The Folger Guide to Teaching Hamlet

Created by experts from the world’s largest and most well-respected Shakespeare archive, The Folger Guide to Teaching Hamlet provides an innovative approach to teaching and understanding one of Shakespeare’s most well-known plays.

Hamlet follows the form of a revenge tragedy, in which the hero, Hamlet, seeks vengeance against the man he learns is his father’s murderer—his uncle Claudius, now the king of Denmark. Much of its fascination, however, lies in its mysteries. Among them: Should Hamlet believe a ghost? What roles do Ophelia and her family play in Hamlet’s attempts to know the truth? Was his mother, Gertrude, unfaithful to her husband or complicit in his murder, or both? How do the visiting actors cause the truth to begin to reveal itself?

The Folger Guides to Teaching Shakespeare series is created by the experts at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the nation’s largest archive of Shakespeare material and a leading center for both the latest scholarship and education on all things Shakespeare. Based on the proven Folger Method of teaching and informed by the wit, wisdom, and experiences of classroom teachers across the country, the guides offer a lively, interactive approach to teaching and learning Shakespeare, offering students and readers of all backgrounds and abilities a pathway to discovering the richness and diversity of Shakespeare’s world.

Filled with surprising facts about Shakespeare, insightful essays by scholars, and a day-by-day, five-week teaching plan, these guides are an invaluable resource for teachers, students, and Shakespeare fans alike.

Dr. Peggy O’Brien is a classroom teacher who founded the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Education Department in 1981. She set the Library’s mission for K–12 students and teachers then and began to put it in motion; among a range of other programs, she founded and directed the Library’s intensive Teaching Shakespeare Institute, was instigator and general editor of the popular Shakespeare Set Free series and expanded the Library’s education work across the country. In 1994, she took a short break from the Folger—twenty years—but returned to further expand the education work and to engage in the Folger’s transformation under the leadership of Library Director Michael Witmore. She is the instigator and general editor of The Folger Guides to Teaching Shakespeare series.