RL.05-06.I.

PART I: PAPER 5
SET TEXT HAMLET

SHAKESPEARE
Aims of the Paper
Shakespeare is manifestly a great writer, perhaps the greatest ever to work with the English
language, and his influence on subsequent generations of poets, dramatists and novelistsin
England and abroadhas been immense. But the scale and quality of this achievement, and the
merits of particular parts of it, have been continuously debated by critics ever since Francis Meres,
in 1598, praised Shakespeare for 'mightily' enriching the English language, and called him one of the
best writers for lyric poetry, comedy and tragedy, as well as one of 'the most passionate among us
to bewaile and bemoane the perplexities of Love'. When his friend Ben Jonson proclaimed that
Shakespeare was 'not of an age but for all time', he cannot have foreseen the wealth of criticism that
would be built up as each succeeding 'age' interpreted and re-assessed the play for itself. In the
theatre too, discovery, re-thinkingand argumenthave been continuous.
The Part I paper gives students an opportunity to think both in detail and in broader terms about the
full range of Shakespeare's output, both as the product of a distinctive intellect at work in a rich
literary and historical context, and as that of a writer whose influence has been enormous. In order
to give students the chance to explore one work in depth, with particular attention to its language,
the Faculty identifies a set play (Hamlet) for close study in small groups. But it also encourages
examination of the entire canon, including the less well-known plays rarely encountered in school,
and the non-dramatic poems. Shakespeare's relation to other 16th- and 17th- century writers is also
an issue. (Here, the paper overlaps provocatively with the Part I 1500-1700 paper, with the
compulsory Tragedy paper in Part II, and with various Part II options.)

The Examination
In the examination itself, students are asked to answer three questions. In the first, they gloss
difficult or problematic words and phrases in passages taken from the set play, and write an essay
linked to one of these passages, either in the form of a commentary on it, or as a point of departure.
They then answer two other questions broader in scope.

Teaching for the Paper

Various kinds of teaching are offered for this paper: formal lectures, seminars, faculty classes on the
set play in which students from different colleges meet and exchange approaches, and college
supervisions. For help with the Hamlet glossing exercise see Exegesis on the Faculty website
http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/
The following Faculty teaching will be on offer in the year 2005-2006:

IN THE LENT TERM

Dr. J.P. Casey

Shakespeare: Roman and Tragic Themes (6L)

IN THE EASTER TERM

Dr C J Burrow
Dr J L Fleming
Dr E P Griffiths
Dr J R Harvey
Dr D A Hillman
Dr M D Long

Glossing Hamlet (1L)

Shakespeares Language (3L)
The Ladies Shakespeare (2L)
Hamlet: a rehearsal (8L)
Shakespeare in Time (3L)
Shakeapeare Critisicm (4L)
Shakespeare and Tragedy (5L), Shakespeare (2L)

Dr A G Milne & Others

Dr G F Parker
Faculty Classes

Hamlet Circus (4L)

Shakespeare (4L)
Hamlet Classes

Using the List

The quantity of Shakespearean scholarship and criticism is phenomenal. This reading list can only
begin to suggest the variety of approaches that have been applied to this writer, helping students to
orient themselves in an exceptionally large field of secondary material. Essentially, students must
make up their own minds which issues they want to addresswhether kingship, gender, tragicomedy, adaptation, textual problems, or theatricality, to name a fewand what criticism is most
helpful. The plays, however, very much remain the thing.

