Talk:Hamlet

Hamlet Date
For those interested in this question I will try to formulate my position here, as it keeps being reverted from the front page. Recently a few scholars have become very good at finding ingenious ways of fact checking some influential but in the end speculative conjectures in the field of Shakespeare and Renaissance studies. As a result some of the conjectures have been refuted and some beliefs have been revised. The dating of Hamlet at present is given on the page to sometime between 1599 and 1601, which is almost certainly wrong. My first attempt at a fix was to delete this, because it must now be considered active misinformation. When this was reverted by user:Xover, because the introduction was supposed to reflect the body of the text, I tried to insert a reference to the most thorough and study I have found in researching this:

"The most thorough attempt of dating Hamlet is done by Terri Bourus in her Young Shakespeare's Young Hamlet. She believes that the version in the First Quarto (Q1) is the one that Thomas Nashe alluded to in 1589, meaning that it was written before this. The version of Hamlet found in Q1 might thus be Shakespeare's first play. She thinks he made a major revision of this in 1602 to produce the version that is found in the First Folio. A minor revision of this was done in 1603/4 to produce the version found in the Second Quarto. The version of Hamlet that has later been canonized is a conflation of the versions in the First Folio and the Second Quarto."

Her book length analysis is impressive both for its methodology and for the completeness of the review. It is also quoted and discussed in every later attempt at dating Hamlet I have looked at, and I think giving her view would be an incremental improvement on the dating section as it is that hopefully others would expand with further sources, if they liked. This was again reverted by user:Xover, as he demands consensus on such changes. user:Xover is obviously very knowledgable on things Shakespeare in general, but equally obviously not an expert on this question in partucular. So I guess that now the present misinformation will be on the page until he has gotten up to speed on the subject.

Here are some of the sources I have read in researching this, which might interest others:


 * Jolly, Margrethe. The First Two Quartos of Hamlet: A New View of the Origins and Relationship of the Texts. McFarland, 2014.


 * Taylor, Gary, and Rory Loughnane. “The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s Works.” In The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion, edited by Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan, 415–602, 2017.


 * Jackson, MacDonald P. “Vocabulary, Chronology, and the First Quarto (1603) of Hamlet.” Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England 31 (2018): 17–42. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26800525.


 * Dutton, Richard. Shakespeare, Court Dramatist. Kindle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

There are other sources referenced in some of these that could also be of interest. I have researched this as background for my thesis, but cannot at share all my views here yet, as I am afraid the cheating robots will think I grabbed stuff off wikipedia. So hopefully somebody else will pick up the thread to get the dating section up to par. (If they can get it past the gate keeper, that is.)

Anagram
I suggest adding after the sentence ending with footnote 4, the observation, “Tellingly, Hamlet is an anagram of Amleth, and one achieved by simply moving the last letter.” Atomikiwi (talk) 04:27, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Which reliable sources mention this? AndyJones (talk) 13:30, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

Character name misspelling
"Voltemand" is the spelling in the text, rather than "Voltimand".