The first quarto of Hamlet was printed in 1603, with William Shakespeare's name appearing on the title page, but scholars cannot agree on the date of its composition (it may be from as early as 1594), or the source text from the printed version, although most agree that the first quarto was not printed from an authorial manuscript. The second quarto of Hamlet was printed just a year later, in 1604, and most scholars agree that the second quarto does derive from Shakespeare's manuscript. Whether the first quarto represents a playhouse revision, an early draft, or something else altogether is likely to remain a mystery in the absence of further historical evidence.
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