Page 39 - Hamlet: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

xxxii HAMLE T

1930. In a modernised text like the present, it would
not be appropriate to follow it with the same fidelity. It
is a light pointing, corresponding with Hamlet's advice to
the player to speak his lines 'trippingly onthetongue,'and
I have therefore been obliged sometimes to add commas
and more often to substitute dashes or periods for
commas already there, in order to avoid ambiguity and
bewilderment on the part of the reader. Except for such
changes, which must go unregistered in the already
overburdened notes, and a few more serious ones which
will be recorded, together with the rectification of errors,
a list of which may be found in The Manuscript of
Shakespeare's 'Hamlet,' the punctuation of this edition
is that of the Second Quarto, which is in the main,
I believe, that of Shakespeare.

IV

When I first began editing Shakespeare in 19191 was
prepared for fresh tillage in the field of textual explora-
tion and emendation, but in that of commentary I looked
to find few stones unturned by editors of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Nothing has surprised me
more than the amount of work of this sort still to be done,
not merely in comparatively neglected plays like Love's
Labour's Lost and All's Well, but also in popular and
constantly edited ones such as The Tempest, The Merchant
of Venice, As You Like It and Twelfth Night. Indeed,
the further I went upon my way the more the need for
commentary forced itself upon my attention, and in
Hamlet, the most popular and most frequently edited of
them all, the task is heavier than ever.
Here, for example, is a list of some thirty of the more
important passages upon which I think I have been able
to throw fresh light, or upon which fresh light has been
thrown by others during recent years:
to fast in fires (1.5.11)} cursed hebona (1.5. 62); now to