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The revised Norton Critical Edition of Shakespeare\’s masterpiece again bases its text on the second quarto (1604-1605). When necessary, the editor has also drawn upon the folio, recording all departures from the quarto in the Textual Notes. Punctuation and stage directions for the play have been refined, and the textual annotations have been both revised and expanded.
The Intellectual Backgrounds and Extracts from the Sources sections remain as germane as ever and are, therefore, unchanged. In order to help the reader place Hamlet in the proper historical context, Intellectual Backgrounds include important readings on melancholy, demonology, the nature of man, and death. Represented are works by Peter de la Primaudaye, Timothy Bright, Lewes Lavater, G. Gifford, Michel de Montaigne, and Hieronymous Cardanus. Extracts from the Sources offer pre-Shakespearean accounts of the story of Hamlet with substantial extracts from Saxo Gramaticus\’Historia Danica and Belleforest\’s Histoires Tragiques.
The editor has carefully revised the Criticism section in order to accommodate the most significant interpretations published in the last twentyeight years, while continuing to retain the seminal essays of the first edition. Twenty-three critical analyses are featured, six of them new. Included in this wide selection are essays by Samuel Johnson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Harry Levin, Peter J. Seng, Rebecca West, Arnold Kettle, Margaret W. Ferguson, Jacqueline Rose, and William Empson. A thoroughly updated Selected Bibliography is also included.
