William Shakespeare, Hamlet. Ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. 2 vols.

The Third Series of the Arden Shakespeare is currently in the process of newly editing all of Shakespeare’s plays and poems. Necessarily this is taking some years, but the intent is to do a complete sweep, unlike the earlier series, which appeared in a continuous process of revision following the inception of the enterprise in the 1890s. (Fittingly enough, the first play to appear was Edward Dowden’s Hamlet; Harold Jenkins’s edition replaced it some eighty-three years later.) Some plays and poems of the second series have long been overdue for replacement; others have been published rather recently. Of these, Hamlet is perhaps the outstanding instance. Harold Jenkins’s edition of Hamlet was published in 1982, and remains a substantial achievement. Some defenders of the Jenkins Hamlet murmured in protest when this most recent edition was proposed. Still, much has happened in literary criticism and editing since 1982. The result is that we now have two Arden Hamlets: one a crowning achievement of the more traditional historical and philological editing that held sway until the early 1980s, the other a no less impressive work of scholarship and editing situated in our current climate of postmodernism. Both are extraordinary. I plan to hold on to, and continue to use, both.

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