Read Hamlet by email.
Four weeks of Elsinore, at the speed Hamlet actually thinks.
The play opens in the dark with a challenge — “Who’s there?” — and nothing after that gets a straight answer either. Twenty-six mornings of Elsinore, one scene at a time, five or six minutes each: about as long as Hamlet can hold a single thought.
Five or six minutes a day, and every installment opens with a line reminding you where you left off.
Four weeks from now, you will have read Shakespeare.
26 installments, one an email
- First published
- 1600
- Installments
- 26
- Each installment
- 5–6 min
How long it takes
- Words
- 32,088
- Reading time
- 2 hours 14 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 4 weeks
- At 10 minutes a day
- 13 days
- At 20 minutes a day
- 7 days
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
Why read Hamlet?
At 32,088 words Hamlet runs close to twice the length of Macbeth, and it moves in fits: twenty scenes, seven of them in Act IV alone, five of those under six hundred words. That rhythm is the play. One morning brings the whole nunnery scene, “To be, or not to be” and all, at 1,601 words; another brings 259 words of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern trying to find out what Hamlet has done with the body. Read a scene a day, the delay everyone complains about stops being a problem in criticism and becomes something happening to you.
The verse arrives as verse — speaker names in small capitals, stage directions in italics, lines breaking where the pentameter breaks instead of reflowing into paragraphs. Five of the twenty scenes are too long for one email, and Act II Scene 2 — 4,929 words, in which Hamlet meets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, then the players, then works out that the play’s the thing — comes in three parts. Every cut falls at an entrance or an exit, taking the combination of stage directions that makes the longest part shortest, so a part ends when the room changes rather than when a counter runs out.
Installment 1 is the playbill — twenty-five persons of the play, and a setting given in a single word, Denmark — then the first scene, a changing of the watch that turns into a ghost story. The graveyard and the duel take the last four mornings. In between are three and a half weeks in which the play arrives at the speed of somebody genuinely making up his mind.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read Hamlet?
About two and a quarter hours straight through (32,088 words). By email, it’s 26 daily installments of five to six minutes — just under four weeks, or faster at a premium pace of two or three scenes a day.
Is this the complete, unabridged text?
Yes — the full play in the carefully typeset Standard Ebooks edition: all twenty scenes, every stage direction, the dramatis personae, and the parts productions cut for time, including the Act IV soliloquy, “How all occasions do inform against me.” Nothing is trimmed or modernized.
How does a play work as email?
One scene per email, in play formatting: speaker names in small capitals, stage directions in italics, verse lines kept as verse. Hamlet’s scenes run long — twenty of them across 32,088 words — so five arrive in more than one part, cut at an entrance or an exit rather than at a length. The other fifteen come whole, the nunnery scene included, and the median installment is still 1,423 words.
Do the recaps spoil anything?
Each recap covers only the previous scene, so nothing arrives before the play delivers it. Hamlet is less careful than the recaps are: the Ghost lays out the entire murder inside the first week, and there are three weeks still to run.
How does it arrive?
One installment per email, one email a day, at the hour you pick, with a one-line recap of the previous scene at the top. Free. Unsubscribe or pause anytime.
Standard Ebooks edition, public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.