Page:Hamlet - The Arden Shakespeare - 1899.djvu/24



with the following from Henry V., II. li. 12 and 57–59:—

The general style of the Hamlet of 1603 is much more like that of an ill-reported play of that date than like the style of a play of Kyd's and Marlowe's time; but the actor's speech about Hecuba and Priam, though much reduced in length, stands out from the rest of the play in this form as it does in the second Quarto and the Folio, by virtue of its reproduction of a style which was out of date at the opening of the seventeenth century.

The Quarto of 1604 is carelessly printed and ill punctuated as compared with Hamlet of the Folio, yet it represents more faithfully and fully what Shakespeare wrote. The Folio, counting only passages of more than one line, omits 218 lines; the Quarto, 85. The most considerable omissions in the Quarto are three—thirteen lines immediately before the entrance of Osric in V. ii.; this seems to be due to accident; secondly, the passage about the boy actors in II. ii.; the omission was probably made, as Professor Hall Griffin suggests, because it would be unbecoming in the King's servants to show hostility to the children, who were servants of the Queen; thirdly, part of the dialogue between Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in an earlier passage of the same scene;