This edition of "Hamlet", edited by one of the foremost of American scholars, is one of the series known as the New Variorum edition of Shakespeare. These two volumes constitute the most fully annotated edition of the play in existence.

The second folume contains a rich variety of materials. There are reprints of three important early works: the First Quarto version of "Hamlet," which differs greatly from the version we usually read; an Elizabethan translation of the French prose tale by Belleforest, called "The Hystorie of Hamblet," and a new translation of the German tragedy, "Der bestrafte Brudermord," or "Fratricide Punished," which has occasionally been regarded as a pre-Shakespearean Hamlet.

These are followed by critical appreciations from the pens of such English critics as Johnson, Grey, Malone, Hazlit, Coleridge, Jones Very, Strachey, and Moberly; German writers such as LEssing, Wieland, Goethe, Schlegel, Franz Horn, Heine, and Tieck; and French writers such as Voltaire, Chateaubriand, Guizot, Lacroix, and Hugo. The bibliography is very full, containing all the editions of the drama collated in the textual notes, as well as all significant works of criticism on the play, both in English and in several foreign languages, up to the time of printing.
(back cover)