Texts
Early editions are reproduced in Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto (1981), ed. M.J.B. Allen and
Kenneth Muir, and Charlton Hinman, ed., The First Folio Shakespeare. The Norton Facsimile
(1968). The quarto and Folio texts can also be found on Early English Books Online (available via
the University Library website). Among one-volume texts, Peter Alexander's (1951) is the plain text
supplied in Tripos exams. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (1974), now
available in a revised, slightly enlarged edition (1997), has some valuable introductions and notes. It
is the basis of The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare, ed. Marvin Spevack (1973). William
Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (1986), diverged from
traditional practicemost spectacularly by providing two distinct texts of King Lear. The Oxford text
has been largely absorbed into The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (1997), a
convenient one-volume paperback with up-to-date introductions and notes.
No series of individually edited plays and poems is uniformly commendable, though the
Oxford, New Penguin, New Cambridge and Arden 3rd series (all in progress) contain much of the
best work. Students focussing on particular texts should accustom themselves to comparing
editions, some of which will have better notes, others stronger introductions, and others again better
stage histories and accounts of performance. Those most interested in theatre and film should
consult the editions in the Shakespeare in Production series, published by Cambridge University
Press.

Contexts, Sources, Language, Performance

John F. Andrews,
Jonathan Bate and
Russell Jackson, eds,
Leeds Barroll,
Harry Berger, Jr.,
Norman Blake,
Lynda E. Boose and
Richard Burt, eds,
Tucker Brooke, ed.
Douglas A. Brooks,

William Shakespeare: His World, His Work, His Influence 3 vols

(1985)
Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History (1996)

Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare's Theatre (1991)

Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page (1989)
A Grammar of Shakespeare's Language (2001)
Shakespeare the Movie: Popularising the Plays on Film, TV and Video
(1997)
The Shakespeare Apocrypha (1908)
From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern
England (2000)
Douglas Bruster,
Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (1992)
Geoffrey Bullough ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols (1957-75)
Anthony Davies,
Filming Shakespeare's Plays (1988)
Margreta de Grazia
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (2001)
and Stanley Wells, eds.
Allan C. Dessen,
Recovering Shakespeare's Theatrical Vocabulary (1996)
Allan C. Dessen and
A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580-1642 (1999)
Leslie Thomson, eds.,
Janette Dillon,
Theatre, Court and City, 1595-1610: Drama and Social Space in London
(2000)
Michael Dobson,
The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship
1660-1769 (1992)
Juliet Dusinberre,
Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, 2nd edn., (1996)

R.M. Frye,
Andrew Gurr,
Andrew Gurr,
Kim Hall,
Peter Holland,
Park Honan,
S.S. Hussey,
Grace Ioppolo,
Russell Jackson, ed.,
Simon Jarvis,

Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine (1963)

The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642, 3rd edn (1992)
Playgoing in Shakespeare's London, 2nd edn (1996)
Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern
England (1995)
English Shakespeares: Shakespeare on the English Stage in the 1990s
(1997)
Shakespeare: A Life (1998)
The Literary Language of Shakespeare (1982)
Revising Shakespeare (1991)
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film (2000)
Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearian and Textual Criticism and
Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725-1765 (1995)
Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (2000)

Ann Rosalind Jones

and Peter Stallybrass,
John Jones,
Shakespeare at Work (Oxford, 1995)
Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (1947)
David Scott Kastan, ed., A Companion to Shakespeare (1999)
David Scott Kastan,
Shakespeare and the Book (2001)
Dennis Kennedy,
Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century
Performance, 2nd edn (2001)
John Kerrigan (ed.),
Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and 'Female Complaint'. A Critical
Anthology (1991)
Francois Laroque,
Shakespeares Festive World (1991)
Jeffrey Masten,
Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexuality in
Renaissance Drama (1997)
Steven Mullaney,
The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England
(1988)
Gail Kern Paster,
The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (1986)
Kenneth S. Rothwell,
A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television
(1999)
V. Salmon and
Reader in the Language of Shakespearean Drama (1987)
E. Burness, eds.,
Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, rev. edn (1987)
James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (1996)
Bruce R. Smith,
The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (1999)
Bruce R. Smith,
Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics (1991)
Gary Taylor,
'General Introduction', in Stanley Wells et al., William
Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (1987)
Peter Thomson,
Shakespeare's Professional Career (1992)
Peter Thomson,
Shakespeare's Theatre (2nd ed. 1992)
Marion Trousdale,
Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians (1982)
Stanley Wells, ed.,
Shakespeare in the Theatre: An Anthology of Criticism (1997)
Also recommended are the accounts of performance given by actors in the Cambridge University
Press Players of Shakespeare series. Students particularly interested in performance should
consult the Part II Shakespeare in Performance paper reading list for further suggestions.

