"Project Hamlet" is a website dedicated to Shakespeare's tragedy 'HAMLET, Prince of Denmark,' featuring an introduction to the play, its stage and screen history and its major topics, its complete text organized by scenes (1623 First Folio edition amplified by certain inserts from the 1604/05 Second Quarto), an analysis of Hamlet's World, of the play's underlying timeline, its major characters (Prince Hamlet, Horatio, Claudius, Gertrude, the Ghost of Hamlet's Father, Polonius, Ophelia, Laertes, etc.) and the major scenes and soliloquies, including but not limited to 'To be, or not to be,' as well as a short biography of William Shakespeare, a translation of the Amleth tale contained in Saxo Grammaticus's 'Gesta Danorum,' a transcription of that text's 1608 adaptation in the English 'Hystorie of Hamblet,' and suggestions for a cinematic response to the 'Hamlet' interpretations of Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir Derek Jacobi, Sir Kenneth Branagh, Grigori Kozintsev and Franco Zeffirelli/Mel Gibson. A Necessary Prologue This website was intended to go online two years ago – in the summer or fall of 2006. But shortly before it was ready to be launched, the hard drive on which it was stored was fatally damaged: even extracting the drive from its casing and installing it into a different computer failed to return any of the data. After the IT specialists I consulted had declared the problem beyond their ken, I reluctantly concluded that my work of the past 18+ months was lost for good – repairing the damage by myself was as much out of the question as a recreation of the site from scratch soon proved to be; and resorting to professional data rescuing services was, given the prohibitive fees typically charged for their services, effectively a "no-go" as well. Only this year (2008), I finally learned about one such company offering their services to non-business clients, too, at somewhat more manageable rates. And I am happy to report that it was money very well spent! Thus, with a two-year delay, I am now finally able to launch this site; even though, for the time being, some flaws remain: In addition to the pages still awaiting a final edit even at the time when I first lost my data, there are bound to be a few new blotches now, such as now-broken links and a couple of other things that need mending. But even with some remaining imperfections on its head, I am eager not to delay the launching of this website even further: whatever corrections yet remain to be made, I will try to make them as swiftly as I can ... but while the site is already accessible online. Therefore –