PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

Summary

Any new recension of a play like Hamlet, which is of universal interest and touches scholarship at numberless points, will provoke criticism and discussion from which the editor has much to learn. He will be fortunate too if friends and critics do not draw his attention to material already in print which he has overlooked. The call for a second edition within two years of publication comes too early for me to reap this aftermath to full advantage. Beyond correcting a few misprints I have, therefore, left the type of this volume as it stood in November, 1934, gathering together in supplementary pages additional notes and observations which it seemed profitable to Mr Child and myself to make at this juncture, in the hope of being able to incorporate them, with fresh additional matter, should a third edition ever be required. When these notes concern, by way of correction or expansion, the Introduction, Notes or Glossary of the 1934 edition, the reader's attention will be drawn to the fact by asterisks, in the original text, though such notes, it maybe observed, form only a part of the new matter. Meanwhile my grateful thanks are due to the many critics, private and public, who have tendered advice or admonition. Reasoned disagreement, indeed, is one of the greatest of services that an editor can receive. For even when the criticism cannot be accepted, it may, and often does, induce further elucidation, if not fresh discovery.