Critical Approaches
Brian Vickers, ed. Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 1623-1801, 6 vols (1974-81) recovers
material of value. There are various scholarly selections from Dr Johnson (e.g., ed. Woudhuysen)
and Coleridge (e.g., ed. Raysor). Hazlitts The Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817) is usually
worth consulting. Some of the following are works of high quality (e.g. Bradley on tragedy), whatever
you make of the method. Others are patchy, but might suggest lines of thought worth pursuing.
Much illuminating, essay-length work can also be found in volumes of the Casebook series, the
Longman Critical Readers series, and in the journals Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey
and Shakespeare Studies. Also recommended are the short book-length introductions in the Oxford
Shakespeare Topics series - one or two of which are picked out below.

Janet Adelman,
Catherine Alexander
& Stanley Wells, eds,
Linda Bamber
C.L. Barber
Anne Barton
Jonathan Bate,
John Bayley
Harry Berger, Jr.,
Philippa Berry
A.C. Bradley
Graham Bradshaw
Stanley Cavell
Lawrence Danson,
Philip Davis
Ian Donaldson,
Heather Dubrow,
Terry Eagleton,
T.S. Eliot,
William Empson
ed. David B. Pirie
Barbara Everett
Sigmund Freud
Northrop Frye
Marjorie Garber,
John Gillies
H. Granville-Barker
Stephen Greenblatt
Terence Hawkes,
Terence Hawkes,
Jean Howard and
Phyllis Rackin
G.K. Hunter
Lisa Jardine,
Emrys Jones
Copplia Kahn

Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays,

'Hamlet' to 'The Tempest' (1992)
Shakespeare and Race (2000)
Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in
Shakespeare (1982)
Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (1959)
Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (1994)
The Genius of Shakespeare (1997)
The Characters of Love (1960), Shakespeare and Tragedy (1981)
Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare, ed.
and intr. Peter Erickson (1997)
Shakespeare's Feminine Endings: Disfiguring Death in the
Tragedies (1999)
Shakespearean Tragedy (1904)
Shakespeare's Scepticism (1987); Misrepresentations: Shakespeare
and the Materialists (1993)
Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (1987)
Shakespeare's Dramatic Genres (2000)
Sudden Shakespeare: The Shaping of Shakespeares Creative
Thought (1996)
The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations (1982)
Captive Victors: Shakespeare's Narrative Poems and Sonnets (1987)
William Shakespeare (1986)
Hamlet' ,'Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca', in Selected
Essays 1917-1932 (1932)
Essays on Shakespeare (1986)
Young Hamlet: Essays on Shakespeare's Tragedies (1989)
'The Theme of the Three Caskets' (1913), in Art and
Literature, vol. 14 of The Pelican Freud Library (1985)
A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy
(1965)
Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (1987)
Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, 1994)
Prefaces to Shakespeare (1927-48)
Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social
Energy in Renaissance England (1988)
That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process (1986)
Meaning by Shakespeare (1992)
Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English
Histories (1997)
Dramatic Identities and Cultural Tradition (1978)
Reading Shakespeare Historically (1996)
Scenic Form in Shakespeare (1971)
Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (1981)

Copplia Kahn,
Frank Kermode,
John Kerrigan,
G. Wilson Knight
L.C. Knights
F.R. Leavis
Michael Long,
Ania Loomba and
Martin Orkin, eds,
M.M. Mahood,
M.M. Mahood,
Philip McGuire
R.S. Miola
Louis Montrose,
Michael Neill
Winifred Nowottny
Stephen Orgel

Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (1997)

