Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
The mystery in Hamlet is a ghost that has haunted the minds of many a generation of scholars and critics. Perhaps the full secret of this mystery was to be known only by Shakespeare himself, even as that other secret was told only to Hamlet by the ghost on the platform at Elsinore
In the dead vast and middle of the night.
1 In Wilhelm Meister.
2 In Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare and Other English Poets.
3 See his Life of William Shakespeare.
4 See Shakespearean Tragedy, A. C. Bradley, 1905.
5 Set forth in Werder's Vorlesungen uber Shakespeare's Hamlet, Berlin 1875. (Passages are translated in Furness' Variorum edition).
6 For Shakespeare's use of the sollioquy, see Professor E. E. Stoll's “Anachronism in Shakespeare Criticism,” Modern Philology, VII, 557-575 (1910).
7 William J. Rolfe, p. 335 of his revised edition of Hamlet.
8 Here, and elsewhere, see the text of the edition by Gollancz.
9 For a clear and able presentation of the theory, see Professor Karl Young's article, “The Shakespeare Skeptics,” North American Review, March, 1922, 382-393. Cf. also Professor E. E. Stoll's elaborate discussion, “Hamlet; an Historical and Comparative Study,” Research Publications of the University of Mimzesota, VIII, No. 5, 1919.
10 Expressed in the essay or article “A Guide to English Literature” (review of Stopford A. Brooke's Primer of English Literature).
11 Cf. “Recent Criticism of Hamlet” by E. E. Stoll, Contemporary Review, 347-357 (1924).