Shakespeare Texts HAMLET –the 1st Quarto 1603
Shakespeare Texts Hamlet: The 1stQuartoHAMLET–the 1stQuartoIntroductionThere are three major versions of Hamlet–the '1stQuarto'(Q1), published in 1603, the '2ndQuarto'(Q2) published in 1604/5, and the '1st Folio'(F1), published in 1623. Further quarto editions are based onQ2, and further folios are revisions of F1.That the versionwe call 'Q1' was publishedearlier than 'Q2' we have known for four centuries,butonly because of the implication of this sentence on the title page of Q2:Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as muchagaine as it was, according to the true and perfectCoppie.Q1'stext itself was lost, and only came to light in 1823 when Sir Henry Bunbury discovered a copyin the Manor House of Great Barton in Suffolk.A second copy then turned up over 30 years laterin Dublin. They remain the only two copies known.How long it had been lost we cannot know; butit seems almost certainthatthe first post-Folio editors–Rowe, Pope, Theobald, Johnson, Capell, Maloneand others–did not have access to it. And soin 1823 its peculiarreadings, not least itsversionof the 'To be or not to be'speech,came as a rude shock –To be, or not to be, ay, there's the point,To die, to sleep, is that all? Ay, all.No, to sleep, to dream, ay, marry, there it goes,For in that dream of death, when we awake,And borne before an everlasting judge,From whence no passenger ever returned,The undiscovered country, at whose sightThe happy smile, and the accursèd damned.But for this, the joyful hope of this,Who'd bear the scorns and flattery of the world,Scorned by the right rich, the rich cursed of the poor,The widow being oppressed, the orphan wronged,The taste of hunger, or a tyrant's reign,And thousand more calamities besides,To grunt and sweat under this weary life,When that he may his full quietus makeWith a bare bodkin? Who would this endure,But for a hope of something after death?Which puzzles the brain, and doth confound the sense,Which makes us rather bear those evils we haveThan fly to others that we know not of.Ay, that. Oh, this conscience makes cowards of us all. -Lady, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.-and it led to the text as a wholebeingderided by many of its new readers.To its fiercest critics it belongs with those lambastedin the preface to the 1st Folio in 1623 as"stol'n and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by frauds and stealths of injurious impostors". Since 1823 literary critics and editors have argued about Q1'sstatusand provenance. Though Shakespeare Texts Hamlet: The 1stQuartothere are many variations within these extremes, the threemost vigorously championed theories are these:'Bad Quarto'theory: this argues thatQ1, though the first to be printed,in compositionpostdates the text we know as Q2, andis a garbled version of the play which Shakespeare's company hadfirst performed(we think)in 1600–apoor'memorial reconstruction'of the 'official' text, probably by the actor who had performed Marcellusand doubled as Lucianus, since these characters'scenes seem to be accurately remembered, while the others are not. This actor, the argument runs,might have worked freelance for Shakespeare'scompany, and then sold his inaccurate recollection to the eager publisher.'Evolution'theory: thisinvolves the notion of an even earlier 'Hamlet', the text of which has never been found. This is the so-called 'Ur-Hamlet', some suggestauthored by Thomas Kyd, others that it was Shakespeare's own first attempt. We know thata play of that namehad been performed by Shakespeare's own company, the Chamberlain's Men (possibly in co-production with Henslowe's Admiral's Men),at Newington Butts in1594, and there are references to it as early as 1589. So this theory has it that Shakespeare evolvedhis famous playfrom thisearlierone(be it his own, or Kyd's, or some other writer's work) rather than starting afreshin perhaps 1599and working directly from the source in Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques. This would make Q1just a stage –perhapsthe firstmajor stage-in arelatively long evolution. It was hurried into print, perhaps even at the company's own instigation, but before Shakespeare had completed his transformation. Q2 quickly followed in 1604 in an attempt to erase the memory of that transitional, and unsatisfactory version.F1 followed nearly twenty years later and represents the text, substantially cut for performance, though it also offerssome lines unknown to Q2 andmany different word and line-readings.'Alternative Version'theory:this argues that Q1 may be a poorly printed but otherwise fairlyaccurate recordof a version of the play that wasedited and modified from the form of the first productionof Q2in order, perhaps, tobe toured with a small company(interestingly, while it refers to attendant lords and others it gives no speeches at all to servants, messengers, sailors or soldiers).