Commentary notes (CN):

1. SMALL CAPS Indicate editions. Notes for each commentator are divided into three parts:

In the 1st two lines of a record, when the name of the source text (the siglum) is printed in SMALL CAPS, the comment comes from an EDITION; when it is in normal font, it is derived from a book, article, ms. record or other source. We occasionally use small caps for ms. sources and for works related to editions. See bibliographies for complete information (in process).

2. How comments are related to predecessors' comments. In the second line of a record, a label "without attribution" indicates that a prior writer made the same or a similar point; such similarities do not usually indicate plagiarism because many writers do not, as a practice, indicate the sources of their glosses. We provide the designation ("standard") to indicate a gloss in common use. We use ≈ for "equivalent to" and = for "exactly alike."

3. Original comment. When the second line is blank after the writer's siglum, we are signaling that we have not seen that writer's gloss prior to that date. We welcome correction on this point.

4. Words from the play under discussion (lemmata). In the third line or lines of a record, the lemmata after the TLN (Through Line Number] are from Q2. When the difference between Q2 and the authors' lemma(ta) is significant, we include the writer's lemma(ta). When the gloss is for a whole line or lines, only the line number(s) appear. Through Line Numbers are numbers straight through a play and include stage directions. Most modern editions still use the system of starting line numbers afresh for every scene and do not assign line numbers to stage directions.

5. Bibliographic information. In the third line of the record, where we record the gloss, we provide concise bibliographic information, expanded in the bibliographies, several of which are in process.

6. References to other lines or other works. For a writer's reference to a passage elsewhere in Ham. we provide, in brackets, Through Line Numbers (TLN) from the Norton F1 (used by permission); we call these xref, i.e., cross references. We call references to Shakespearean plays other than Ham. “parallels” (//) and indicate Riverside act, scene and line number as well as TLN. We call references to non-Shakespearean works “analogues.”

7. Further information: See the Introduction for explanations of other abbreviations. Click here for more information about browsing the entries and here for more information about the special symbols used in Hamletworks. Click the question mark icon above to remove this help message.

1982 ard2

ard2: Seneca; xref

271-2 your father . . . lost his] Jenkins (ed. 1982): “Here and in [394-7] cf. Seneca on death: ’Hoc parti tuo accidit . . . hoc omnibus ante te, hoc omnibus post te’ (Epistles, 77). See above, [252 n].”

1987 oxf4

oxf4

271 must knowe] Hibbard (ed. 1987): "should realize."

2003 SQ

Hirschfeld: Stump

271-88 It showes . . . . This must be so] Hirschfeld (2003, pp. 435-6): <p. 435> “It is . . . perfectly appropriate that the audience first sees Hamlet confront his father’s death in the presence of his uncle, his father’s brother. For Claudius both </p. 435> <p. 436> represents as well as articulates the relay of events that concerns Hamlet--a death that thrusts the son back upon a ’first corse’: [quotes 271-6; 280-8]. Claudius’s insistence that death is ’common’ (not just ordinary but transferable as a bequest descending from a father), though part of his effort to minimize the occasion for Hamlet’s grief, ironically reinforces the devastation. In reiterating death’s genealogical tree--from father to father to father--Claudius’s rhetoric pushes Hamlet back to the scene of the Fall, to the first father who lies at the root of this ’common’ theme. But, with its reference to the ’first corse,’ the speech does so obliquely. For the ’first corse,’ as Donald Stump points out, belongs not to Adam but to Abel, the son and brother, not the father. Claudius’s speech thus conforms to a traumatic logic that invokes an originary moment in terms of a succeeding one; he explains the death of one father not only in terms of the deaths of a sequence of previous fathers--a first ’course’--but also in terms of the dead body of a son and brother--the first ’corpse.’ ” </p. 436>

1994 Kliman

Kliman

271 you must knowe] Kliman (1994): Editors who make this phrase parenthetical soften Q2’s command.