‘Hamlet’ Then Till Now

Summary

Many men have seen themselves in the hero of this play; and it is especially easy for me to do so at the moment, when I have a task assigned to me which I know myself unequal to performing. I do not expect to escape censure for my weakness, though I hope it will not be put down to a defect of will and that something may be allowed to me for the magnitude of the task itself. For well over a century almost every writer upon Hamlet has begun by remarking that more has been written on it than on any other work of literature, before adding his own ink to the ever-swelling flood. In 1877 the Furness Variorum, in order to keep up with the tide, needed two volumes instead of the one that still suffices for other Shakespeare plays; and beginning where Furness left off, A. A. Raven listed in his ‘Hamlet’ Bibliography and Reference Guide (1936) over 2000 items between 1877 and 1935, while the Classified Shakespeare Bibliography of Gordon Ross Smith (1963), continuing the count down to 1958, added over 900 more items, ranging from Dover Wilson’s The Manuscript of Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ (1934), which I suppose deals with Hamlet then, to ‘Hamlet as Existentialist’ (Shakespeare Newsletter, vii, 1957), which may conceivably be Hamlet now. As I approach this enormous task of tracing the critical fortunes of this play, my mind, like Hamlet’s own in Hazlitt’s phrase, sinks within me.