Hamlet

With a wealth of helpful and incisive commentary, this edition of Hamlet provides:

The Second Quarto Text (1604-1605), edited to the highest standards of scholarship.

Additional passages found only in the 1623 Folio text.

Detailed notes and commentary on the same page as the text.

A full, illustrated introduction to the play’s historical, cultural and performance contexts.

An in-depth survey of critical approaches to the play.

A full index to the introduction and notes.

A select bibliography of references and further reading.

This is a fully self-contained free-standing volume which includes in its introduction and appendices all the supporting materials that a reader would expect to find in an Arden edition. It forms the core of a ground-breaking edition of three hamlet texts. A companion volume contains fully annotated editions of the 1603 First Quarto and the 1623 Folio texts.

Readers of both editions have, for the first time, a unique opportunity to study the three surviving texts of Hamlet experiences by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, fully modernized and edited by leading scholars.