Audiobook · read by volunteers
Hamlet
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
Read by Elizabeth Klett, Kara Shallenberg (1969-2023), John Gonzalez, Denny Sayers (d. 2015), Kristin Hughes (1974-2021), David Jaquay, Kirsten Ferreri, Christie Nowak, Rosalind Wills, Karen Savage · 6 chapters · 3 h 53
About the book
Prince Hamlet returns to Elsinore to find his father dead, his uncle Claudius on the throne and his mother married to the new king. Then the ghost of the old king appears on the battlements and charges him with revenge for a murder. From that moment Hamlet is torn between duty and doubt, between action and endless thinking. He feigns madness, stages a play to test the truth, wounds those he loves and moves toward a crisis that none of them can escape. This full-cast production gathers ten LibriVox volunteers, including Elizabeth Klett and Kara Shallenberg, who share the many roles across six sections. The recording takes about four hours, and it keeps the poetry, the sudden bursts of wit and the dark intensity that have made the play so famous. It is a rich way to meet one of the great tragedies of the theatre.
Introduction
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) wrote Hamlet around the turn of the seventeenth century, probably in the early 1600s. It is often regarded as one of the greatest plays ever written. Shakespeare drew on Danish chronicles and on the Elizabethan taste for revenge tragedy, yet he turned that familiar formula into something else: a philosophical inquiry, a family drama and a supernatural thriller at once.
What makes Hamlet so enduring is its central character. He thinks aloud, questions himself, jokes bitterly and can seem both cruel and tender. The famous soliloquies are only the best-known part of a play that asks how a person should act when the world is rotten and certainty is out of reach. Supporting figures such as Ophelia, Gertrude, Polonius and the grave-diggers are equally unforgettable.
This LibriVox production is a dramatic reading with a cast of ten volunteers, so the voices change from scene to scene. It begins with the list of characters and then follows the five acts, in six tracks, for a total of about 3.9 hours.
Hearing the play rather than reading it restores the immediacy it was written for. Listeners new to Shakespeare may find the sound of the language easier than the printed page, and those who know the play well will notice fresh details. It remains a work that rewards repeated listening. A play of this length and density benefits from a pause. Many listeners like to hear one act at a time, perhaps following a printed text, and then to return to a favourite scene. The pace of this recording is steady enough to follow even when the language is complex.
Public domain
William Shakespeare died in 1616: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text