In these stories, a Danish prince fakes madness in order to take revenge on his uncle, who had killed the prince's father and married his mother. Many scholars believe that Shakespeare was not the first person to adapt this story-Thomas Kyd, one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, is largely believed to have written a play known as the Ur-Hamlet. The story of Hamlet is based on a Danish revenge story first recorded by Saxo Grammaticus in the 1100s. Truncated and full-text versions alike have been produced on stage and screen, and 20th and 21st-century casts and directors have launched interpretations of the text which examine Hamlet as an Oedipal figure, as an individual suffering from mental illness, and even as the illegitimate son of King Claudius. In the centuries since it was first written, Hamlet has been staged and set in different eras of history, from the late Middle Ages to the confines of a modern-day psych ward. Hamlet's constant anxiety about the difference between appearance and reality, as well as his difficulties with religion (the sinfulness of suicide, the unfairness that killing a murderer while the murderer is praying would result in sending the murder to heaven) can be seen as directly influenced by humanist thought. Hamlet is in many ways a product of the Reformation-a religious revolution in which Protestants broke away from the Catholic Church-as well as the skeptical humanism of the late Renaissance, which held that there were limits on human knowledge. His surviving writings include nearly 40 plays and over 150 sonnets, and his body of work is widely performed, analyzed, studied, and reinterpreted to this day. Shakespeare died in 1616 of a rumored “fever” just a month after creating a will in which he declared himself to be in good health. In 1609, he published a book of sonnets, and released other long poems in the mid-1590s when London’s theaters were closed due to the plague. His theatrical career likely began in the mid-1580s, and between then and 1613, he composed such works as Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, The Henriad, Julius Caesar, Othello, and many more. There is a gap in the historical record between the birth of Shakespeare’s twins and his first recorded appearance on the London theater scene in 1592. She later bore two more children-one of whom, Hamnet, died at the age of 11. At 18, Shakespeare wed a woman eight years his senior, Anne Hathaway just six months after their marriage, Hathaway gave birth to a daughter.

His father was a glove-maker and assemblyman in Stratford-upon-Avon, and his mother was the daughter of a well-to-do landowner.

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