"HAMLET."

Press, Volume XLIX, Issue 14841, 5 December 1913, Page 7

"HAMLET."

ITS FIRST PRODUCTION. HARVEY'S NOTES REVIVED. ("Times"-Sydney "Sun" Special Cabio.) LONDON, December 3. Marginal notes made by Gabriel Harvey, the famous Elizabethan scholar and friend ot Spenser, edited by Professor Moore-Smith, suggest very strongly that Hamlet in its first unrevised form was produced not earlier than the end of 1598 and not later than the beginning of 1601. Gabriel Haryey (1545-1630) was tho son of a ropun.uker, and became a noted author of his period. His patron, the Earl of Leicester, sent him abroad. He became a Doctor of Laws, and regarded himself as "the inventor of the English Hexameter/ but ho would have been forgotten long ago but for his friendship for Spenser, and his violent quarrel with Nash and Greene, which began by Greene's allusion to his ropewalk origin in his "Quip for an Upstart Courtier," published in 1592. They conducted a violent controversy till Greene's death, and then Nash continued it till the Archbishop of Canterbury issued an order for the seizure of all the combatants' works in the interests of public peace. The first production of "Hamlet" is generally assigned to 1601 or 1602. It was entered in the Stationers' Register in 1603. The differences in the early editions indicate that it underwent a good deal of revision. Certain passages in the play are thoucht to refer to events in 1600 and 1601.