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performed after that play; a reference to Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
by the Cambridge academic Gabriel Harvey seems to date from before February 1601. The exchange concerning boy actors alludes to rivalries in the London theaters during 1600 and 1601, but it may have been inserted in the play sometime after its original composition (the passage is absent from the Second Quarto text). An old
Hamlet
play, of unknown authorship and now lost, was extant in the late 1580s to mid-1590s; it is not known whether Shakespeare had any direct involvement with it.
    SOURCES: Given the frequency with which Shakespeare reworked old plays, it may be assumed that the old
Hamlet
play was his chief source. The Danish prince Amleth is a revenger in the twelfth-century
Historiae Danicae
of Saxo Grammaticus, familiar to Elizabethan readers via a retelling in François de Belleforest’s
Histoires tragiques
(1570). In Belleforest, the Gertrude figure definitely begins her affair with her husband’s brother before the murder, in which she is suspected of complicity. The Player’s speech on the fall of Troy is influenced by the language of Christopher Marlowe’s
Dido Queen of Carthage;
Hamlet’s philosophizing sometimes resembles the tone of Michel de Montaigne’s
Essais
, but a direct link has not been proved.
    TEXT: The First Quarto was published in 1603 under the title
The Tragicall Historie of HAMLET Prince of Denmarke by William Shakespeare. As it hath beene diuerse times acted by his Highnesse seruants in the Cittie of London: as also in the two Vniuersities of Cambridge and Oxford, and else-where
. Much shorter than the later texts, and with many garbled lines, it seems to be a reconstruction of an acting version. There are some notable differences from the later texts (e.g. Polonius called Corambis, “To be or not to be” and the “nunnery” dialogue positioned with the “fishmonger” exchange, not after the arrival of the players), but some of the stage directions are valuable (e.g.
“Enter Ofelia playing on a Lute, and her haire downe singing”
for the mad scene). The Second Quarto, published in 1604/05, was clearly an “authorized” text, intended to displace the First Quarto, as may be seen from its title-page claim, “Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect Coppie.” Most scholars believe that the text derives from Shakespeare’s manuscript; over 4,000 lines long, it is unlikely to have been staged in full. The text in the 1623 Folio seems to have been set from the theater promptbook or a transcript of it. It has much fuller stage directions than the Second Quarto, and considerable textual variations: about 70 new lines are present, while about 230 Quarto lines are absent, including the whole of Hamlet’s last major soliloquy, “How all occasions do inform against me”—in Folio, he is not there to witness Fortinbras’ army. Hundreds of individual readings differ, strongly suggesting that the Second Quarto and Folio represent different stages in the play’s life. Some scholars regard the revision as systematic (e.g. making subtle changes to Hamlet’s relationship with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern), but it may have been more incremental and haphazard. Given the major differences, the editorial practice of conflation, which began with Nicholas Rowe’s insertion of the Second Quarto’s final soliloquy in his Folio-based text of 1709, has recently fallen into disrepute. We edit the Folio text, but include the Quarto-only passages (edited and annotated) independently at the end. Though Folio seems to have been set from a theatrical manuscript, it was also influenced by the Quarto tradition; so too, a modern edition of Folio can benefit from Quarto readings when the Folio text is manifestly erroneous, as it is on numerous occasions.

THE TRAGEDY
OF HAMLET,
PRINCE OF DENMARK

LIST OF PARTS
    HAMLET , Prince of Denmark
    KING of Denmark, Hamlet’s uncle
    GHOST of old