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Hamlet (Arden Shakespeare: Second Series)

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I am currently working on my MFA/Directing. I directed Hamlet and am now writing my defense of it. I have two thoughts on this third edition.

After going through this edition, from a point of view of the script, I'm not sure I understand the need to update Harold Jenkins's 2d edition. The script itself was easier to navigate in the 2d edition and I thought Jenkins's notes were more helpful. I also disagree with some of what Thompson and Taylor have to say in their editorial notes below the script. That said, I am biased because I used the 2d edition as a sort of "Hamlet Bible" as I directed the piece. Jenkins's notes were extremely insightful and useful. I became very comfortable with it.

On the other hand, this third edition has some different insight into the play in performance than does the second edition, as well as information on casting and music that was not included in Jenkins. Obviously there is much written about William Shakespeare in the world, and this 3rd edition of Arden is probably the most up-to-date resource for bibliographic material (as well as some photos of past productions of the play). Jenkins edition is 24 years old, ancient in the scholastic world's "what's new" when it comes to sifting the vast quantity of material written on Shakespeare and Hamlet.

Obviously, the needs of the theatrical world for playing Hamlet are different than that of the scholastic world (of which I am currently stuck in both). I think Jenkins is more user-friendly for the theatrician while Thompson & Taylor suit the needs of the scholastic better. My final thought is that a scholar/student of Shakespeare will want to have both the second and third editions for the differences they have to offer.

When Henry James sat down to write on his Venetian travels for what later became the Italian Hours, he began with a disclaimer: "It is a great pleasure to write the word; but I am not sure there is not a certain impudence in pretending to add anything to it." Turning to Shakespeare, we might amuse ourselves by writing on, say, Hamlet, but can anything be said that's not already been said, and better, a dozen times, by superior critics and closer readers? In the appropriate spirit of humility (and in utter submission to the Bard and his great gift to civilization), I offer a few thoughts on the Arden 2nd Edition of Hamlet, and not on "the greatest work in the history of literature."

Hamlet is by far the longest of the Ardens at 574 pages. It breaks down thusly: the prefatory material of editor Harold Jenkins - one of the Arden Series general editors and a Hamlet authority of great renown - alone takes up 164 pages. Three-quarters of this is bibliographical and historical. In his 40-page critical introduction, Jenkins addresses many of the plays thorniest problems, with the Talmudic attentiveness of the closest reader. Then comes the play itself, spread over 264 pages (in terms of sheer length relative to the Bard's other plays, the text is a monster, coming in at more than 3800 lines). Each page of the Arden includes an average half-page of Jenkins' detailed, argumentative, authoritative, and uncommonly helpful footnotes. The final 146 pages consist of longer (end)notes that Jenkins simply could not physically fit onto the bottom of a page. Many of these are short essays (including an appendix that glosses an earlier discussion on the dating of the play).

Each of the Arden Hamlet's three sections might merit separate publication (after a modest bit of repackaging), but as a totality, Jenkins' edition must be the greatest value on the Shakespeare market. Jenkins' ruminations on the provenance of the story and the many sources Shakespeare might have drawn on, the "Ur-Hamlet" that might have come from the quill of contemporary Thomas Kyd (The Spanish Tragedy), the complexities of determining an authoritative text, the drama's inconsistencies and unanswered questions, the import of the great soliloquy of III.i (which is emphatically NOT, insists Jenkins, a deliberation on whether to commit suicide), Elizabethan revenge dramas in general, and so much more make this a truly indispensable, illuminating, even breathtaking volume.

We think we know this play well. We have read it, and seen performed on stage and in memorable or hideously forgettable films. Many of its greatest lines are embedded in our hearts. The beginning of true understanding, however, resides in a superbly annotated scholarly edition. The Arden is one of several choices you can make and is for me the one to own, equally suitable for students, scholars, actors, and mere Bardolators. It will - provided, of course, you are not already a scholarly specialist in Elizabethan drama - knock the scales from your eyes. And until the 3rd edition now in preparation under Ann Thompson is published, this Hamlet will stand as the epitome of the Arden Shakespeare's greatness as a series.

This edition of Hamlet will allow you to read the text more closely and with more understanding than any other I have seen. With all the added notes and helps you will not only understand the language of Shakespeare more clearly, you will also be able to come to your own informed opinions on this great work.

The richness of great works is their layering and their openness to multiple interpretations. And yet, misreading and misunderstanding the language is more often the source of missing the point of the passage rather than adding to a richer understanding. There are certainly creative misreadings, but those are made from deep understanding rather than superficial mistaken interpretation.