Shakespeare's Language (2000)
On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature (2001)
The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian
Tragedy (1930); The Imperial Theme (1931)
Some Shakespearean Themes (1959); 'Hamlet' and other
Shakespearean Essays (1980)
The Common Pursuit (1952)
The Unnatural Scene: A Study in Shakespearean Tragedy (1976)
Post-colonial Shakespeares (1998)
Shakespeare's Wordplay (1957)
Bit Parts in Shakespeare's Plays (1992)
Speechless Dialect: Shakespeare's Open Silences (1985)
Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy (1992)
The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the
Elizabethan Theatre (1996)
Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance
Tragedy (Oxford 1997)
'Lear's Questions', 'Some Aspects of the Style of King Lear',
Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957) and 12 (1960)
Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's
England (1996)
Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (1996)

Patricia Parker,
Patricia Parker and
Geoffrey Hartman, eds. Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (1985)
Annabel Patterson
Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (1989)
Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (1981)
A.P. Rossiter
Angel with Horns (1961)
Kiernan Ryan
Shakespeare (3rd edn., 2001)
L.G. Salingar
Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (1974)
Wilbur Sanders and
Howard Jacobson
Shakespeare's Magnanimity (1978)
Bruce R. Smith,
Shakespeare and Masculinity (2000)
Valerie Traub,
Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama
(1992)
Helen Vendler
The Art of Shakespeares Sonnets (1997)
Robert Weimann,
Author's Pen and Actor's Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare's
Theatre (2000)

SET TEXT FOR 2004-2005

HAMLET
For help with the Hamlet
http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/

glossing

exercise

see

Exegesis

on

the

Faculty

website

Editions and textual criticism:

For the glossing exercise you will need to familiarise yourself with the details of the text and for
Hamlet this means knowing about differences between quarto and folio texts. There is no standard
edition from which you can guarantee that passages for comment will be set.
You are advised to consult
The First Folio of Shakespeare, Norton Facsimilie, ed. Charlton Hinman (New York: 1968)
This text lacks some 222 lines printed in the Second Quarto of the play (1604/5), while adding
approximately 83 found nowhere else. It incorporates various minor blunders of the sort that tended
to happen in Elizabethan and Jacobean printing houses when type was being set up, most of which
have been spotted and corrected by later editors. There are also hundreds of variant readings (often
of single words) between Q2 and F, for which the compositors are unlikely to have been responsible,
but which may reflect the hand of Shakespeare as reviser of his own play.
You will, however, need to work primarily from a good, annotated modern edition. What immediately
th
follows (apart from the Furness Variorum) is a list of the major 20 century editions, most of them
editorial conflations (i.e. an amalgam of Q2 and F) but the most recent ones tending to separate
these two texts in various ways, and for different reasons.
ed. H.H. Furness, Hamlet, 2 vols., New Variorum Edition (London, 1877). Most useful now for its
assemblage of early critical and editorial commentary in the foot-notes.
ed. T. J. B. Spencer, Hamlet, New Penguin Shakespeare (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), with
introduction by Anne Barton
ed. Harold Jenkins, Hamlet, Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1982)
ed. Philip Edwards, Hamlet, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: CUP, 1985). A
conflated text which however signals all Q2 passages cut in Folio by square brackets.
ed. George Hibbard, Hamlet, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford. OUP, 1987). A Folio based text
which relegates Q2 only passages to an Appendix as does the one volume Oxford Complete
Shakespeare, gen. eds. G. Taylor and S. W. Wells (1986).
ed. C. Hoy, Hamlet, Norton Critical Edition (London: Norton, 1992), 2nd ed, includes useful critical
anthology
eds. Paul Bertram and Bernice W. Kliman, The Three-text 'Hamlet' (New York: AMS Press, 1992)
nd
ed. G. B. Evans, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2 revised edn. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997),
with introduction by Frank Kermode. It is important to use the revised edition, because the 'Note on
the Text' (pp. 1234-5) reflects a significant modification of Evans's editorial position since the first
edition of 1974, the result of intervening scholarship.
The First or 'Bad' Quarto (1603) of the play is now generally agreed to be a reconstruction from
memory (probably by the man who played Marcellus, and other small parts) of a drastically cutdown acting version. Abbreviated and garbled though it is ('To be or not to be; ay, there's the point. /
To die, to sleep, is that all? Ay, all.'), it nonetheless sheds some light on original staging. And it will
(as demonstrated by the recent production in London) still work in the theatre.
Q1 can most conveniently be read in the edition (modernized) by Kathleen 0. Irace, The First Quarto
of Hamlet, New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: CUP, 1998)
See also:
ed. Thomas Clayton, The Hamlet First Published (Q1], 1603): Origins, Form, Intertextualities
(London, 1992)
eds. G.Holderness & B. Loughrey, The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester,
1992)

