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Hamlet, and As You Like It, a Specimen of a New Ed. of Shakespeare [By T. Caldecott]. by T. Caldecott
Hamlet and As You Like It a Specimen of a New Ed of Shakespeare by T Caldecott - By T. Caldecott Author:William Shakespeare General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1832 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: This play, notwithstanding some circumstances which seem to assign an earlier date to it, was written, if my conjecture be well founded, in 1600. See an Attempt to ascertain the Order of his Plays. Malone. There has lately been produced an edition of this play of the year 16O3. As to its date, or the time, at which it was written, it appears from Mr. Malone's Attempt at Chronological Order, c. in Johnson and Steevens' editions of 1778 and 1803, and 1813, that he conjectured it to have been written in 1596; while Chalmers assigned it to 1597: but in his Life of our Author, 1821, he conjectures it to have been written in 1600: and he again prints the whole of the plays according to the new conceptions he had formed, though many of them varied no less than eight or nine years from his previous computation. Now if upon such grounds and so unsettled a state of things, editors not even agreeing with themselves, the order, in which these dramas are presented to the public, is to undergo a change on every republication, the confusion will be endless. With the reader and the public it must be an object to have ready and certain means of reference to the leading passages of a great author : and it thence seems highly desirable, that there should be some settled or understood course, by which at all times in one form the dramas of Shakespeare should be presented. As the time when they were respectively brought upon the stage or first committed to the press, must now be mere matter of conjecture, and is indeed by all late editors stated so to be, no course seems to be in any respect so well adapted to this end,...« less