****After nearly two centuriesin which the fortunes of these threetheories have fluctuated wildly, the 'bad quarto/memorial reconstruction'theory probably has the upper hand at the present time. The programme notefor the 2010 National Theatre production baldly states: "The First Quarto ... was a pirate edition, heavily truncated and possibly transcribed(badly) by the actor who playedMarcellus at the Globe." And in his fine book, 1599, James Shapiro goes even further: "one or more of those involved in the touring production, including the hired actor who played Marcellus (we know it was this actor because in putting the text together he remembered his own lines a lot better than he did anyone else's) cobbled together from memory a 2,200 line version of the road production and sold it to publishers in London."Such certainty is questionable. Q1certainlyisvery poorly printed, and it has many lines that sound unworthy of, or simply unlike,the Shakespeare we know, butit is a much better version of the play than it has often been thought. It is certainly completely produceable, and manages some developments in the play (particularly around Leartes' return from France) in a more economical fashion than the longwinded developmentof Q2. 'Piracy' alsoleaves some questions unanswered. Why are Polonius and Reynaldo called 'Corambis'and 'Montano'-was the pirate'smemory really that poor? Why do some of the supposedly garbledpassages make senseon their own terms? And why is Gertrude's behaviour sometimes closer to Belleforest than to Q2? Zachary Lesser, a Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and author of 'Hamlet After Q1' hasgone so far as to arguethat Q1's'To be or not to be', for all its inelegance, has a rather stronger internal Shakespeare Texts Hamlet: The 1stQuartologic than the version so many of us have to heart. In all these theoriesspeculation is heaped upon speculation. Some proponents of 'bad quarto', for example, explain away 'Corambis'and 'Montano'by noting that the title page refers to a performance in Oxford University, one of whose honoured founders was considered to be Robert Pullen, whose Latin name was 'Polenius'. In Shakespeare's time the President of Corpus Christi College was John Rainolds (or Reynolds), well-known for his fierce enmity to the theatre. Thus the changesof name from 'Polonius' and 'Reynaldo' wereconceived specifically for that performance in order to avoid offence.Well, maybe...Without adding materially to the speculation, it seems clearthat there areseveral elements of difference in the Q1 text that point tosome now irrecoverable but distinct validityin its composition, even if it is true that what came to be printedof it is a 'poor, memorial reconstruction'.This EditionI have modernised most of the spelling,and included full speech prefixes,but retained many other features of theoriginal printing: theeccentric–perhaps slipshod -punctuation and lineation(the compositor seemed determined to render prose as verse), the italicisation of most of the proper names, and the frequent use of an initial capital letter for words of particular importance. The parsimony in the use of the exclamation mark is typical of the period, and rather welcome; the reluctance to use the full stop (commasand colonsabound) rather less so.One detail of Q1 that has influenced productionfor nearly two centuries is the stage direction on Page 40, Enter the Ghost in his night gown, in place of the mere Enter the Ghost of the later editions. This detail has fed into notions, not all of them post-Freudian, that the climactic scene between Hamlet and his mother should be played either in, or very obviously adjacent to,the royal bedchamber. It is interesting to note in this context that Q1 does not use the word 'closet' in reference to this scene, though it is used several times in Q2 and the Folios;critics of the theatrical habit of having Hamlet and Gertrude circling a bed, or even tussling on it, have repeatedly insisted that a 'closet' is NOT a bedroom ...Another detail concerns Hamlet's age. From the conversation between Hamlet and the Sexton in Q2's version of the graveyard scene, we can determine that Hamlet must be approaching30 (or older), given that he vividly remembers Yorick carrying him on his back:Here's a skull now; this skull has lain in the earth three and twenty years.The equivalentconversation in Q1 suggeststhat Hamlet need not have been more than 18 or 20–if Yorick had died while still in post as Court Jester:Look you, here's a skull hath been here this dozen year.My own feeling is that18 or 20is a far more credible age forHamlet than 28 or 30, but why the disparity exists is just one more layer of the Q1 mystery. It may be relevant that RichardBurbage, Shakespeare's first Hamlet,was 33 in 1600. By then he had been a leading actor for a decade; could he also have played Hamlet in the lost playas much as a decade earlier?Speculation is irresistible!Andrew Hilton
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