IN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE NUMBER 8 THE FIRST QUARTO EDITION OF SHAKE- EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY FRANK G. HUBBARD PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH MADISON PREFACE This edition of the First Quarto of Hamlet is intended as a contribution to the discussion of the vexed question of the relation to each other of the three versions of the play (Q1 Q2 F1). No solution of that question is here proposed, and, as far as practicable, comparison of the three texts has been avoided. The chief object of this edition is to make it easily possible for the scholar and the reader of Shakespeare to receive an impression of the First Quarto comparable with → the impression that one receives from the modern edited text of the Second Quarto and the First Folio. The text is here presented unencumbered, as far as possible, with critical and explanatory notes, to the end that the reader may receive a direct impression of the play as a whole, and of the characteristics of its various parts. In the footnotes has been given critical material that will serve to show what changes have been made in the original text; from this material the reader can judge to what extent it has been found necessary to emend and change that text in order to make it intelligible. No attempt has been made to supply the usual explanatory and interpretative notes, except where such notes are necessary to define and illustrate the meaning of words that are not found in Q2 and F1, and to offer suggestions concerning the interpretation of the text where the interpretation is not obvious. The introduction gives a bibliographical history of the First Quarto, sets forth in detail the condition of its text, and discusses the question of the source and origin of that text. I wish to express my thanks to Mr. Henry E. Huntington of New York for the use of a photostat reproduction of the Devonshire copy of the First Quarto, now in his library. Upon this I have based the text of the present edition. 408925 |