In a short space this account embraces a wealth of detail about Hamlet. The play's prehistory is explored, from the Saxo Gramaticus Gesta Danorum to the tale fashioned, taking in Shakespeare's likely and possible other sources, including the Belleforest version, the possible ur-Hamlet and the German Fratricide Punished. The play is then examined in the context of the Globe's staging means and presentational possibilities, and noted are its likely use of stage areas; ‘fairly extensive’ use of props; and the ways in which, in open-air daytime performance, movement, gesture and delivery could signal place, time and weather (p. 35). Bevington then shifts focus to what his chapter heading calls the play's ‘Ideological Contexts’, and he tracks through the text exploring key points in the action like Hamlet's exchanges with Cordelia and the possibility they are overheard by Claudius and Polonius, the staging of the murder of Gonzago, Claudius's delayed exit, the gravedigger scene and the final bloody denouement. All are explored in an attempt ‘to visualize Hamlet on the stage in 1599–1601’ (p. 52) and assess how the action would have played out given the social, political and religious presuppositions and understandings of an Elizabethan audience. These first three chapters – some eighty pages – are a compact but impressively detailed exploration of the genesis, stage life and page life of the play in its time, and Bevington's own many acute perceptions are supplemented by reference to the readings of modern scholars.

The remaining four chapters are in a way the more impressive in that they take on the formidable task of exploring the stage and textual history and the critical reception of Hamlet from the seventeenth century through to the present. Notwithstanding that in a short space the interpretations of actors can only be treated in brief, through to the end of the nineteenth century there are perceptive sections on major figures like Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Macready and Irving.

Inevitably, coverage of modern and contemporary English-speaking and foreign-language Hamlets on stage and screen is somewhat contracted (actors Gielgud and Olivier, and the Russian director Kozintsev's version of the play among the exceptions), some being just listed by date in the notes – understandably, for more extensive treatment would have required a book twice as long. But space is commendably found for mention of both foreign treatments and those of a number of female stage and screen interpreters of the role.

Comment on some recent interpreters is perforce tight, but twentieth-century and even more recent developments in critical and textual readings are given good space, and emphases are charted through to postmodernism. Bevington's notes give valuable additional information and the bibliography is conveniently organized by chapters. The book is illustrated, but for me such an impressively comprehensive account as we are given here makes it the perfect companion, at least through to the 1950s, to Mander and Mitchenson's richly illustrated and similarly titled Hamlet through the Ages (1955).