Abstract
In the history of Shakespeare scholarship and criticism, the text printed in 1603 has always been misremembered. It has suffered from being lost, then found and claimed, then unclaimed, then sort of claimed again—making its relationship with Shakespeare troublesome indeed—an unwanted little bastard striving to gain approval from the rest of the family. For 200 years, it was simply forgotten. It was unknown to the critics, poets, playwrights, scholars, and editors who institutionalized and canonized Shakespeare in the century and a half after the Restoration. Dryden, Rowe, Pope, Theobald, Warburton, Johnson, Capell, Steevens, and Malone never saw it. Neither did the great English actors from Betterton to Garrick, Kemble, and Kean, famous for their very different performances of Hamlet. Neither did the early Romantic poets and critics, German and English, who idolized Shakespeare the poet and Hamlet the character.
“Remember me”
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
For documentary evidence of the “1597” edition, see Arthur Freeman and Paul Grinke, “Four New Shakespeare Quartos?” TLS (5 April 2002): 17–18.
T. W. Baldwin, Shakspere’s “Love’s Labours Won”: New Evidence from the Account Books of an Elizabethan Bookseller (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957). For subsequent scholarship see entry in the Lost Plays Database.
Lukas Erne, in Shakespeare and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), discusses a few early collectors of playbooks (194–223), but such fans were demonstrably exceptional, accounting for only a small fraction of the initial print-runs of plays. Moreover, none systematically collected multiple editions of a single Shakespeare play, as editors like Theobald began doing in the eighteenth century.
W. W. Greg describes both extant copies of Q1 as “in good condition, though in the Huntington copy a few headlines are shaved and those on the verso pages are obscured by the mounting paper, the leaves being inlaid; both have been to some extent defaced with annotations in pen and ink, more extensive in the [British] museum copy but more serious in the Huntington, where at a number of points, the reading has been deliberately altered”: see W. W. Greg, ed., “Hamlet”: First Quarto, 1603 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), i.
E. H. Mikhail, ed., Goldsmith: Interviews and Recollections (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993), 29.
W. W. Greg, ed., The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1602 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1910), xxvi–xxvii.
For an astute history of “The Rise and Fall of Memorial Reconstruction,” see Gabriel Egan, The Struggle for Shakespeare’s Text: Twentieth-Century Editorial Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 111–23. He notes Greg’s continuing unease about application of the theory to Q1 Hamlet (111).
Evelyn May Albright, Dramatic Publication in England, 1580–1640: A Study of Conditions Affecting Content and Form of Drama (London: Oxford University Press, 1927), esp. 300–310.
Laurie E. Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The “Bad” Quartos and Their Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 324.
Paul Menzer, The Hamlets: Cues, Qs, and Remembered Texts (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 33.
Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, eds., Hamlet (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006), 509
Brian Vickers, “Hamlet by Dogberry: A Perverse Reading of the Bad Quarto,” TLS, 14 December 1993.
Gary Taylor and Michael Warren, eds., The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of “King Lear” (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993);
George Ian Duthie, Elizabethan Shorthand and the First Quarto of “King Lear” (Oxford: Blackwell, 1949) and Shakespeare’s “King Lear”: A Critical Edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1949).
See Taylor’s textual introduction to Hamlet in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 396–402;
and George Ian Duthie, The “Bad” Quarto of “Hamlet” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941).
John Jowett, The Tragedy of King Richard the Third (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000).
Kathleen Irace, Reforming the “Bad” Quartos: Performance and Provenance of Six Shakespearean First Editions (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 164.
Kathleen Irace, “Origins and Agents of Q1 Hamlet,” in The “Hamlet” First Published (Q1, 1603): Origins, Form, Intertextualities, ed. Thomas Clayton (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 90–122.
The single actor had been identified, independently, by W. H. Widgery and Grant White in 1880–1, and by H. D. Gray in 1910: see Harold Jenkins, ed., Hamlet (London: Methuen, 1982), 20–21.
The First Quarto of Hamlet, ed. Kathleen O. Irace, The New Cambridge Shakespeare: The Early Quartos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 115–16.
James P. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 244.
MacDonald P. Jackson, Studies in Attribution: Middleton and Shakespeare, Jacobean Drama Studies, vol. 79 (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1979).
Ralph Berry, “Hamlet’s Doubles,” Shakespeare Quarterly 77 (1986): 204–12.
This statement is based on the concordances to the roles of individual characters in Marvin Spevack’s A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare, 9 vols. (Hildesheim: Olms, 1968–80), which is based upon the text of Hamlet in the Riverside edition, which combines material from both Q2 and F. I have not checked the figures and proportions in all three versions. However, the memorial reconstruction hypothesis about Q1 is based on the assumption that it derives from something like the Riverside conflation.
Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
See the positive review by William Proctor Williams in Notes & Queries 56 (2009): 452–4. Gabriel Egan’s later, more detailed review is damning about the incoherence and inaccuracy of many aspects of Menzer’s argument: see “Shakespeare: Editions and Textual Matters,” The Year’s Work in English Studies, vol. 91: Covering Work Published in 2010 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 328–410, esp. 357–67; but Egan does accept Menzer’s evidence for greater stability in the Corambis cues, and the “plausibility” of Menzer’s argument that the differences between Corambis and Polonius result from “revision” (366).
