Murder Most Foul : Hamlet Through the Ages [ electronic resource ] /
by David Bevington.
- Oxford Scholarship Online , 2012
This book is an account of Shakespeare's great play from its sources in Scandinavian epic lore to the way it was performed and understood in its own day, and then how the play has fared down to the present: performances on stage, television, and film; critical evaluations, publishing history, spinoffs, spoofs, musical adaptations; the play's growing reputation, its influence on writers and thinkers, and the ways in which it has shaped the very language we speak. Since all these things go hand in hand over the centuries, the history of Hamlet can be seen as a kind of paradigm for the cultural history of the English-speaking world.