I. THE HISTORY OF THE PLAY.

THE earliest known edition of Hamlet appeared in quarto form in 1603, with the following title-page:

THE Tragicall Historie of HAMLET | Prince of Denmarke | By William Shake-speare. | As it hath beene diuerse times acted by his Highnesse ser- uants in the Cittie of London: as also in the two V- | niuersities of Cambridge and Oxford, and else-where | At London printed for N. L. and John Trundell. | 1603.

Clark and Wright, brought out in the "Clarendon Press" edition of the play; namely, " that there was an old play on the story of Hamlet, some portions of which are still preserved in the quarto of 1603; that about the year 1602 Shakespeare took this and began to remodel it, as he had done with other plays; that the quarto of 1603 represents the play after it had been retouched by him to a certain extent, but before his alterations were complete; and that in the quarto of 1604 we have for the first time the Hamlet of Shakespeare."

For a résumé of the discussion of this interesting question (which will probably never be settled) see Furness's Hamlet, vol. ii. pp. 12-33.

The third quarto, published in 1605, is a reprint of the second; the title-page being identical except in date, and the variations in the text slight and unimportant. A fourth quarto, "Printed for Iohn Smethwicke" and "to be sold at his shoppe in Saint Dunstons church yeard in Fleetstreet," appeared in 1611; and a fifth, undated, was afterwards issued by the same publisher.* No other editions appeared during the lifetime of Shakespeare, or before the publication of the folio of 1623. The text of the latter varies considerably from that of the quartos, as will be seen by our Notes, in which the more important differences are recorded. Collier thinks that "if the Hamlet in the first folio were not composed from some hitherto unknown quarto,† it was derived from a manuscript

* Malone believes that this edition was printed in 1607, and Halliwell is inclined to place it "before 1609;" but, as the Cambridge editors show, its orthography is more modern than that of the quarto of 1611, from which it was probably printed.

† It is not impossible that there may have been such a quarto. No copy of the quarto of 1603 was known until 1823, when one was found by Sir Henry Bunbury. A second was picked up in 1856 by a Dublin bookseller, who paid a shilling for it. The former, which lacks the last page, was afterwards sold to the Duke of Devonshire for £230; the latter, which wants the title-page, was bought by Mr. Halliwell for £120, and