Shakespeare's Hamlet - Methinks Book Club
Reading Guide for Shakespeare's Hamlet, May's play at our book club!
Welcome to the Methinks Book Club! In 2026, we will be closely reading a Shakespeare play every month, with a complete guide at the start and an essay review at the end. Currently, we are reading Hamlet, our May play. You can check out the reading schedule on the introductory post below. Join us by upgrading to a paid subscription!
Welcome to May’s play at Methinks Book Club: Hamlet!
This is my favourite work of literature of all time. It’s my eighth time reading it, if you can believe it. I can only hope to transmit 10% of my love for Hamlet to you.
I will be brief here, since you have too much to read already below. Enjoy!
In this guide you will find:
important contextual information about elements of the play;
reading tips;
suggestions for a note-taking system;
questions to guide your reading;
bibliography;
recommendations of adaptations, podcasts, and YouTube lectures.
WARNING: this guide contains 400-year-old spoilers. I hope you don’t mind.
I. How to Begin Your Reading Experience
First things first: annotate your book
Keep a pen in your hand while reading, and don’t be shy about filling the pages with notes. You should be engaging in a dialogue with Shakespeare in your own mind and letting that dialogue appear in the margins. Reading actively in this way is important for intellectual engagement with the play: it improves retention of the text and encourages critical reflection. If you’re uncertain about what to annotate, the themes and motifs listed below offer a helpful starting point.
One suggestion is that you can use these themes to create a colour-schemed annotation system, as I did with my copy of Hamlet. Mark in the text the sections where these themes appear, and maybe jot down a comment about it!
If you don’t like coloured tabs, you can write the themes on the back cover of your copy and note down the pages where they appear.