This edition has extensive notes with the text and when a topic requires longer treatment the notation LN is used for Longer Note. You turn to the back and find the Longer Note by Act - Scene - Line Number and get a great deal of useful discussion about that aspect of the play.

There is also a 159 page introduction with context setting essays on the issues around the date of the play, its publication, the various texts and the debates over the merits and deficiencies of the First and Second Quarto and the First Folio, plus editorial problems, and a critical introduction.

All in all, this great play deserves to be read closely and returns riches for all the effort you can afford to put into reading it. This edition is very fine and assists you in mining treasures from this magnificent work.

Now, I thought I knew "Hamlet".

I'd read it a dozen times, written several undergrad papers on it, and seen it performed twice. As far as single plays go, that was quite a lot of exposure, or so I thought at the time. As it turns out, I'd barely scratched the surface of this play.

This Arden edition does a fantastic job of contextualizing the play, and not only of explaining the discrepancies between the three extant versions but also makes a good case for why we should care about each of them (even the oft-disregarded Q1). The annotation is breathtaking in its depth and its exhaustive thoroughness, and the editor's passion for the material is infectious.

Be warned, this is NOT the edition for casual Shakespeare lovers or for those who are approaching the play for the first time. At nearly 600 pages, you could brain an ox with this thing, and the degree of analysis present here will turn off some people. In short; it's an edition by literature snobs, for literature snobs.

Of all the editions of the play I've read, this is easily the best, and I would call it a must-buy for anyone interested in a serious study of Shakespeare.

Having spent the greater part of the last 8 years obsessing over Hamlet, having read it more times than there are days in the year, and having owned many different editions of the play, the Harold Jenkins Arden Shakespeare edition is the version I have worn out and in which I have blackened the margins.

Both scholars looking for a comprehensive history of the play and those approaching it from the theater standpoint will find this edition most useful. The readiness is all.

As one who collects editions of HAMLET, I can say without reservation that the Arden (2nd edition) is the hands-down best edition you can buy of the greatest work in our language. The notes are as complete as can possibly be expected, and offer the best insight I've yet to see concerning the various "problems" in HAMLET. Its comprehensive look may be too much for a person approaching the play for the first time, but for the serious student of HAMLET it's essential.

I love William Shakespeare: he is my favorite writer. Hamlet was the first play that I read, and it instantly became my favorite. My grandmother is a retired English professor, and so she likes to keep a collection of all the famous works. Arden was the series of choice, and therefore 1/2 of a bookshelf is dedicated just to it. I thought that the footnotes were extremely helpful in the Arden Edition of Hamlet, and that the way the page was set up it was easy to read, and preferrable to other books' layout. There were no long paragraphs that told you basically what the whole play was about, and I found that helpful: it's more fun to try to understand it on your own. I have viewed about five other versions of "Hamlet", and I still have not seen one that compares to this one.

I am a Bardolator and an Orthodox Shakespearean; so that you'll know where I'm coming from. I paraphrase Whitman by claiming that Hamlet contains multitudes. And of what other literary figures can we say such things and get away with it sounding normal? Perhaps God (especially the Yahweh of the Tanakh) and Jesus (either Nazarethian or Christ), perhaps Ulysses. Hamlet is so huge a figure greater works than Amazon User Comments have been written on the mere subject of him being an influence greater than our comprehension. He transcends not only the literary but our cultural "genres", because it's in part his creation.

I don't recommend only one edition of Hamlet but as with Mozart's "Requiem", you get a richer picture by collecting publications that vary sometimes significantly and provide them as if they were pieces of a puzzle. But Arden is known for its impeccable quality and high standards in editing, so this is amongst those editions that you will find useful. I've already given my thoughts on the 1603/1623 edition, a treasure in itself, and about what makes this combination work. It's easier to read without falling under the annotations as happens with this edition, although it's necessary that the extensive web of footnotes exists right there where it's supposed to be: it's useful to have them there, and to have so extensive a bulk of annotations in the end would be a drag. I will say with a blink in the eye that they will make you educated.

This edition doesn't take sides on matters, although what I found positively surprising taking into account my own beliefs is how open-mindedly the editors Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor talk about the Shakespearean Ur-Hamlet instead of the Kydian. Ironic in itself since it was the 1982 Jenkins Arden edition that was quite aggressive about the chance of Shakespeare being the writer. I don't know if it has to do with Bloomian influence, but it's nice to see a widened perspective, considering that I'm always inclined to be fascinated by the thought of the young Shakespeare, having just arrived in London, creating this play of Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark with whatever company Shakespeare was then, be it Pembroke's Men or those of Lord Chamberlain's, in the late 1580s, then it being performed and being pulled out of production. I would consider the Ur-Hamlet as being more of a collaboration in which Shakespeare wouldn't have had the complete freedom to create his vision, but a joint vision of a theatre group. It could've been pulled out because it wasn't well-received, or rather as I like to think, because Shakespeare, now in growing popularity with growing prestige and influence over his peers, felt that the play wasn't really what he had intended. If we believe that Shakespeare had his hand in the revisions of the Folio that was published in 1623, we could think that he was tinkering with the play until the very end. If we believe this to be true, it shouldn't be surprising if he had started moulding it not in 1603 but in the late 1580s or truly in the early 1590s.