Maxwell E. Foster et al., The Play Behind the Play: Hamlet and Quarto One (London: Heinemann,
1998)

And more generally:

J. Dover Wilson, The Manuscript of Shakespeare's 'Hamlet', 2 vols (Cambridge: CUP, 1934)
W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio (Oxford: OUP, 1955)
eds. S. W. Wells, Gary Taylor et al., William Shakespare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: OUP,
1987), pp. 396-420
Paul Werstine, 'The Textual Mystery of Hamlet', Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988), 1-26
Barbara Mowat, 'The Form of Hamlet's Fortunes', Renaissance Drama, n.s. 19 (1988), 97-126
Grace loppolo, Revising Shakespeare (London: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 134-46
Leah S. Marcus, 'Bad Taste and Bad Hamlet', Unediting the Renaissance (London: Routledge,
1996), pp. 132-176
John Jones, Shakespeare at Work (Oxford: OUP, 1995; repr. 1999), pp. 71-151
David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory (New York and London, 1999), ch. 3
Sources:
Apart from discussions in individual editions, Geoffrey Bullough's, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of
Shakespeare, vol. 7 (London: RKP, 1973) remains standard.
Anthologies of criticism:
ed. John Jump, Shakespeare: 'Hamlet' (London: Macmillan, 1968) - Casebook series
eds. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris. Hamlet. Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 5 (London:
E.Arnold, 1963)
ed. David Bevington, Twentieth Century Interpretations of 'Hamlet' (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1968)
eds. Kenneth Muir and Stanley Wells, Aspects of 'Hamlet' (Cambridge: CUP, 1979)
See also Vols. 9 and 45 of Shakespeare Survey (Cambridge: CUP, 1956 and 1993), which are
primarily devoted to Hamlet
eds. Laurie Lanzen Harris and Mark W. Scott, Shakespearean Criticism (Detroit, Michigan: Gale,
1984), vol. 1
ed. Martin Coyle, Hamlet (London: Macmillan, 1992) - New Casebook series
eds. Mark Thornton Burnett and John Manning, New Essays on Hamlet (New York: AMS Press,
1994)
David Farley-Hills, Critical Responses to 'Hamlet' , 3 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1996-)

Selected criticism: (nb. also, Shakespeare Studies, Shakespeare Quarterly & Shakespeare
Survey)
ed. W. K. Wimsatt, Dr. Johnson on Shakespeare (London, 1969)
ed. Terence Hawkes, Coleridge on Shakespeare (London, 1969)
William Hazlitt, in The Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817) much reprinted
A. C. Bradley, in Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) also much reprinted
G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (London, 1930: rev. edn, 1947)
T.S. Eliot, 'Hamlet', Selected Essays (London: Faber, 1932), pp. 141-6
John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet (Cambridge: CUP, 1935; repr. 1970)
Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus (1949)
Harry Levin, The Question of 'Hamlet' (New York, 1959)
Helen Gardner, in The Business of Criticism (Oxford, 1959)
Fredson Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587-1642 (1959), chs. 1-3
Morris Weitz, Hamlet and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (London: Faber, 1965)
Brian Vickers, The Artistry of Shakespeare's Prose (London, 1968), pp. 248-71
Jacques Lacan, 'Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet', Yale French Studies 55-56
(1977), 11-52
James L. Calderwood, To Be and Not To Be: Negation and Metadrama in 'Hamlet' (New York, 1983)
Roland M. Frye, The Renaissance 'Hamlet': Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton: Princeton
U.P., 1984)
Jacqueline Rose, 'Sexuality in the reading of Shakespeare', Alternative Shakespeares, ed. J.
Drakakis (London, 1985)
Arthur McGee, The Elizabethan Hamlet (London: Yale University Press, 1987)
R. A. Foakes, Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare's Art (Cambridge: CUP, 1993)
Lisa Jardine, Reading Shakespeare Historically (London: Routledge, 1996), esp. chs. 2 & 9

