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Hello, William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, his longest play, around 1599.

It was an immediate success, and has since become his best known work around the world and the most quoted.

Shakespeare has Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, reveal his inner self to the audience

as he revengees the death of his father, while concealing his thoughts from all of the Danish court who sometimes presuming insane.

He gives him lines such as to be a not to be, a last pureric and frailty thy name is Woman,

which are known even to those who have never seen or read the play.

And Hamlet has become the defining role for actors, men and women who want to show their mastery of Shakespeare's work.

With me, to discuss Shakespeare's Hamlet, our Sir Jonathan Bates,

promised a Wuster College University of Oxford,

Karra Rutta, Professor of Shakespeare and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick,

and Sonia Massai, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at King's College London.

Jonathan Bates, where does Hamlet fit into the order of Shakespeare's plays?

It's really at the centre of his career.

So Shakespeare starts writing plays in the early 1590s.

There's an early revenge tragedy called Titus Andronicus, his first tragedy.

Then for most of the time through the 1590s, he's writing comedies and his great English history plays.

Then at the end of the 1590s, he goes back to tragedy.

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