Product Description

This revised Norton Critical Edition of one of the series' most widely read texts is based on the second quarto (1604-05). Where necessary, the editor has also drawn from the folio text, recording all departures from the quarto in the Textual Notes. Punctuation and stage directions for the play have been refined, and textual annotations have been revised and expanded.

The "Intellectual Backgrounds" and "Extracts from the Sources" sections, both highly praised, remain as germane as ever. Intellectual Backgrounds includes important readings on melancholy, demonology, the nature of man, and death, including works by Peter de la Primaudaye, Timothy Bright, Lewes Lavater, G. Gifford, Michel de Montaigne, and Heironymous Cardanus. Extracts from the Sources provides pre-Shakespearean accounts of the story of Hamlet, reprinting substantial excerpts from Saxo Grammaticus's Historia Danica and Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques.

"Criticism" has been revised to accommodate the most significant recent interpretations of Hamlet while retaining the seminal essays of the First Edition. Twenty-three critical analyses are featured, including those by Samuel Johnson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, A. C. Bradley, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, G. Wilson Knight, C. S. Lewis, Harry Levin, Peter J. Seng, Rebecca West, Arnold Kettle, Margaret W. Ferguson, Jacqueline Rose, and William Empson.

An updated Selected Bibliography is also included.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #50952 in Books
• Published on: 1992-01-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 297 pages

Customer Reviews

Contains Invaluable Information about Hamlet
This is worth buying for the critical essays and background information alone. Most interesting is the 'true' story of AMLETH, chronicled around 1100 by Saxo Grammaticus. This piece is bona fide history, albeit with some retouching. It was written about 500 years before Shakespeare took up his pen to write his mighty play, and is very interesting to contrast with the play. Much more is contained in this Critical Edition, particularly essays by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and other famous literary figures.

Great play, amazing edition
Essentially, this Norton Critical edition is the best out there. While the notes may need some polishing, they are sparse to preserve the ambiguity of the play. The critical essays in the back are absolutely superb.

!!!FLASH-FLOW!!!
what fire-spells lie in hamlet's mind! here is not some two-dimensional action figure whose only purpose is to enflame the audience with wonder with his sword-slash and his martial agility. here is not some cheap revenge drama where the hero eventually magno-triumphs in glory and thus satiates the spec-tators rage-lust for justice. asymmetrical! here is a man spider-entangled with enigma, here is man truly bewildered by life's perplexo. here is a man who fails to overcome his own interior twists and banish the fog that grips him in paraly-scourge. this drama causes us to ponder life's rattle of chaotica more acutely, it compels us into the prison of inquiry, baffles us and leaves perhaps wiser than before. for what intrigues we humans most is mystery, the unknown, the irresolvable and thus this scholar of wittenberg, armed with a formidible array of proofs, evidences, theories and conjectures, nevertheless, despite all his bookish wisdom, finds himself helplessly at the mercy of rage-orcs when he is challenged to confront the world's unjustice, become a man of action and right his uncle's wrongs! are we all not hamlet? do we all not shrink in the face of tyranno-blight? do we all not at some time or another complacently let injustice govern us, rule us, oppress us? do we all not occasionally become enwebbed by reality's night-shadows and cannot for the life of us rouse the tank-courage needed to banish the vipers? this is a man of emotion! this is a man who thinks! this is a man who contemplates the conundrums harrowing our sleep in constanto! he cannot help but arouse our sympathy and draw us into his sphere, cheering for him, rooting for him, praying for his eventual conquest of lechers for we all at one time or another have experienced similar ideas floating in our cosmos. and yet when he fails life's omnipresent hazard strikes us in greater prepondera thus causing us think more deeply on our existence.

kyle foley, author of Lorelei Pursued, Wrestles with God