Characters in Hamlet means act 3, scene 1, line 55. References to the First Quarto and First Folio are marked "Hamlet "Q1"" and "Hamlet "F1"", respectively, and are taken from the Arden Shakespeare "Hamlet: the texts of 1603 and 1623" (Thompson and Taylor, 2006b). Their referencing system for "Q1" has no act breaks, so 7.115 means scene 7, line 115. Characters in Hamlet What follows is an overview of the main characters in William Shakespeare's "Hamlet", followed by a list and summary of the minor characters from the play. Three different early versions of the play survive: known as the First Quarto ("Q1"),
Shakespeare in performance fetters on our imagination". Herder likewise proclaimed that reading Shakespeare's work opens "leaves from the book of events, of providence, of the world, blowing in the sands of time". This claim that Shakespeare's work breaks though all creative boundaries to reveal a chaotic, teeming, contradictory world became characteristic of Romantic criticism, later being expressed by Victor Hugo in the preface to his play "Cromwell", in which he lauded Shakespeare as an artist of the grotesque, a genre in which the tragic, absurd, trivial and serious were inseparably intertwined. Theatres and theatrical scenery became ever more elaborate in the 19th century,