Many consider Shakespeare's "Hamlet" to be the most problematic play ever written (Croxford pp). Leslie Croxford writes in his article, "The Uses of Interpretation in Hamlet" for a 2004 issue of Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, that the play presents inconsistencies that arise from the "variousness" of its medieval and Renaissance sources, from discrepancies between printed version of the drama, and from a host of unresolved thematic and psychological problems, such as the famous question of why Hamlet delays his revenge (Croxford pp). Thus, there are endless interpretations of the play (Croxford pp). T.S. Eliot called Hamlet "the 'Mona Lisa' of literature," and it is true, for no other work has presented more uncertain meanings (Croxford pp). .

             In giving interpretation such significance, Shakespeare had to develop previous versions of the story, thus, when one considers the issue of interpretation in the play, one is also examining a prime example of how tests undergo alteration from period to period (Croxford pp). There are two specific influences on the metamorphosis of Hamlet: "the intellectual climate in which it was written and the nature of the sixteenth-century political world," and together they put at the author's disposal transformations of his inherited versions that reveal his creative process, therefore giving an important dramatic voice to a newly "emergent form of Europe's early modern self" (Croxford pp). .

             In 1817, William Hazlitt wrote that the world is so used to this tragedy that it is difficult to know how to criticize it any more than an individual knows how to describe his or her own face (Hazlitt pp). Hazlitt believed that it was the one play of Shakespeare's that people think of most often because it "abounds most in striking reflections on human life, and because the distresses of Hamlet are transferred, by the turn of his mind, to the general account of humanity" (Hazlitt pp).