With a wealth of helpful and incisive commentary, this edition of Hamlet provides:The Second Quarto Text (1604-1605), edited to the highest standards of scholarship.Additional passages found only in the 1623 Folio text.Detailed notes and commentary on the same page as the text.A full, illustrated introduction to the play's historical, cultural and performance contexts.An in-depth survey of critical approaches to the play.A full index to the introduction and notes.A select bibliography of references and further reading.This is a fully self-contained free-standing volume which includes in its introduction and appendices all the supporting materials that a reader would expect to find in an Arden edition. It forms the core of a ground-breaking edition of three hamlet texts. A companion volume contains fully annotated editions of the 1603 First Quarto and the 1623 Folio texts.Readers of both editions have, for the first time, a unique opportunity to study the three surviving texts of Hamlet experiences by Shakespeare's contemporaries, fully modernized and edited by leading scholars.