The first clear reference to what we know as Shakespeare's Hamlet appears in the Stationers' Register, 26 July 1602, as a play called The Revenge of Hamlet Prince [of] Denmark. In that article, the author says the play was "lately acted by the Lord Chamberlain his servants" . In his list of London plays published in 1598, Francis Meres makes no mention of any play called Hamlet, but a note in Gabriel Harvey's edition of Speght's Chaucer (published in 1598) does mention the play Hamlet. Since scholars question the date of the actual writing of that note, most of them agree that Shakespeare published Hamlet after 1601 and before 1603. The First Folio, in 1623, categorized Shakespeare's plays as Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. Shakespeare wrote the great tragedies—excluding Romeo and Juliet, which is not, strictly speaking, a true tragedy—between 1601 and 1606, and apparently Hamlet was written first. Shakespeare closely followed Hamlet with Othello (1604), King Lear (1605/6),......

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Title: Hamlet
Approximate Word Count: 2258
Approximate Pages: 10 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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