Bndl Hamlet Texts 1603 And 1623 Hamlet Ed3

Hamlet, The Texts of 1603 and 1623 is a companion to the core volume in a ground-breaking edition of three Hamlet texts: Hamlet, The Second Quarto Text (1604-1605). Readers of both editions have, for the first time, a unique opportunity to study the three surviving texts of Hamlet experienced by Shakespeare's contemporaries, fully modernized and edited by leading scholars. --

This volume gives readers the First Quarto text of 1603 and the Folio Text of 1623, modernised and edited to the usual Arden standard. As a companion to the Second Quarto volume, it will be of particular interest to scholars and students of textual history, or to anyone studying Hamlet at an advanced level. Both plays are edited and annotated and the introduction contains the fullest available stage history of the First Quarto text.

And even within itself it is a play divided: some parts are identical to the Second Quarto and the Hamlet most familiar to readers, but others are either unique or so different in expression (inferior?) that the differences are hard to explain, because "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so"--As Hamlet himself says--in the Folio, but not in Q2 or Q1. "To be, or not to be, I there's the point." It is not a matter of asking the "real" Hamlet to (please) stand up--all the Hamlets are real--but of determining what historical realities these Hamlets do or may represent, how they came to be as they are. Is Q1 the record of an early draft, incompletely revised by Shakespeare, for example, or the product of an actor's variable memory? Reflecting on these and related problems with a view to solution is the purpose of the present collection.

This set, which was originally an expansion of Professor Dover Wilson's Sandars lectures of 1934, has been out of print for many years and is now reissued. It was the first of three sets in which the author presented his long and painstaking work on Shakespeare's Hamlet and deals with the textual problems. What Happens in Hamlet deals with the dramatic problems and the text itself, with annotations, is published as one of the volumes of the New Shakespeare