Excerpt from Shakespeare's Hamlet: A New Commentary With a Chapter on First Principles He greatly ventures who would write a new commentary on Hamlet. For in one generation after another, minds of a high order, both in the English-speaking parts of the world and in Germany, have given themselves to the earnest study of this tragedy and its character problems. Germany, in particular, has supplied every variety of Hamlet-criticism, high and low - has given us Goethe's and Schlegel's suggestive impressions, which could not but greatly influence British criticism, and has given us also Werder's paradoxical view of Hamlet as a successful man of action, and Tieck's unpardonable hypothesis as to his relations with Ophelia. Furness, in the Bibliography included in his great 'Variorum' edition of the play, gave a list of some fifty German translations of Hamlet purporting to be original and independent translations; which perhaps tells as much, respecting the appeal of the play, as does his list of over two hundred German essays and criticisms relating to Hamlet, or his 14-page catalogue of the nineteenth-century criticism in English. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.