of The Return from Parnassus' to have given Jonson meant no more than that Shakespeare had signally outstripped Jonson in popular esteem. As the author of 'Julius Cæsar,' he had just proved his command of topics that were peculiarly suited to Jonson's vein,' and had in fact outrun his churlish comrade on his own ground.

1 The most scornful criticism that Jonson is known to have passed on any composition by Shakespeare was aimed at a passage in Julius Cæsar, and as Jonson's attack is barely justifiable on literary grounds, it is fair to assume that the play was distasteful to him from other considerations. 'Many times,' Jonson wrote of Shakespeare in his Timber, 'hee fell into those things [which] could not escape laughter : As when hee said in the person of Cæsar, one speaking to him [i.e. Cæsar]; Cæsar, thou dost me wrong. Hee [i.e. Cæsar] replyed: Cæsar did never wrong, butt with just cause: and such like, which were ridiculous.' Jonson derisively quoted the same passage in the induction to The Staple of News (1625): 'Cry you mercy, you did not wrong but with just cause.' Possibly the words that were ascribed by Jonson to Shakespeare's character of Cæsar appeared in the original version of the play, but owing perhaps to Jonson's captious criticism they do not figure in the Folio version, the sole version that has reached us. The only words there that correspond with Jonson's quotation are Cæsar's remark: Know, Cæsar doth not wrong, nor without cause

Will he be satisfied

(III. i. 47-8). The rhythm and sense seem to require the reinsertion after the word 'wrong' of the phrase but with just cause,' which Jonson needlessly reprobated. Leonard Digges (1588-1635), one of Shakespeare's admiring critics, emphasises the superior popularity of Shakespeare's Julius Cæsar in the theatre to Ben Jonson's Roman play of Catiline, in his eulogistic lines on Shakespeare (published after Digges's death in the 1640 edition of Shakespeare's Poems):

So have I seen when Cæsar would appear,
And on the stage at half-sword parley were
Brutus and Cassius-oh, how the audience

Were ravish'd, with what wonder they went thence;
When some new day they would not brook a line

Of tedious, though well laboured, Catiline.

At any rate, in the tragedy that Shakespeare brought out in the year following the production of 'Julius Cæsar,' he finally left Jonson and all friends and foes lagging far behind both in achievement and reputation. This new exhibition of the force of hist genius re-established, too, the ascendency of the adult actors who interpreted his work, and the boys' supremacy was quickly brought to an end. In 1602 Shakespeare produced Hamlet,' that piece of his which most kindled English hearts.' The story of the Prince of Denmark had been popular on the stage as early as 1589 in a lost dramatic version by another writer-doubtless Thomas Kyd, whose tragedies of blood, 'The Spanish Tragedy' and 'Jeronimo,' long held the Elizabethan stage. To that lost version of Hamlet' Shakespeare's tragedy certainly owed much. The story was also accessible in the

'Hamlet,' 1602.

I wrote on this point in the article on Thomas Kyd in the Dictionary of National Biography (vol. xxxi.): The argument in favour of Kyd's authorship of a pre-Shakespearean play (now lost) on the subject of Hamlet deserves attention. Nash in 1589, when describing [in his preface to Menaphon] the typical literary hack, who at almost every point suggests Kyd, notices that in addition to his other accomplishments "he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches." Other references in popular tracts and plays of like date prove that in an early tragedy concerning Hamlet there was a ghost who cried repeatedly, "Hamlet, revenge!" and that this expression took rank in Elizabethan slang beside the vernacular quotations from [Kyd's sanguinary tragedy of] Jeronimo, such as "What outcry calls me from my naked bed," and "Beware, Hieronimo, go by, go by." The resemblance between the stories of Hamlet and Jeronimo suggests that the former would have supplied Kyd with a congenial plot. In Jeronimo a father seeks to avenge his son's murder; in Hamlet the theme is the same with the position of

'Histoires Tragiques' of Belleforest, who adapted it from the Historia Danica' of Saxo Grammaticus.1 No English translation of Belleforest's 'Hystorie of Hamblet' appeared before 1608; Shakespeare doubtless read it in the French. But his authorities give little hint of what was to emerge from his study of them.

