By this edition of HAMLET I hope to help the student of Shakspere to
understand the play--and first of all Hamlet himself, whose spiritual
and moral nature are the real material of the tragedy, to which every
other interest of the play is subservient. But while mainly attempting,
from the words and behaviour Shakspere has given him, to explain the
man, I have cast what light I could upon everything in the play,
including the perplexities arising from extreme condensation of meaning,
figure, and expression.

As it is more than desirable that the student should know when he is
reading the most approximate presentation accessible of what Shakspere
uttered, and when that which modern editors have, with reason good or
bad, often not without presumption, substituted for that which they
received, I have given the text, letter for letter, point for point, of
the First Folio, with the variations of the Second Quarto in the margin
and at the foot of the page.

Of HAMLET there are but two editions of authority, those called the
Second Quarto and the First Folio; but there is another which requires
remark.

In the year 1603 came out the edition known as the First Quarto--clearly
without the poet's permission, and doubtless as much to his displeasure:
the following year he sent out an edition very different, and larger in
the proportion of one hundred pages to sixty-four. Concerning the former
my theory is--though it is not my business to enter into the question
here--that it was printed from Shakspere's sketch for the play, written
with matter crowding upon him too fast for expansion or development, and
intended only for a continuous memorandum of things he would take up and
work out afterwards. It seems almost at times as if he but marked