Does philosophy gain or lose when it is embedded within literature or embodied by drama? Does literary criticism gain or lose when it turns to literary works as occasions for abstract reflection? Leading literary scholars and philosophers interrogate philosophical dimensions of Shakespeare's Hamlet with these urgent questions in view. Scholars probe Hamlet's own insights, assess the significance of philosophy's literary-dramatic framing by this play, and trace the philosophically-relevant underpinnings revealed by historical transformations in Hamlet's reception. They focus on the play's thematizations of subjectivity, knowledge, sex, grief, self-theatricalization. Examining Shakespeare's play from a philosophical standpoint sharpens the questions the play itself so famously poses: What counts as a proper response to injustice upon realizing that whatever one does, there can be no undoing of the initial wrong? What do our commitments to the dead amount to? How to persist in infusing significance into action while grasping the degradation of death and our own replaceability? Scholars at the forefront of their fields tackle these and other questions from a wide range of viewpoints, illuminating the central concerns of one of Shakespeare's masterpieces.

A Synoptic Hamlet is an alternative response to the editorial problems of this multiple-text play. Like most critical editions, it presents the early texts in a manner helpful to the general reader by modernizing spelling and punctuation, and emending non-sensical readings. However, it does not hide the text’s diversity by exclusively selecting readings from either the Second Quarto or the First Folio in order to reconstruct a single-reading version corresponding to the authentic Hamlet. Rather, it makes their significant variants immediately available in the line itself (offering alternative editorial interpretations of identical or similar readings at certain points). Thus the reader can have a direct appreciation of the divergence and similarity between these early texts from which the Hamlet of today is known.

Every reader is an actor according to Rosenberg. To prepare the actor-reader for insights, Rosenberg draws on major intepretations of the play worldwide, in theatre and in criticism, wherever possible from the first known performances to the present day. The book is rich and provocative on every question about the play.

The theme for Shakespeare Survey 63 is 'Shakespeare's English Histories and their Afterlives'.