James J. Marino, Owning William Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 87–8.
Vadnais, “‘According to the scrippe’: speeches, speech order, and performance in Shakespeare’s early printed play texts,” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2012), esp. p. 108; accessed online through OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, April 2014. The evidence and arguments marshalled by Vadnais are equally damaging for any theory that the 1603 quarto is the result of note-taking during a performance (discussed in chapter 3).
Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama 1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 150, 136, 107.
Harold Jenkins, “Playhouse Interpolations in the Folio Text of Hamlet,” Studies in Bibliography 13 (1960): 31–47.
For this and other metrical variations, see George T. Wright, Shakespeare’s Metrical Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
Petersen, Shakespeare’s Errant Texts: Textual Form and Linguistic Style in Shakespearean “Bad” Quartos and Co-authored Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), xvi, 63, 65, 73, 78, 79, 84, 210, 223.
Charles Adams Kelly, The Evidence Matrix for the 1st Quarto of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” (Ann Arbor, MI: Howland Research, 2008), 19. A revised, corrected, and enlarged edition of Kelly’s argument was published in 2014.
Petersen’s work also involves analysis of later German texts of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Titus Andronicus. But the relationship of Q1 Hamlet to the eighteenth-century text of Der bestrafte Brudermord cannot tell us anything about the origins of Q1, because the German text involves translation, transnational touring, changes of company and theatre, and sustained adaptation, based probably on the portable printed texts of Q1 and Q2. See Tiffany Stern’s “‘If I could see the Puppets Dallying’: Der Bestrafte Brudermord and Hamlet’s Encounters with the Puppets,” Shakespeare Bulletin 31 (2013): 337–52.
Leah S. Marcus, Un-editing the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London: Routledge, 1996), 152–76.
Albert Weiner, ed., Hamlet: The First Quarto, 1603 (Great Neck, NY: Barron’s Educational, 1962), 24.
Hardin Craig, A New Look at Shakespeare’s Quartos (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), 9.
Paul Werstine, Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 232. Erne rejected memorial reconstruction in favor of his own hypothesis (that Q1 represents the abridged performance script of the play), which I consider in chapter 3.
I have written about one modern playwright revising his script, repeatedly, in “‘May I Be Metamorphosed’: Cardenio by Stages,” in The Quest for Cardenio: Shakespeare, Fletcher, Cervantes and the Lost Play, ed. David Carnegie and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 387–403;
and “Poner in Escena The History of Cardenio,” in The Creation and Re-creation of Cardenio: Performing Shakespeare, Transforming Cervantes, ed. Terri Bourus and Gary Taylor (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 197–218.
F. P. Wilson, Marlowe and the Early Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), 115. The actor who played King John cannot have also played Melun, since Melun exits at the end of 5.2 and John enters immediately at the beginning of 5.3. Wilson did not make this point.
These interleavings were removed and now have a separate British Library shelfmark. I have examined them personally, but they were called to my attention by the accurate account in Arthur and Janet Ing Freeman, “Did Halliwell Steal and Mutilate the First Quarto of Hamlet?” Library VII, 2:4 (2001): 349–63, esp. 359–63.
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: A Tragedy (London: M. Wellington, 1718). This is one of the so-called Players’ Quartos (though in fact it is a duodecimo). See Henry N. Paul, “Mr. Hughs’ Edition of Hamlet,” Modern Language Notes 49 (1934): 438–43.
Randall McLeod, “Gon. No more, the text is foolish,” in The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear, ed. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
Lamb, “On the Tragedies of Shakspere,” The Reflector (1811); Hazlitt, Characters, 113. Hazlitt and Lamb were both avid theatregoers, but the Shakespeare productions they witnessed were deformed by anachronistic theatrical practices, which magnified the differences between reading the texts and watching them performed. For a valuable defense of Hazlitt and Lamb, see Edward Pechter, Shakespeare Studies Today: Romanticism Lost (New York: Palgrave, 2011), esp. 151–76. My point here is simply that Q1 Hamlet was discovered at a moment intrinsically inhospitable to it.
On this shift, see Shannon Jackson, Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. 40–78.
See William Davis, “Now, Gods, Stand up for Bastards: The 1603 ‘Good Quarto’ of Hamlet,” Textual Cultures 1 (2006): 60–89.
B. A. P. Van Dam, The Text of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (London: John Lane, 1924), 19. Van Dam’s argument depends in part on the assumption that “My will, not all the world” is the second half of a single verse line, but the phrase is metrically ambiguous, and could just as easily be interpreted (as it is by Taylor and Thompson) as the first half of the next verse line.
Stern, “Sermons, Plays and Note-takers: Hamlet Q1 as a ‘Noted’ Text,” Shakespeare Survey 66 (2013): 1–23, esp. 3, 12, 13, 14, 15.
Copyright information
© 2014 Terri Bourus
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bourus, T. (2014). Piratical Actors?. In: Young Shakespeare’s Young Hamlet. History of Text Technologies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137465641_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137465641_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-49963-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-46564-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)