The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke: A Study with The Text of The Folio of 1623 was originally published in 1885 by Longmans, Green & Co., London.

George MacDonald wrote, “By this edition of Hamlet I hope to help the student of Shakespeare to understand the play—and first of all Hamlet himself, whose spiritual and moral nature are the real material of the tragedy, to which every other interest of the play is subservient.”

His son, Dr. Greville MacDonald, wrote that his father’s commentary was “the most important interpretation of the play ever written…It is his intuitive understanding…rather than learned analysis—of which there is yet overwhelming evidence—that makes it so splendid.”

Editions

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From Johannesen Printing & Publishing

Hand-bound cloth cover edition, reproduced from the original 1885 edition with photolithography.

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Kindle & Paperback editions

The Tragedie of Hamlet: An Overview by Barbara Amell

My records indicate that George MacDonald lectured more often upon William Shakespeare’s play of Hamlet than on any of his many other lecture subjects. It is understandably a difficult fact for people to take in, that the man known for his staunch belief in a God who is Love in every conceivable sense of the word, and whose literary reputation today rests so largely upon his classic fairytales and fantasies, had such a decided preference for lecturing upon a confused, melancholy, potentially suicidal and possibly insane character, trapped in a plot where the majority of the cast winds up dead. Reports of MacDonald’s numerous lectures on Hamlet repeatedly quote him calling this play “the highest work of Shakespeare—he suspected he was right in saying it was the highest work of art in the world.” (Glasgow Herald 9/10/1890.) “Hamlet was the most marvellous product of human thought, wonder, and sense of mystery.” (Birmingham Daily Gazette 1/16/1866.) Yet there was considerably more involved in MacDonald’s admiration for Hamlet than the play’s artistic quality: “… the character of Hamlet was the grandest of pictures—not merely because of the poetry which was associated with and woven round him, but because of his character itself.” (Birmingham Gazette 10/29/1891.) One description of this lecture reads in part, “He showed that the Prince presented all the characteristics of a Christian gentleman. The lecture was studded with many gems of thought, and irradiated by frequent flashes of caustic humour, and tempered by reverent allusions, which embodied whole sermons of exhortation and edification.” (Northern Echo 9/10/1890.) The latter comment helps explain why, out of the many varied text sources MacDonald chose for his Sermons from Shakespeare, five of them were from Hamlet, and all these were taken from Hamlet’s dialogue.

Wingfold Summer 2012 documents that George MacDonald presented a six-lecture course upon Hamlet in May and June of 1876. To my knowledge, he never repeated this format. The Hamlet course was given at the lavish London home of the MacDonalds’ friends Russell and Emelia Gurney. In late 1875, the MacDonalds had found it necessary for health reasons to lease a second home at Boscombe to spend the winters in, and this arrangement had strained their finances. A lecture course at the Gurneys would have guaranteed MacDonald a sophisticated audience of people who could pay him well. MacDonald’s letters to his wife Louisa from early May 1876 indicate that preparing this course had inspired him to attempt something he had never done before: putting the contents of one of his many extempore lecture topics in writing. In a letter dated May 3, 1876, he underlined the following sentences: “I am very busy with my Hamlet. I am tempted to sell it for myself. What would you think of that?” May 4, 1876, MacDonald wrote, “Now I must polish the last act of Hamlet. I think while I am lecturing, I shall proceed to get ready an edition to print & enquire about exchange fee.” As mentioned above, MacDonald’s “The Elder Hamlet,” clearly a product of this lecture course, was published in Macmillan’s, August 1876. This essay indicates that MacDonald may have been planning to put the Hamlet course itself in writing. Eventually, however, he prepared an edited version of the play, with his extensive commentary.

