Citation: George MacDonald, The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: A Study of the Text of the Folio of 1623 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1885).
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 ? ” London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1885.
8vo, pp. xiv + 277 + (1): price 12s.
Dedicated from Bordighera, Christmas 1884: “To my honoured relative, Alexander Stewart MacColl (of Edinburgh), a little less than kin (he was the brother of MacDonald’s stepmother) and more than kind, to whom I owe in especial the true understanding of the great soliloquy.”
The text is printed on the left, and the comments on the right-hand page.
MacDonald, who regards Hamlet as “the noblest character in all fiction,” had the theory that Shakespere— for so he spelt the name-worked upon his own copy of the Second Quarto, cancelling and adding, and that after his death this copy came, along with the original, into the hands of his friends, the editors of the Folio, who proceeded to print according to his alterations. The critics, as MacDonald wrote from Bordighera, Feb. 26,1885, were down on his exposition — “they are just of the class which I say cannot understand him (Hamlet) or his invention. How should there be anything in common between me and the — for instance — a paper I have looked upon with literal repugnance almost since its first appearance?” 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” (“ George MacDonald,” p. 540). Dr. Greville MacDonald possesses the remarkable MS. MacDonald had written on the elder Hamlet in Macmillan’s Mag. (Aug., 1876).
- 1924. Published as a centenary edition by George Allen & Unwin, with an introduction by Sir Johnston Forbes Robertson, a life-long friend of the MacDonald family. This reissue was adversely criticised by Mr. George Saintsbury (q.v.) in the Athenaeum.
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