Shakespeare's tragedy of a grieving prince (written around 1600), commanded by his father's ghost to avenge a murder, who instead questions, doubts, and delays — the longest and most famous of his plays, and the work most often credited with putting a fully modern inner life on the stage. In his soliloquies, above all 'To be, or not to be,' a character first seems to think aloud and to possess a hidden self. Why Hamlet delays has never been settled, and the play survives in several differing early texts, with no single original.
A prince comes home to a funeral and finds a wedding. His father the king is dead, his uncle wears the crown, and his mother has married that uncle. Then his father's ghost appears and says he was murdered, and demands revenge. In any older revenge story the son now sharpens his sword and strikes. Hamlet does not. He doubts the ghost, tests it, stages a play to catch his uncle, mocks himself for failing to act, and turns over the question of death itself. The whole tragedy is built around a man who will not do the one thing the plot demands. Out of that hesitation came one of literature's most influential portraits of an inner life — a mind that thinks, doubts, and divides against itself in front of us — and the most discussed play ever written.