We could continue of this subject forever, but then there is the thing itself: the play, the words, the beautiful narrative, the experience. "Hamlet" is so full of everything - not to mention the culture it has helped to mould - it's hard to come across unchanged; nay, it's impossible to come across unchanged, but hard not to be obsessed. If Hamlet obsesses with the ghost and revenge that transcends the mere excuse to kill, we've been trapped to obsess with Hamlet: there are cosmic things brewing in his mind, and in his words there's a metaphysical awareness, mysteriously shrouded to tingle our imagination in just the right way. He's a grand character, so much that Harold Bloom famously argues that it's in fact Hamlet that has been shaping our sense of a humanity; and ironically he's more human in his conflicted nature than any of us.

I'm also obsessed with self-reference, a term that's been losing its meaning since it first was spoken out loud. But it's a sort of phase in the process of the narrative becoming self-conscious and possibly transcending the limitations set for it by the medium and extending to the mind of the reader, becoming a lucid flow of introspection. I would like to think of "Hamlet" and "Don Quijote" as the two works most responsible for our modern notion of narrative introspection which uses self-reference to create a multi-layered reality. The basic concept, of course, is to be found in "Hamlet" where the prince sets out a play to catch the king's conscience: with "Mousetrap" we have a new reality inside the one we're dwelling, in fact geniusly reflecting the reality in which we think we live in (that of Hamlet's), yet only know because of what an infernal ghost has been telling us. Basically this means that also "Mousetrap" could be a fiction, and we could be guilty parties, as well, in believing Hamlet. Since Quarto 6 it has become standard to call the ghost "the ghost of Hamlet's father", although I think that Shakespeare enjoyed this ambiguity between truth and fiction and deliberately yet subtly referred to the possibility of the ghost being the main narrator by providing Hamlet with false information. I can't think of anything more delicious than to see Shakespeare playing the role of the ghost (as the legend tells) considering the possible lines we can draw from the ghost to Shakespeare himself as the illusionist, the mage Prospero, the possessed priest taking us beyond the cosmic doors.

This is but one way of reading Hamlet. What speaks of its importance and genius is that there are millions of ways of interpreting what the play means, and each of them is allowed their oddness because the play is so profound that it's possible to find a whole cosmos inside of it. This is a play that has grown out the concepts of a mere work of art into biblical propositions just as the Holy Writ, Iliad and Odyssey and Cervantes' "Don Quijote". This is art around which we can build our whole life, at least our literary existence. Then we become a part of something that's grander than our Zeitgeist, we arrive to the root of what has been a part of every generation's canon of literary minds. It's a legacy and a bloodline to be cherished.

With best regards,
AK

I have read many editions of Hamlet in my time and this has been one that has impressed me greatly. There's no need to comment on the text itself; the brilliance of Shakespeare's writing is a given. This edition presents the text in a font that is clear and easy to read which allows for better enjoyment of the meaning of the text and Shakespeare's words.

The footnotes are also excellent both in terms of quality of writing and their informativeness. They offer good textual analysis and also contextualizations which give the reader a great insight into the world in which Shakespeare wrote his play. This allows them to discover for themselves why Shakespeare might have chosen to write about the things that he did.

To sum up, a good edition of a truly great play that is perfect for scholar and casual reader alike.

I am a traditional orthodox Protestant minister who presently must support myself while caring for my congregation. One line of enterprise I have undertaken to pay the bills, as have other preachers before me, is to teach and tutor students. Working with a Korean high schooler on Shakespeare, I came across this title during Internet research on HAMLET. Glad I ordered it! You could not desire a more comprehensive introduction, glossary, and commentary on this, possibly the greatest work of the Bard. Specially instructive in ferreting out nuances, double entendres and cultural references which 21st century goundlings might miss. The two-volume edition with all three recensions of the play gives great clarity to the problems of text involved, and helped me better appreciate the limits of the new Oxford Complete Shakespeare. If you can also buy the BBC video production, you're good to go.Hamlet: The Complete Dramatic Works of William ShakespeareHamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623: Third Series (Arden Shakespeare)