Terms

Elsinore English name of Helsingør, a city in Denmark at the northeastern tip of the island of Zealand, by the Øresund strait. The town’s fortress is Kronborg Castle, rebuilt between 1574 and 1585 under Frederick II. Shakespeare gives the castle in the play the name... Wittenberg German city whose university was founded in 1502 by Frederick the Wise, elector of Saxony, to spread Renaissance humanism. Luther taught there, and the institution became a center of the Protestant Reformation. In the play, it is the university Hamlet... Melancholy In ancient medicine, which still dominated medical thought in Shakespeare’s time, the body had four humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm, according to Hippocrates and Galen. The word comes from the Greek "black bile". The melancholic... Arras Huge, heavy tapestry hung from ceiling to floor, with colored designs, used on the stone walls of castles to keep out the cold. Between the wall and the cloth there was room for a person to hide. The name comes from Arras, a French city famous in the... First Quarto A book format in which the printed sheet is folded twice, giving four leaves and eight pages, common in the Elizabethan era for publishing single plays. Hamlet came out in 1603 in the First Quarto, much shorter, and in 1604 in the Second Quarto, nearly twice... Folio A book format in which the printed sheet is folded only once, forming two leaves and four pages, expensive and used in prestige editions. The First Folio, of 1623, gathered 36 plays by Shakespeare, organized by two former partners, John Heminges and Henry... Christian burial Burial with the rites of the Church. Christian doctrine saw suicide as a sin, because life belongs to God, and whoever took his own life could be deprived of Christian burial and of the Mass. In Shakespeare’s England, the suicide could also lose his goods,... Providence In Christian theology, the care and government of God over the world, such that nothing happens without the divine will. The image of the sparrow comes from the Gospel of Matthew (10:29): not one sparrow falls to the earth without the Father’s will. The...