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Hamlet: A Longman Cultural Edition 1/e
William Shakespeare
Constance Jordan
Published December 2003 by Longman
Copyright 2004, 256 pp., Paper
ISBN: 0-321-14922-X
List Price:
$8.00
Inventory Status:
In-Stock
   
Summary

From Longman's new Cultural Editions Series, Hamlet, edited by Constance Jordan, includes the play and contextual materials from the era of Shakespeare. KEY TOPICS: This edition represents Shakespeare's text as it appears in the most authoritative of early editions, the Folio, published in 1623, and it supplies readers with useful footnotes to the interpretation of the text. It also includes brief samples of works by Shakespeare's contemporaries in a section entitled “Contexts”; these will help readers to understand the historical setting and the cultural ideas that helped shape the meaning of Shakespeare's play. By listening to these voices from the past, readers can approach the play with some knowledge of why Hamlet asks the questions he does and of why the character himself, the creation of a distant century, also seems so much a part of our own world. MARKET: Readers interested in Shakespeare's Plays and the time they were written Jordan Hamlet SMP.doc Page 1 of 1
Features

  • Includes Hamlet, the Folio Edition, published in 1623.
  • Contexts include a selection of essays on key issues addressed in the play: descriptions of the widely credited spirit world; accounts of the disease of melancholia; the debates about purgatory, both Catholic and Protestant; prohibitions against “wild justice” of revenge; and analyses of the causes of suicide, a mortal sin. To illustrate the varied responses to Hamlet on both the page and the stage, critical commentary and discussions of performances, drawn from the three centuries since composition and first performances of Hamlet, are included.
  • Available FREE when packaged with The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Second Edition.


Table of Contents



List of Illustrations.


About Longman Cultural Editions.


About This Edition.


Introduction.


Table of Dates.


Hamlet, The Prince of Denmark.


Contexts.


Spiritual and Mental Life.

Joseph Hall, Meditations and Vows (1609).

Ludwig Lavater, from Of Ghosts and Spirites Walking by Nyght (1572).

Timothy Bright, from A Treatise of Melancholy (1586).

Robert Burton, from The Anatomy of Melancholy (1628).



Purgatory.

Simon Fish, from A Supplication for the Beggars. (1528).

John Calvin, from The Institute of the Christian Religion (1536).

John Véron, from The Hunting of Purgatory to Death(1561).

Cardinal William Allen, fromA Defense and Declaration of the Catholic Church’s Doctrine, Touching Purgatory (1577).

Robert Bellarmine, fromThe Art of Dying Well (1622).



Revenge.

The Bible and Holy Scriptures, from Genesis 4, 9-15 and Romans 12.9 (1560); The Holy Bible: Revised Standard Version, from Genesis 4, 9-15 and Romans 12.19 (1952).

William Dickinson, fromThe King’s Right (1619).

Thomas Beard, fromThe Theater of God’s Judgements (1597).

Francis Bacon, Of Revenge, Of Delays, and Of Suspicion from Essays (1858).



Suicide.

Michel de Montaigne, A Custom of the Ile of Cea, from The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio (1603).

John Sym, from Life’s Preservative against Self-Killing (1637).



Sources.

Saxo Grammaticus, from Historia Danica, trans. Oliver Elton (1894).



Performance and Interpretation.

Henry Fielding, from The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling (1749).

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from Notes on some other plays of Shakespeare (1806-08).

Charles Dickens, from Great Expectations (1860-61).

Samuel Clemens, from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).

A.C. Bradley, from Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (1905).



Further Readings.


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