Hamlet

Hamlet returns a student prince to a court where his father is dead, his uncle is on the throne and married to his mother, and a ghost on the battlements has just told him it was murder. He believes it. He also cannot bring himself to act on it.

The court watches him closely and he lets them watch. He tests the ghost's story by staging a play, alienates the woman he loves, kills the wrong man behind a curtain, and is sent abroad to be murdered. Around him Ophelia comes apart, Laertes comes home for revenge, and Claudius keeps improvising. By the last scene almost nobody is left standing.

Shakespeare wrote it around 1600, and it is the longest and most quoted of his plays. Its argument with itself — about delay, about doubt, about whether thinking is a substitute for doing — is why it has been played continuously for four centuries.

It is also unexpectedly funny. Hamlet is a wit before he is a tragic hero, the gravediggers get one of the best comic scenes in the language, and the horror works precisely because the jokes keep landing until the moment they stop. The soliloquies are famous because they are genuine arguments rather than decoration.

It suits audiences meeting Shakespeare for the first time as much as those who know the text by heart. It works best live, where a man thinking out loud to a room full of people is doing exactly what the form was invented for.