Abstract
There are no pirates in the first edition of Hamlet. That text cannot be convincingly attributed to a piratical publisher, a piratical actor, or a piratical spectator. There are errors in the printed text, of course, as there are errors in all early printed texts of Shakespeare’s plays—and, indeed, in all books produced by Gutenberg’s complicated hand-press printing machine. But since the rediscovery of the 1603 edition, almost two centuries ago, no one has ever provided convincing evidence that the first quarto of Hamlet is a radically illegitimate text, produced by some fundamentally unauthorized person or mechanism of transmission. No early witness ever impugned Nicholas Ling’s authority to publish it or the quality of its text. The manuscript from which it was printed may not have been in Shakespeare’s own handwriting; it was probably a copy, perhaps even a copy of a copy, and it undoubtedly contained the kinds of mistakes introduced when people copied manuscripts. But the errors of copyists and the errors of printers can be found in the 1623 collection of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, and in all the “good quartos” printed in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Editors vary in their willingness to emend, but no serious scholar doubts Shakespeare’s authorship of other printed texts just because they are imperfect.
“Young Hamlet”
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Notes
Leah S. Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London: Routledge, 1996), 107.
Paul M. Edmondson, “‘A sad story tolde’: Playing Horatio in Q1 Hamlet,” Hamlet Studies 22 (2000): 26–39;
Philip C. McGuire, “Which Fortinbras, Which Hamlet?” in Hamlet First Published, ed. Thomas Clayton (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 151–78;
Kirk Melnikoff, “Nicholas Ling’s Republican Hamlet (1603)” in Shakespeare’s Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography, ed. Marta Straznicky (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012);
Steven Urkowitz, “Well-sayd olde Mole’: Burying Three Hamlets in Modern Editions,” in Shakespeare Study Today, ed. Georgianna Ziegler (New York: AMS, 1986), 37–70.
“A Funeral Elegy on the Death of the famous Actor Richard Burbage” (Huntington Library MS HM 198, 99–101), in English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660, ed. Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry, and William Ingram (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 181–3.
See also G. P. Jones, “A Burbage Ballad and John Payne Collier,” Review of English Studies 40 (1989): 393–7, and British Library MS Stowe 962, fols. 62b-63b.
Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Company, 1594–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 222.
Harold Jenkins, in his edition of Hamlet (London: Methuen, 1982), recognizes that “no arithmetic is necessary to determine that Hamlet must be thirty,” but then dedicates four pages to dismissing the “perplexity” this has caused other critics; in particular, he dismisses the variants in Q1, “now that Q1 is recognized as a reported text,” by speculating that “the reporter had a poor memory for numbers” (551–4). He does not consider the other evidence I discuss here.
Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, in their edition of Hamlet (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006), note this “stress on 30 years of marriage” (1604, p. 308) but do not mention its relevance to Hamlet’s age.
Bart Van Es, Shakespeare in Company (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 232–48. There is no contemporary evidence that Burbage played Coriolanus, who seems to be younger; another member of the company was clearly capable of long roles, since there is a second one in both Othello (Iago, actually longer than Othello, which Burbage played) and Volpone (Mosca).
Adolphus Alfred Jack, Young Hamlet, edited with an “Introduction” by E. D. Taylor (Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen Press, 1950), 4–5. Jack had been Professor and Chair of English Literature at the University of Aberdeen until he retired in 1938; he had died in 1945. The fact that the book was published posthumously probably contributed to the neglect of Jack’s argument by subsequent scholars.
Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experience in England1560–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 24–5.
Margrethe Jolly, “Hamlet and the French Connection: The Relationship of Q1 and Q2 Hamlet and the Evidence of Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques.” Parergon 29.1 (2012): 93–4. She does not make the specific point about 21 years of age. She cites evidence of Hamlet’s youth from scenes 1, 6, 7, 11, and 16 of Q1, overlooking the examples I cite from Sc. 2 and 5.
Jeffrey L. Forgeng, Daily Life in Elizabethan England (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2009), 63.
Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975) 136, 172, 150; Gurr, Shakespeare Company, 239.
See Paul Menzer, The Hamlets: Cues, Qs, and Remembered Texts (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), which I discuss in chapter 2.
See Linda F. Lunstrom, William Poel’s Hamlets: The Director as Critic (1984), 13–42, and Marvin Rosenberg, “The First Modern English Staging of Hamlet Q1,” in Hamlet First Published, 241–8.
Kathleen O. Irace, The First Quarto of Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 20–27; Thompson and Taylor, Hamlet 1603, 13–39.
