Page:Hamlet - The Arden Shakespeare - 1899.djvu/23

 Such differences as these can be accounted for only in one of two ways—either, as the Clarendon Press editors maintain, a considerable portion of the old play is included in the Quarto of 1603, or that Quarto imperfectly and often erroneously exhibits Shakespeare's work in a form which he subsequently revised and altered. When careful and judicious investigators fail to agree, the matter must be admitted to be doubtful. For my own part, repeated perusals have satisfied me that Shakespeare's hand can be discerned throughout the whole of the truncated and travestied play of 1603. The Shakespearian irony of many passages is unlike anything we find in plays of 1588—1589. With the exception of the following lines:—

I see nothing that looks pre-Shakespearian, and I see much that is entirely unlike the work of Kyd. It is possible, indeed, that Kyd's work may have been revised before 1600, but we have no evidence to that effect. Here and there echoes of a phrase, or a line, or a rhyme in Jeronimo, or The Spanish Tragedy, or Solyman and Perseda may be heard in the Quarto of 1603, as echoes of Marlowe and of Lyly may be heard elsewhere. But it has been aptly pointed out by Sarrazin that reminiscences of Shakespeare's own Henry V. are found in a passage which appears only in this first Quarto. Compare from the Quarto:—