Abstract
Between 1603 and 1623, three radically different versions of a play called Hamlet, all attributed to Shakespeare, were printed in London. Why?
“I’ll call thee Hamlet!”
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Notes
Paul Menzer, The Hamlets: Cues, Qs, and Remembered Texts (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008).
Brian Walsh, Shakespeare, the Queen’s Men, and the Elizabethan Performance of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
See Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007),
and in particular Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, “The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008): 371–420.
Hugh Craig and Arthur Kinney, Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Hamlet, ed. Terri Bourus, Sourcebooks Shakespeare (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks MediaFusion, 2006).
William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986; rev. 2nd ed., 2005).
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006);
and William Shakespeare, Hamlet: 1603 and 1623, ed. Thompson and Taylor (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006). Throughout this book, I normally cite the modernized Arden texts of the three versions (as Hamlet 1603, Hamlet 1604, or Hamlet 1623), and their respective line-numbers, unless there is something peculiar to the original printings that is important to the argument.
The RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Liam E. Semler, Teaching Shakespeare and Marlowe: Learning versus the System (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 1, 5.
My image of the spiral is intended to revise Robert Darnton’s model of the “circuit of communication,” which has been so influential among book historians: see “What is the History of Books?” (1982) in The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (1990), 107–35. Although Darnton’s model, based on eighteenth-century French print culture, is complicated by Gary Taylor’s model, based on Jacobean London’s mix of print, manuscript, and theatre, Taylor retains Darnton’s circular logic: see “Preface: Textual Proximities,” in Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007), 24–8.
I have discussed the idea of performance as experiment in two essays: “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), 297–318; and Terri Bourus and Gary Taylor, “Measure for Measure(s): Performance-testing the Adaptation Hypothesis,” Shakespeare 10.2 (2014), already available online, forthcoming in paginated print.
See Tiffany Stern, “Watching as Reading: The Audience and Written Text in the Early Modern Playhouse,” in How to do Things with Shakespeare, ed. Laurie E. Maguire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 136–59.
Robert Andrews, “Video Nasties Gallery: Fifteen Years of Anti-Piracy Warnings,” The Guardian, 8 April 2009 (accessed online 22 February 2014).
Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 5.
Alfred W. Pollard, Shakespeare’s Fight with the Pirates and the Problems of the Transmission of His Text (London: Moring, 1917), recently reprinted by Cambridge University Press (2010); Johns, Piracy, 5 (quoting the variant first line of “To be or not to be”), 13 (piracy “was reputedly rife in the main thoroughfares of Shakespeare’s London”).
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© 2014 Terri Bourus
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Bourus, T. (2014). Prologue: Questions. In: Young Shakespeare’s Young Hamlet. History of Text Technologies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137465641_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137465641_1
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