The following menus and text fields work individually or in any combination; a few kinds of information are available for every entry but not searchable.
If you are interested in a detailed description of the annotation policy, please contact us for a copy of the editor's manual.
Browse the electronic text of Hamlet on the left by scrolling or by selecting a particular act or scene (top left-hand corner of the page). Clicking on the little arrows (>) to the right of any line opens a window with text extracts that quote this line.
Search the database using the search options on the right. The menus and text fields explained below work individually or in any combination.
Text fields offer the following options:
This finds words in all the text fields below.
This menu indicates the quoting text's closeness to Hamlet. The core collection includes only entries which indicate an evident Hamlet reference through a high degree of linguistic overlap, explicit marking, thematic context or an author’s known propensity for quotation. This is the default search setting.
The complete corpus offers additional entries where a Hamlet phrase is so heavily modified or generally used that a reference may be considered doubtful; moreover, a selection of passages that antedate Hamlet is included and annotations offer more general information on certain lines.
Specify your search by typing a search word into the TEXT field:
This menu lists persons who are considered (co-) responsible for a Hamlet reference.
This text field indicates the title of the text which quotes Hamlet, a book or a shorter item like a poem, essay or TV series episode. While the BIBLIO field may cite a historical edition, spelling is standardized here to make quick searches easier, as in The Duchess of Malfi instead of The Dutchesse of Malfy. Very brief original titles are extended to be more helpful as in Review of John Stuart Mill's Autobiography instead of Review, and for untitled poems, the first line is given.
This field gives the text passage which contains the Hamlet reference, with the words taken from Hamlet highlighted for convenience.
This may coincide with the date of the first publication in letters, blogs, interviews and journalism or be very different indeed in posthumously published texts or works with an extended gestation period.
This menu classifies references to Hamlet elements that cannot be associated with a specific line or passage, i.e. mentions of the play which are not accompanied by a quotation, accounts of fictional Hamlet performances or allusions to a character from the play. Famous scenes and motifs such as the soliloquy "to be or not to be", the play-within-the-play or Ophelia's madness can also be searched for. References to the play are classified for the play being performed or read by fictional characters. Such performance references always concern fictional stagings, never historical Hamlet performances as described in diaries, letters or reviews.
This menu indicates the main language of the work (or of the AUTHOR, for nonverbal references). Entries in English, German and French are recorded in the original language only; for all other languages, translations are added or given instead of the original. Languages with very few entries are grouped together. English and German entries include texts in varieties such as Scots, Creoles, African American Vernacular or Swiss German.
This menu indicates who suggested the reference. This may be the first person to spot a particular Hamlet quotation in their private reading or by doing a systematic electronic search; but it may also involve going through public research and reporting another scholar’s find to the database. Those secondary sources are listed in the text field SECONDARY SOURCE and categorized by academic discipline in the menu RESEARCH FIELD.
This menu indicates the genre of the quoting text.
This menu indicates how the quoting text marks the concept that the Hamlet reference is a quotation (in the broadest sense), i.e. an element from a preceding text or utterance. This can happen explicitly through metalinguistic tags like "the well-known quotation" or through typographical signals signals such as quotation marks. Entries in quotation dictionaries are marked as such by the genre of the book they appear in, and further indirect signals come from archaisms and other anomalies (for example "2B or not 2B") or from a wider thematic context. The mention of names such as Shakespeare, Hamlet or Yorick points to the author or the work that is quoted.
This menu describes if and how William Shakespeare is indicated as responsible for the Hamlet element that is quoted. He may be mentioned by name or by an epithet like "The Bard" or "the Swan of Avon." A wider thematic context may also point to his authorship: as a rule, this concerns texts which mention Shakespeare outside the passage included in HyperHamlet.
This menu describes if and how the play Hamlet is given as the origin of the quoted passage. Apart from a mention of the title or characters, this can also indicated through a wider thematic context, while other references use a quotation as an anonymous saying or misattribute it as coming from the Bible or another Shakespeare play.
This menu classifies the relation between the Hamlet elements which appear in a later text and that text as a whole, in terms which are (partly) borrowed from Genette’s Palimpsests. Click here for details.
This menu indicates the textual function and/or location of the Hamlet element in the quoting text.
Multiple assignments are possible, for example for titles of poems or songs that are repeated in the body of the text. Adaptations and works of instrumental music or visual art are set to complete text as well as title; titles and epigraphs may head a book or an individual chapter, poem or episode.
This menu classifies entries attached to a particular Hamlet line. It describes the length of the quoted extract, ranging from short noun phrases through clauses and longer passages. Click here for details.
LINE references are classified for the syntactic extension of the original element, indicating whether the quoted text and the quoting text comprise a sentential constituent or an entire clause.
This menu describes the linguistic features that render the quotation recognisable or, in other words, what remains identical in quotation. Click here for details.
This menu classifies LINE references for the changes which the Hamlet phrase undergoes in quotation. Words may be substituted, omitted, re-arranged or added; clauses and phrases may change their grammatical function or be paraphrased more loosely. Punctuation and spelling are disregarded unless they change the meaning. Click here for details.
The following text fields are not separately searchable, but their content is included in the fulltext "Quick search"
This text field gives the bibliographical reference for the text extract that contains the Hamlet quotation. The format follows the MLA style manual, with some minor variants for consistency and rare genres.
This text field provides additional information that may concern the context of the given extract (information on speakers, topics or plotlines) and its author, composition and publication history as well as information on a book's overall relation to Hamlet or other literary references.
This menu indicates the field of research in which a particular Hamlet reference has been mentioned before. The text field SECONDARY SOURCE provides the bibliographical references. All other references have, to our knowledge, first been spotted by the HyperHamlet project team. They are coded as No source given or as Retrieved from fulltext database.
The following text field is not separately searchable
This search field gives the date when the text with the Hamlet quotation first becomes available to an audience and thus to re-quotation. This date may be earlier than the edition quoted on HyperHamlet, and it may be much later than the date of composition or even the death of the author. For genres like opera, drama, TV or radio plays, the date of the first performance/broadcast is given even if a first print edition came out later. For letters, which are considered 'published' to their addressee, the date of composition is given here.