Burbage created the title-part in Shakespeare's tragedy, and its success on the stage led to the play's publication immediately afterwards. The bibliography of Hamlet' offers a puzzling problem. On July 26, 1602, ' A Book called the Revenge of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, as it was lately acted by the blem of its Lord Chamberlain his Servants,' was entered on the Stationers' Company's Registers, and it was published in quarto next year by N[icholas]

The pro

publica

tion.

father and son reversed. In Jeronimo the avenging father resolves to reach his end by arranging for the performance of a play in the presence of those whom he suspects of the murder of his son, and there is good ground for crediting the lost tragedy of Hamlet with a similar play-scene. Shakespeare's debt to the lost tragedy is a matter of conjecture, but the stilted speeches of the play-scene in his Hamlet read like intentional parodies of Kyd's bombastic efforts in The Spanish Tragedy, and it is quite possible that they were directly suggested by an almost identical episode in a lost Hamlet by the same author.' Shakespeare elsewhere shows acquaintance with Kyd's work. He places in the mouth of Kit Sly in the Taming of the Shrew the current phrase 'Go by, Jeronimy,' from The Spanish Tragedy. Shakespeare quotes verbatim a line from the same piece in Much Ado about Nothing (1. i. 271): 'In time the savage bull doth bear the yoke ;' but Kyd practically borrowed that line from Watson's Passionate Centurie (No. xlvii.), where Shakespeare may have met it.

Cf. Gericke und Max Moltke, Hamlet-Quellen, Leipzig, 1881. The story was absorbed into Scandinavian mythology: cf. AmbalesSaga, edited by Mr. Israel Gollancz, 1898.

The First Quarto, 1603.

L[ing] and John Trundell. The title-page stated that the piece had been acted divers times in the city of London, as also in the two Universities of Cambridge and Oxford and elsewhere.' The text here appeared in a rough and imperfect state. In all probability it was a piratical and carelessly transcribed copy of Shakespeare's first draft of the play, in which he drew largely on the older piece.

The Second Quarto, 1604.

A revised version, printed from a more complete and accurate manuscript, was published in 1604 as 'The Tragical History of Hamlet Prince of Denmark, by William Shakespeare, newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much again as it was, according to the true and perfect copy.' This was printed by I[ames] R[oberts] for the publisher N[icholas] L[ing]. The concluding words -'according to the true and perfect copy'-of the title-page of the second quarto were intended to stamp its predecessor as surreptitious and unauthentic. But it is clear that the Second Quarto was not a perfect version of the play. It was itself printed from a copy which had been curtailed for acting purposes.

The Folio

A third version (long the textus receptus) figured in the Folio of 1623. Here many passages, not to be found in the quartos, appear for the first time, but a few others that appear in the quartos are Version. omitted. The Folio text probably came nearest to the original manuscript; but it, too, followed an acting copy which had been abbreviated somewhat less drastically than the Second Quarto and in a

different fashion.1 Theobald in his 'Shakespeare Restored' (1726) made the first scholarly attempt to form a text from a collation of the First Folio with the Second Quarto, and Theobald's text with further embellishments by Sir Thomas Hanmer, Edward Capell, and the Cambridge editors of 1866, is now generally adopted.

Popularity

let.'

'Hamlet' was the only drama by Shakespeare that was acted in his lifetime at the two Universities. It has since attracted more attention from actors, playgoers, and readers of all capacities than any other of Shakespeare's plays. Its world-wide popularity from its author's day to our own, when it is of Ham- as warmly welcomed in the theatres of France and Germany as in those of England and America, is the most striking of the many testimonies to the eminence of Shakespeare's dramatic instinct. At a first glance there seems little in the play to attract the uneducated or the unreflecting. 'Hamlet' is mainly a psychological effort, a study of the reflective temperament in excess. The action develops slowly; at times there is no movement at all. Except Antony and Cleopatra,' which exceeds it by sixty lines, the piece is the longest of Shakespeare's plays, while the total length of Hamlet's speeches far exceeds that of those allotted by Shakespeare to any other of his characters. Humorous relief is, it is true,

Cf. Hamlet-parallel texts of the first and second quarto, and first folio-ed. Wilhelm Vietor, Marburg, 1891; The Devonshire Hamlets, 1860, parallel texts of the two quartos edited by Mr. Sam Timmins; Hamlet, ed. George Macdonald, 1885, a study with the text of the folio.