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 authorship question signatures, which they characterise as "an illiterate scrawl", is interpreted as indicating that he was illiterate or barely literate. All are written in secretary hand, a style of handwriting common to the era, particularly in play writing, and three of them utilize breviographs to abbreviate the surname. In his surviving signatures William Shakespeare did not spell his name as it appears on most Shakespeare title pages. His surname was spelled inconsistently in both literary and non-literary documents, with the most variation observed in those that were written by hand. This is taken as evidence that he was not the same