Shylock and others Book

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This is an OCR edition with typos.
Excerpt from book:
THE SOURCES OF HAMLET. A Young man who had recently seen Hamlet on the stage remarked by way of explaining and qualifying his admiration of the performance : "But then I had read the play ! " We do not quote this dramatic critic for the purpose of denying his implied proposition that it is an advantage to have read a play before seeing it, but to introduce a remark of a similar character, namely, that it is an advantage to a student of Hamlet to have previously read the Danish History of Saxo Gram- maticus. There the reader will find the very names of Hamlet and Gertrude (disguised as Amlethus and Gerutha), and most of the incidents ofthe plot: for instance, the murder of the King of Denmark by his brother ; the brother's usurpation and his marriage with the late king's widow; Hamlet's feigned madness, and his killing the lurking counsellor, and his harangue to his mother; the dispatch of Hamlet to England, his discovery of the king's crafty letter, and his substitution of another letter effecting the destruction of his two companions. We do not overlook the points in which the play differs from the history; but that the plot of the play is substantially taken from the old story does not admit of the smallest doubt. Now Saxo Grammaticus was born in the middle of the twelfth century, and his Danorum Regum Heroumque Historia was first printed at Paris in 1514, in a handsome folio by the celebrated Josse Bade d'Asch. There was an edition printed at Basle in 1534, andanother at Frankfort in 1576, so that the work was in type in three impressions, and accessible for the dramatist in 1600, or thereabouts, when the play was written. Shakspeare's " small Latin " may have caused a difficulty in the handling of Saxo, but even if this was so, he might, as he appears to have done in oth...