Andrew Cairncross

Andrew Scott Cairncross, known as A.S. Cairncross, was a scholar of Shakespeare and the English literary renaissance. He is best known for his 1936 book The Problem of Hamlet (London: MacMillan), which makes a number of controversial arguments about Hamlet — arguing, for example, that the play was written around 1588–89 (rather than twelve years later, as most scholars insist), and that the so-called Ur-Hamlet, to which frequent allusion occurs starting in 1589, is actually an early draft of Shakespeare's play.