Hamlet has always been a popular play. Since it was written around 1600–1, it has rarely been absent from the stage for long. There is even a record of a version acted on a ship off the coast of Sierra Leone in 1608. Quotations from it (such as ‘To be, or not to be’) have become utterly familiar, even to those who have never seen the play.

But in every age the text has been cut, altered and added to. For over four hundred years audiences have watched and heard very different versions of Hamlet. For example, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Fortinbras disappeared from most stagings. That tradition still influences modern productions, and occasionally performances end with Hamlet's death: ‘the rest is silence’.

The example of the famous eighteenth-century actor-manager David Garrick shows there is no such thing as the ‘authentic’ Hamlet. Garrick wanted to portray Hamlet as a truly noble prince, and to make the play into what he saw as a genuine tragedy. He therefore cut anything that detracted from a heroic image of Hamlet, and removed what he called ‘the rubbish of the fifth act’: Ophelia's funeral and the gravediggers.

Garrick's audiences did not hear how Hamlet sent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths, or the ‘Now might I do it pat’ speech (in which Hamlet wishes for Claudius to suffer in hell), because Garrick thought both speeches diminished Hamlet's noble nature. Laertes did not poison his sword, or Claudius the drink. Gertrude died off stage in guilt-ridden insanity, Fortinbras did not appear, and Laertes survived to rule over Denmark jointly with Horatio.

Nineteenth-century productions usually presented romantic interpretations of Hamlet as a sane, intellectual, sensitive prince, unable to sweep swiftly to revenge. Sets often attempted to create the illusion of a historically accurate castle of Elsinore.

Modern productions have increasingly portrayed Hamlet as disturbed and alienated, and have abandoned realistic sets. They rely more on ‘symbolic’ settings or bare stages with a minimum of scenery. This can be seen as a return to the conditions of Shakespeare's own Globe stage, which was not dependent on theatrical illusion.

The first mention of Hamlet in the play is as ‘young Hamlet’ and, from what the Gravedigger says, he seems to be about 30.