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.

1845 hunter

hunter

1868-72 whose...pressure] Hunter (1845, p. 245-46): <p. 245>“This is a very correct description of the moral purposes of acting, and may have suggested to Randolph the idea of his </p. 245><p. 246>Muses’ Looking-Glass, a dramatic piece in which the notion is amplified very ingeniously. I quote the passage from an author far less known than he deserves to be. ‘Flowerdew.— But is there such a glass, good Roscius? Roscius.— There is, sent hither by the great Apollo. Who in the world’s bright eye, and every day Set in this car of light surveys the earth From east to west, who, finding every place Fruitful in nothing but phantastique follies, And most ridiculous humours, as he is The God of Physick, thought it appertained To him to find a cure to purge the earth Of ignorance and sin, two grand diseases And now grown epidemical; many receipts He thought upon, as to have planted hellebore In every garden. But none pleased like this. He takes out water from the Muses’ spring, And sends it to the North, there to be freezed Into a christall. That being done, he makes A mirrour with it, and instils this vertue That it should by reflection shew each man All his deformities both of soul and body, And cure ‘em both.’”</p. 246>

1870 abbott

1868 Abbott (§158):”From is frequently used in the sense of ‘apart from,’ ‘away from,’ without a verb of motion. ‘Clean from the purpose.’—J.C. [1.3.35. (467)], ‘This is from my commission.’—T.N. [1.5.189 (484)], ‘Anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing,’ Hamlet [1868]

1872 cln1

cln1

1867 from] Clark & Wright (ed. 1872): “contrary to. So in Julius Caesar, i. 3. 35, ’Clean from the purpose’; 1 Henry IV, iii. 2. 31, ’Quite from the flight of all thy ancestors’; and Ben Jonson’s Fox, iii. 2. p. 243. Gifford."

1885 macd

macd

1867-8 MacDonald (ed. 1885): “away from: inconsistent with.”

1899 ard1

ard1

from] Dowden (ed. 1899): “away from, contrary to, as in Julius Casar, I. Iii. 35.”

1981 wright

wright

1867-71 Wright (1981, p. 182): Hamlet’s remarks on ‘playing’ yield up more of their meaning when we notice their use of hendiadys. The purpose of playing he tells us, [‘was . . . form and pressure’]. The last phrase surely means ‘the imprint, or stamp, of his form,’ though we may also be justified in hearing a more complex meaning; ‘his form and the stamp of his form.’ But whose form? The previous phrase is more puzzling, but I take the two terms it joins to be not age and body but age and body of the time. For one thing, ‘age . . . of the time’ is meaningless, as Dr. Johnson noted. On the other hand, age and body of the time are clearly not parallel, but what happens here is what frequently happens in hendiadys: the second terms unfolds the first. The very age—that is to say, the period of time, conceived as a body—will find the imprint of its figure in the mirror of stage representations.”

“The usual assumption of editors, when confronted with a phrase in the a + b form, is that the linked words are either synonymous or complementary. It might help their readers—us—if they realized that Shakespeare frequently uses a third pattern, which, though it works differently in different examples, constitutes a distinct alternative way of organizing compound phrases. The function of this third pattern is evidently not to resolve ambiguities but to assert them, to acknowledge and dramatize the elusiveness of even the sim- </p. 182> <p. 183> plest relations, and at once to deny and to extend the adequacy of linguistic forms to convey our experience.” </p. 183>