ABSTRACT
Hamlet was the key play for revealing the secret behind the enigma of Shakespeare’s father’s life. Why then was this secret revealed there and not in one of the earlier autobiographical plays? If as Freud suggested, Hamlet was written in reaction to John Shakespeare’s death, questions of significance and meaning would have been part of that response. The dating of Hamlet in relation to Shakespeare’s father’s death is also important because it could tell us a great deal about the psychological context of the play, as well as possibly explaining the shift in tone and content of Shakespeare’s later work - the beginning of the “dark period” , which ushered in the great tragedies of the 1600s.
