The Mystery of Hamlet King of Denmark

The Mystery of Hamlet
King of Denmark
or What We Will
(The Story behind Hamlet’s Ghost)
Four plays by Percy MacKaye
676 pages, paperback $17.50.

As the culminating achievement of MacKaye’s remarkable career, this tetralogy offers insight into the great mysteries left to us by Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It sets forth events and conflicts shared by the chief dramatis personae of Shakespeare’s tragedy, throughout the thirty years preceding the death of King Hamlet and his portentous appearance as ghost on the ramparts of the Castle of Elsinore. There are few literary works woven of such fine, indeed sublime imagination.

MacKaye seems to have summoned all his considerable powers for a work which is not only an extraordinary creative expansion of the lives of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but a work of immediate meaning for our own tragic times in which strife and revenge seem to play two of the key notes. ~William Rose Benet

In the four plays he has wrought a massive drama of his own which will hold any sensitive reader in suspense and make thirty years seem one vivid afternoon and night.... The tetralogy stands high above anything Mr. MacKaye has previously done... one is inclined to feel that its soaring conception, its rich texture of utterance, and its dramatic sweep and strength promise a durability that few works in this generation will achieve. -  The New York Times

One does not in the least feel that MacKaye rashly trespasses upon Shakespearean territory.... He has grandeur of his own.... His high seriousness is supported by unmistakable powers to deal with generalized concepts and with the heroic emotions that bind together humanity in time and make the existence of classics a reality. - Henry W. Wells Saturday Review of Literatur