Hamlet on the Ramparts

Hamlet on the Ramparts is a public website with selected materials optimized for education for Hamlet Act I, scenes 4 and 5.

This website is designed and maintained by the MIT Shakespeare Project in collaboration with the Folger Shakespeare Library and other institutions. We aim to provide free access to an evolving collection of texts, images, and videos relevant to Hamlet’s first encounter with the Ghost (Act 1, Scenes 4 and 5).

To make the site more useful in the classroom, we include commentary and guides to all materials and detailed lesson plans written by expert teachers from around the country.

We have assembled electronic texts of three major modern editions (the Arden, the Folger, and the 3-Text Hamlet), page images of the first three printed editions of the play (The First Folio, The First Quarto, The Second Quarto), an extensive collection of artwork and photographs, and sequences from three film versions — the Forbes-Robertson film of 1913, the Ragnar Lyth film of 1984, and the filmed record of the Richard Burton-John Gielgud production of 1964.