THE TRAGEDIE OF HAMLET, PRINCE OF DENMARKE A STUDY WITH THE TEXT OF THE FOLIO OF 1623 BY GEORGE MACDONALD "What would you gracious figure?" TO MY HONOURED RELATIVE ALEXANDER STEWART MACCOLL A LITTLE _LESS_ THAN KIN, AND _MORE_ THAN KIND TO WHOM I OWE IN ESPECIAL THE TRUE UNDERSTANDING OF THE GREAT SOLILOQUY I DEDICATE WITH LOVE AND GRATITUDE THIS EFFORT TO GIVE HAMLET AND SHAKSPERE THEIR DUE GEORGE MAC DONALD BORDIGHERA _Christmas_, 1884 Summary: The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: a study of the text of the folio of 1623 By George MacDonald [Motto]: "What would you, gracious figure?" Dr. Greville MacDonald looks on his father's commentary as the "most important interpretation of the play ever written... It is his intuitive understanding ... rather than learned analysis--of which there is yet overwhelming evidence--that makes it so splendid." Reading Level: Mature youth and adults. PREFACE By this edition of HAMLET I hope to help the student of Shakspere to understand the play--and first of all Hamlet himself, whose spiritual and moral nature are the real material of the tragedy, to which every other interest of the play is subservient. But while mainly attempting, from the words and behaviour Shakspere has given him, to explain the man, I have cast what light I could upon everything in the play, including the perplexities arising from extreme condensation of meaning, figure, and expression. As it is more than desirable that the student should know when he is reading the most approximate presentation accessible of what Shakspere uttered, and when that which modern editors have, with reason good or bad, often not without presumption, substituted for that which they received, I have given the text, letter for letter, point for point, of the First Folio, with the variations of the Second Quarto in the margin and at the foot of the page. Of HAMLET there are but two editions of authority, those called the Second Quarto and the First Folio; but there is another which requires remark.