HE original story on which this play is built may be found in Saxo Grammaticus, the Danish historian. From thence Belleforest adopted it in his collection of novels, in seven volumes, which he began in 1564, and continued to publish through succeeding years. It was from Belleforest that the old black letter prose Hystorie of Hamblet was translated; the earliest edition of which, known to the commentators, was dated in 1608; but it is supposed that there were earlier impressions. The following passage is found in an Epistle, by Thomas Nashe, prefixed to Greene's Arcadia, which was published in 1589:-"I will turn back to my first text of studies of delight, and talk a little in friendship with a few of our rival translators. It is a common practice now-a-days, among a sort of shifting companions, that runne through every art and thrive by none, to leave the trade of Noverint [i. e. the law] whereunto they were born, and busie themselves with the endeavours of art, that could scarcely latinize their neck-verse, if they should have neede; yet English Seneca, read by candle-light, yeelds many good sentences, as Bloud is a beggar, and so forth: and if you entreat him faire in a frosty morning, he will affoord you whole Hamlets, I should say, Handfuls of tragical speeches. But O grief! Tempus edax rerum -what is it that will last always? The sea exhaled by drops will in continuance be drie; and Seneca, let bloud line by line, and page by page, at length must needs die to our stage." It is manifest from this passage that some play on the story of Hamlet had been exhibited before the year 1589. Malone thinks that it was not Shakespeare's drama, but an elder performance on which, with the aid of the old prose History of Hamblet, his tragedy was formed. In a tract, entitled Wits Miserie, or the World's Madnesse, discovering the incarnate Devils of the Age, published by Thomas Lodge in 1596, one of the devils is said to be " a foule lubber, and looks as pale as the vizard of the ghost, who cried so miserably |