Search

Vitamin A2 acid (m. p. 176–178°) has been prepared by the Wittig reaction of (dehydro-β-ionylidene-ethyl)-triphenylphosphonium bromide and n-butyl β-formyl-crotonate. Reduction of this acid with lithium-aluminium hydride gave a mixture of all-trans- and 13-cis-vitamin A2, which could be separated by chromatography. The same mixture has been obtained from vitamin A acid according to the first vitamin A2 synthesis by FARRAR, HAMLET, HENBEST & JONES.

Ils disputèrent quinze jours de suite, et, au bout de quinze jours, ils étaient aussi avancés que le premier; mais enfin ils parlaient, ils se communiquaient des idées, ils se consolaient.—Candide.Some twenty years ago, in an analysis of the Play-Scene, I remarked that it was extraordinary that so important a part of Hamlet had received so little attention. Oddly enough, interest in this scene was just beginning in good earnest, and much important criticism and lively controversy have followed in the intervening years. We might hope, then, that at the present day we should be clearer in our minds, and that the scholar, the actor, the stage-manager, and the “general reader” would now be happily in accord.

On the evening of September 20, 1709, at about the hour when we are accustomed in our own theatres to see the curtain rising on the first act, an old man dressed in black clothes sat in a chair of state on the stage of the London Haymarket, and whispered for the last time, “The rest is silence.” Within the sound of his beautiful voice the wit and fashion of the capital were congregated, their customary laughter and chatter awed into stillness by the “divinity [that] hung round that man.” He had played the Prince for forty-eight years, and though he was now more than seventy, and occasionally younger men essayed the rôle, the “town” still preferred their old favorite.

When Coleridge says that Hamlet's tragedy is owing to his failure to realize that ‘action is the chief end of existence’, when Dr. Johnson says that the prince is ‘throughout the whole play, rather an instrument than agent’, each is noticing the extent to which the nature and meaning of action by human agency is the pivot on which Shakespeare's play turns. Among modern critics, Maynard Mack has commented on Hamlet's central concern with action: he says, ‘“Act” . . . I take to be the play's radical metaphor. It distills the various perplexities about the character of reality into a residual perplexity about the nature of an act.‘ I see ‘act’ as not just a metaphor, in Mack's sense that the play uses its concern for action to imply something about the larger issue of reality itself, for I think Hamlet expresses what may be a deeper insight, that action may not only ‘represent’ reality, but, in some sense that the play tries to define, is reality, as Coleridge suggests.

(This is an exact reproduction of the particular copy of the 1747 text which Garrick used as a foundation for his alteration. All the lines marked by Garrick for elimination are put into the footnotes. All the lines indicated by a quotation mark for excision by Hughs and Wilks which remain in the present text were restored by Garrick. Other Garrick restorations and emendations are italicized.)