Hunt's history of the play starts well. I thoroughly enjoyed his discussion of the source material for Hamlet, the differences between the published versions and issues with how the play was actually performed relative to the printed texts we have. He starts out well discussing the history of interpretation criticism of the play, but after getting to the modern and post-modern analysis just sort of wanders off into the weeds. In spots he claims that a given study was seminal without explaining why. In other spots, he goes off into personal experiences that seem to have little bearing on the explanation of the history of Hamlet studies. In spite of the good material at the start, I found this book ultimately unsatisfying. ( )