The revised Norton Critical Edition of Shakespeare's masterpiece again bases its texts on the second quarto (1604-1605). When necessary, the editor has also drawn from 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, both highly praised, remain as germane as ever. 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 Heironymous Cardanus. Extracts from the Sources offer pre-Shakespearean accounts of the story of Hamlet with substantial extracts from Saxo Grammaticus' Historia Danica and Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques.
The editor has carefully revised the "Criticism" section in order to accommodate the most significant recent interpretations published in the last twenty-eight 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, A. C. Bradley, 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.
About the Author
Widely esteemed as the greatest writer in the English language, William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was an actor and theatrical producer in addition to writing plays and sonnets. Dubbed "The Bard of Avon," Shakespeare oversaw the building of the Globe Theatre in London, where a number of his plays were staged, the best-known of which include Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Macbeth. The First Folio, a printed book of 36 of his comedies, tragedies, and history plays, was published in 1623.
About the Editor
Cyrus Hoy is John B. Trevor Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Rochester. His publications include The Hyacinth Room: An Investigation into the Nature of Comedy, Tragedy, and Tragicomedy, four commentary volumes for the Cambridge University Press edition of The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, and numerous articles in scholarly journals. He is one of the editors of the Cambridge University Press edition of The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Flecther Canon.