Philip Fisher, “Hamlet, Old Vic (2004),” britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/hamletOV-rev (accessed December 2013). The 21 July 2004 performance of this production is preserved on film in the National Video Archive of Performance, which can be seen at the Victoria and Albert Theatre and Performance Department.
Imogen Stubbs, “Gertrude,” in Performing Shakespeare’s Tragedies Today: An Actor’s Perspective, ed. Michael Dobson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 29–40.
Charles Spencer, “An Unforgettable and Most Lovable Hamlet,” Telegraph, 28 April 2004 (accessed online December 2013).
Alan Bird, “Hamlet at the Old Vic,” 28 April 2004, LondonTheatre.co.uk (accessed December 2013).
Jay Harvey, “‘Young Hamlet’ Features a Less Philosophical Hero,” Indianapolis Star, 13 February 2011 (also available on the New Oxford Shakespeare website at IUPUI).
Michael Billington, “Hamlet, Old Vic,” Guardian, 28 April 2004 (accessible online).
Dessen and Thomson, Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama: 1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). For sexualized examples, see Heywood’s Woman Killed with Kindness and Golden Age, Marston’s Sophonisba, and Middleton’s Bloody Banquet.
G. B. Shand, “Gertred, Captive Queen of the First Quarto,” in Shakespearean Illuminations: Essays in Honor of Marvin Rosenberg, ed. Jay Halio and Hugh M. Richmond (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 50–69.
Dorothea Kehler, “The First Quarto of Hamlet: Reforming Widow Gertred,” Shakespeare Quarterly 46 (1995): 398–413.
I have emended this line, adding “high,” because the line in Q1 seems to be metrially defective, missing a syllable at that point, and this passage closely resembles the scene in Belleforest, where the Queen Geruthe speaks a very similar sentence: “te jurant par la haute majesté des Dieux” (Israel Gollancz, The Sources of Hamlet [London: Oxford University Press, 1926], 220). The phrase “high majesty” appears three times elsewhere in Shakespeare’s plays.
Terri Bourus, “‘With thouwsand mothers blessings’: Gertred’s Motivations and the Commonwealth of Denmark,” Blackfriars Scholars Conference, Staunton, Virginia, 2005.
Charles Spencer, “Hamlet, Shakespeare’s Globe, Review,” Daily Telegraph, 6 May 2011 (accessed online February 2014).
Paul Taylor, “Hamlet, Shakespeare’s Globe, London,” Independent, 6 May 2011 (accessed online February 2014).
Lyn Gardner, “Hamlet—Review: Shakespeare’s Globe,” Guardian, 5 May 2011 (accessed online February 2014).
Griselda Murray Brown, “Hamlet, Shakespeare’s Globe, London,” Financial Times, 5 May 2011 (accessed online February 2014).
“Acting (un)Shakespeare: Hamlet, Bad Quarto, Good Play?” dir. Steve Scott; dramaturg, W. B. Worthen; performers Ian Brennan, Tim Decker, Kate Goehring, Nicholas Sandys Pullin, John Shea. Eighth Annual McElroy Memorial Shakespeare Celebration, Mullady Theater, Loyola University, Chicago, 27 April 1999.
For a survey, see Terri Bourus, “The First Quarto of Hamlet in Film: The Revenge Tragedies of Tony Richardson and Franco Zeffirelli,” in “Text<->Screen,” EnterText 1.2 (August 2001, accessible online), based on a paper delivered at the “Hamlet on Film” conference at Shakespeare’s New Globe Theatre London, April 2001.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge on Shakespeare: The Text of the Lectures of 1811–12, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Routledge, 1971), 129.
Jude Morgan, The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (New York: St. Martin’s, 2014), 185.
Bryan Loughrey, “Q1 in recent performance: An interview,” in Hamlet First Published, ed. Thomas Clayton (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 131.
Prinzen af Jylland, dir. Gabriel Axel (1994), released in English as The Prince of Jutland (1994). Bale was 20 when the film was released, but only 19 during filming, and Axel’s direction emphasizes his youth. This version of the film must be clearly distinguished from the subsequent Miramax travesty, Royal Deceit, designed to make the story more appealing to American audiences; Axel, whom I interviewed in 2002 in Copenhagen, angrily disavowed Royal Deceit. I gave a fuller account of the relationship between Axel’s original film and Q1 in “I am Hamlet the Dane: Gabriel Axel’s The Prince of Jutland and Shakespeare’s Hamlet,” an unpublished paper delivered at the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) conference, Strasbourg, 3 September 2002.
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© 2014 Terri Bourus
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Bourus, T. (2014). How Old Is Young?. In: Young Shakespeare’s Young Hamlet. History of Text Technologies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137465641_5
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