this tragedy is therefore inserted the element of doubt, the doubt between action and stillness that Hamlet is going to expand including the concepts of good and evil. Prince Hamlet is the center of the tragedy that only grows around him and that is subordinated to him. The question of Brutus expands going to refer to the meaning of life and death and it is the same factor of uncertainty that resonates throughout the tragedy; everyone is asking a question, from the characters up to the public, and is a question itself which opens the drafting of the tragedy: the phrase "who's there?". The sentence resonates throughout the entire first scene, referring to both the characters of flesh and blood and to the ghost of the king, which acts as an interface between the known and the unknown. Everything starts, therefore, from the lack of certainty to distinguish between what is and what is not, possible to find even in the concrete language that Hamlet uses when discussing ideological and existential factors and summed up in the famous phrase "To be or not to be ".

The protagonist of the tragedy is not the own mind of Hamlet, which feigns madness and at the same time perceive everything around him. The drama then involves not only a segment of the lives of the characters but their entire existence, the totality of life in all its aspects, which appear in the text and on the stage in its entirety in a mix of moments past, present and future. This particular aspect of the Shakespearean drama is clearly visible in the second scene of the third act, when Hamlet organizes a theatrical scene (a kind of theatre in the theatre) in which he describes his father's death through the work of his uncle and mother. At this point in the text of the tragedy appear both past characters (embodied by the actors who play the small representation organized by the Prince) and the present ones (who attend to the representation).

It can be concluded that the work of William Shakespeare can be considered innovative for the era in which it was written, and therefore modern, due to its distinctive feature compared to the previous and the following: the fact that the doubt is the same event engine and is recognized as an integral part of life itself.