[Footnote 1: 'it is not true that the world is grown honest': he doubts themselves. His eye is sharper because his heart is sorer since he left Wittenberg. He proceeds to examine them.]
[Footnote 2: This passage, beginning with 'Let me question,' and ending with 'dreadfully attended,' is not in the Quarto.
Who inserted in the Folio this and other passages? Was it or was it not Shakspere? Beyond a doubt they are Shakspere's all. Then who omitted those omitted? Was Shakspere incapable of refusing any of his own work? Or would these editors, who profess to have all opportunity, and who, belonging to the theatre, must have had the best of opportunities, have desired or dared to omit what far more painstaking editors have since presumed, though out of reverence, to restore?]
[Footnote 3: 'but it is thinking that makes it so:']
[Footnote 4: —feeling after the cause of Hamlet's strangeness, and following the readiest suggestion, that of chagrin at missing the succession.]
[Footnote 5: objects and aims.]
[Footnote 6: foi.]
[Footnote 7: Does he choose beggars as the representatives of substance because they lack ambition—that being shadow? Or does he take them as the shadows of humanity, that, following Rosincrance, he may get their shadows, the shadows therefore of shadows, to parallel monarchs and heroes? But he is not satisfied with his own analogue—therefore will to the court, where good logic is not wanted—where indeed he knows a hellish lack of reason.]
[Footnote 8: 'On no account.']
[Footnote 9: 'I have very bad servants.' Perhaps he judges his servants spies upon him. Or might he mean that he was haunted with bad thoughts? Or again, is it a stroke of his pretence of madness—suggesting imaginary followers?]