Role of Evil in Hamlet's Delay and Downfall Scholarly critics have long regarded William Shakespeare's seventeenth-century tragedy, Hamlet, as perhaps the single greatest piece of English literature ever produced. In his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom calls the phenomenon of Hamlet's character "unsurpassed in the West's imaginative literature" (384), and the play itself "the Mona Lisa of literature" (391). Written almost entirely in iambic pentameter, Hamlet's flowing poetic rhythm, utilized in conjunction with deeper …showed first 75 words of 2894 total…

…showed last 75 words of 2894 total…Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1963. Grace, William J. Approaching Shakespeare. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1964. Hopkins, Lisa. "Hell in 'Hamlet' and ''Tis Pity She's a Whore'." Notes and Queries. 44.1 (1997): 102-103. Santayana, George. Essays in Literary Criticism. New York: Scribner, 1956. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark. New York: Signet Classic, 1998. Wilson, J. Dover. "The Parallel Plots in 'Hamlet': A Reply to Dr. W. W. Greg." The Modern Language Review. XIII, No. 1. (1918): 129-156.