John Kerrigan, 'Remember Me! Horestes, Hieronymo and Hamlet', ch. 7 in Revenge Tragedy:
Aeschylus to Armageddon (Oxford: OUP, 1996)
Michael Neill, Issues of Death: (Oxford: OUP, 1997), esp. chs. 6 and 7
Graham Bradshaw, 'State of Play', in The Shakespearean International Yearbook , vol. 1 ('Where
Are We Now in Shakespearean Studies?'), eds. Elton and Mucciolo (Ashgate, 1999)
Michael Pennington, Hamlet: A User's Guide (London: Nick Hern Books, 1996; repr. 2000)
John Lee, Shakespeare's Hamlet and the Controversies of Self (Oxford: OUP, 2000)
Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (2001)
Margreta de Grazia, 'Hamlet the Intellectual' in Helen Small, ed. The Public Intellectual (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2002)
HAMLET in performance:
ed. Gamini Salgado, Eyewitnesses of Shakespeare: First Hand Accounts of Performances 15901890 (Sussex University Press, 1975), pp. 233-56
ed. Stanley Wells, Shakespeare in the Theatre: An Anthology of Criticism (Oxford, 2000). Reprints
12 accounts of productions from Betterton to a 1985 Q1 Hamlet.
Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, vol. 1, Hamlet (London, 1930)
ed. Alan Dent, Hamlet: The Film and the Play (London: World Film Publications, 1948) - on
Olivier's version
ed. Herbert Marshall, Hamlet through the ages: A Pictorial Record from 1709 (London: 1952)
L. Senelick, Gordon Craig's Moscow 'Hamlet': A Reconstruction (London: Greenwood Press, 1982)
Peter Davison, Hamlet: Text and Performance (London, 1983)
Alan C. Dessen, Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge: CUP, 1984),
esp. pp. 150-5
John A. Mills, 'Hamlet' on Stage: The Great Tradition (London: Greenwood Press. 1985)
Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of Hamlet (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993)
eds. H. Klein & D. Daphinoff, Shakespeare Yearbook vol. 7: Hamlet on Screen (Lewiston: Mellen
Press, 1998)
Robert Hapgood, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark , Shakespeare in Production series (Cambridge: CUP,
1999). An edition of the play (conflated) with foot-notes recording particular theatre productions.
Some relevant non-Shakespearean plays:
John Pickering, Horestes (1567)
Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy (1587)
John Marston, Antonio's Revenge (1600)
Henry Chettle, Hoffman, or A Revenge for a Father (1602)
Thomas Middleton, The Revenger's Tragedy (1606) sometimes attributed to Tourneur
Cyril Tourneur, The Atheist's Tragedy, or The Honest Man's Revenge (1609)
George Chapman, The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois (1610)
Anton Chekhov, Ivanov (1887-9), The Seagull (1896)
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966/7)

Most of the books on this list are available in the Faculty Library or on order. If you experience
difficulty in finding them please ask at the Library Issue Desk.
Subject Group Committee Convenor for 2005-2006:

Dr A D B Poole, Trinity College

June 2005

10