Hamlet

The basis of the present carefully edited Norton Critical Edition of Hamlet is the second quarto (1604-5). the editor has also drawn, when necessary, upon the folio, recording all the departures from the quarto in his textual notes. The text of the play is helpfully annotated.

An important section entitled "Intellectual "Backgrounds" provides materials for studying the play in the context of the moral and intellectual assumptions and attitudes current at the time. The contemporary thinkers whose work is represented here are Peter de la Primaudaye, Timothy Bright, Lewes Lavater, G. Gifford, Michel de Montaigne, and Hieronymous Cardanus.

The pre-Shakesperean accounts of the Hamlet story are represented by substantial extracts from the Historia Danica of Saxo Gramaticus and the Histories Tragiques of Belleforest.

From the vast number of critical commentaries on this play, the editor has culled the most significant ompions and attitudes. The critics are John Dennis, Samuel Johnson, William Richardson, Henry Mackenzie, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Augustus William Schlegel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, A. C. Bradley, T. S. Eliot, Elmer Edgar Stoll, G. Wilson Knight, John Dover Wilson, Harley Granville-Barker, Theodor Spencer, C. S. Lewis, Ernest Jones, Harry Levlin, G. B. Harrison, H.D.F. Kitto, and Rebecca West.
(back cover)