MacDonald’s edited Hamlet would not see publication until early 1885. A report of his Hamlet lecture from 1879 related at the close, “The lecturer stated that he was preparing an edition of Hamlet which would soon be published.” (Newcastle Courant 8/22/1879.) But this was not to be. On August 16, 1884, MacDonald wrote to Louisa, “My Hamlet is getting on, but it is slow, pains-giving work. I shall be glad when it is done for several reasons. I shall be readier to die, and readier to prepare another play.” (See Wingfold Winter 2009.) I suspect the next play MacDonald hoped to edit was Macbeth, since this was his second most frequent lecture subject, not merely among his Shakespearean lectures, but among his lecture repertoire in general. Low sales for the Hamlet edition, despite George MacDonald’s general popularity as an author, may have prompted Longmans Publishers to decline to option a second Shakespeare volume from him.

On February 26, 1885, MacDonald wrote to his literary agent A. P. Watt: “As I expected, the critics are down on my Hamlet on all sides.” But MacDonald was then living in Italy, and he had not yet seen “all sides” of what critics in the United Kingdom thought of this book. The publication of the above comment in Greville MacDonald’s George MacDonald and His Wife, p. 541, has given people inaccurate impressions: George MacDonald’s Hamlet edition received several favorable reviews, as it again did when reissued shortly after his death in 1905 by Fifield Publishers, and again with the 1924 Centenary edition from Allen & Unwin Publishers. The critic for the Aberdeen Press and Journal 3/16/1885 gave MacDonald’s Hamlet pride of place for their literature column: “… the book can be thoroughly recommended as a careful, exhaustive, and loving study of the character of Hamlet. It casts light on many a dark passage, and disposes of not a few knotty points in the Prince’s mental constitution. It is beautiful to look at and instructive to read, and though Shakespeare students may carp at some of the readings, still it is an edition of Hamlet that will be treasured by the numberless admirers of hm whom Dr Macdonald considers ‘the grandest hero of fiction.’” A critic for the Graphic 11/18/1905 wrote, “It is a curious study, well worthy of attention, for Dr. Macdonald touched nothing which he did not illuminate.” The Aberdeen Press and Journal 9/22/1924 featured the book as part of the coverage for the centenary of George MacDonald’s birth: “Dr Macdonald brought answers which, in the light of their date and the surrounding error, are splendid tributes to a scholarship and thought that have a touch of genius.” 

A particular oddity represented in George MacDonald’s edited Hamlet is his claim that Hamlet was not contemplating suicide in his famous soliloquy, commencing, “To be, or not to be.” MacDonald referenced this matter in the volume’s dedication, dated “Christmas, 1884,” to his step-uncle Alexander Stewart MacColl, “to whom I owe in especial the true understanding of the great soliloquy.” MacColl had been a noted Shakespearean scholar in Edinburgh for several years. George MacDonald’s father had married Alex MacColl’s sister Margaret while George was still young; so it might be supposed that MacColl had told George how he regarded the soliloquy some years before MacDonald began to lecture. I found, however, that earlier press reports of MacDonald’s Hamlet lectures indicate he did in fact initially think that Hamlet was considering suicide at this point in the play. As late as January 11, 1869, when MacDonald was on an extensive lecture tour of Scotland, he reportedly referred to Hamlet as having “deliberately reasoned about his self-destruction” in his second soliloquy. (Stirling Journal 1/15/1869.) But MacDonald next lectured upon Hamlet on January 12, 1869 in Edinburgh, where he was the guest of Alexander MacColl and his wife Eliza. MacDonald’s change of opinion regarding Hamlet contemplating suicide can be traced in the press reports of his Hamlet lectures which followed that visit. This subject is related in detail in my article “To Be” for Wingfold Summer 2015.

Articles about The Tragedie of Hamlet

WINGFOLD

Wingfold is a quarterly magazine that restores material by and about George MacDonald, in print since 1993. To subscribe, click here. To request any of the following articles that appear in back issues of Wingfold, contact Barbara Amell at b_amell@q.com.

Fall 1998

1885 Review

“George MacDonald on Hamlet”, by Mary Taylor

Commencing a Lecture Career