+Date+.--'A booke called the Revenge of Hamlett' was entered in the Stationers' Register July, 1602. Consequently, Shakespeare's Preliminary version, as represented by the First Quarto, though not printed until 1603, must have been written in or before the spring months of 1602; the second version 1603-1604. +Sources+.--The plot came originally from the _Historia Danica_, a history of Denmark in Latin, written in the twelfth century {182} by Saxo Grammaticus, a Danish scholar. About 1570 the story was retold in French in Belleforest's _Histoires Tragiques_. Besides his debt to Belleforest, it seems almost certain that Shakespeare drew from an earlier English tragedy of Hamlet by another man. This earlier play is lost; but Nash, a contemporary writer, alludes to it as early as 1589, and Henslowe's Diary records its performance in 1494. Somewhat before 1590, an early dramatist, Thomas Kyd, had written a play called _The Spanish Tragedy_, which, though far inferior to Shakespeare's _Hamlet_, resembled it in many ways. This likeness has caused scholars to suspect that Kyd wrote the early Hamlet; and their suspicions are strengthened by an ambiguous and apparently punning allusion to Æsop's _Kidde_ in the passage by Nash mentioned above. A crude and brutal German play on the subject has been discovered, which is believed by many to be a translation of Kyd's original tragedy. If this is true, it shows how enormously Shakespeare improved on his source. +Editions+.--A very badly garbled and crude form of this play was printed in 1603, and is known as the First Quarto. A much better one, which contained most of the tragedy as we read it, appeared in 1604, and is called the Second Quarto. Several other quartos followed, for the play was exceedingly popular. The Folio omits certain passages found in the Second Quarto, and introduces certain new ones. Both the new passages and the omitted ones are included in modern editions; so that, as has often been said, our modern _Hamlet_ is longer than any _Hamlet_ which Shakespeare left us. The First Quarto is generally regarded as a pirated copy of Shakespeare's scenario, or first rough draft, of the play.