Will the Real Hamlet Please Stand Up

Here's a short episode to answer a special request by a loyal listener!  Let's dive a little deeper into the various versions of Shakespeare's Hamlet that have come down to us!

Transcript

Hello! And welcome to the Classic English Literature Subcast, where I supply a little more reason to rhyme.  This is just a quick-hit little episode.  I got an email the other day from a listener who is working on a Master’s degree in English and asked if I could do an episode explaining the difference between the three existing texts of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and, since I aim to please my listeners and am always keen to talk about Hamlet, I here oblige.

In our mainline episode about The Tragedy of Hamlet (that’s episode 57 if you feel a relisten necessary), I may have mentioned that there are three versions of Shakespeare’s play surviving from the early 17th century.  Two of them are quartos – those smaller, pocket editions of books made by folding the main sheet of paper 4 times (hence quarto) – and the third is the version found in the folio (the big book where you only fold the sheet twice).  So we call the different texts Q1, Q2, and F.

In the interests of time, I will not dwell too long upon Q2 and F, because they are the versions upon which nearly all modern printings are based.  The Folio version of 1623 seems to be an actual playhouse transcript with some evidence of adaptation for staging.  It also relies heavily upon Q2, published in 1604, which scholars largely believe to come from Shakespeare’s autograph, or his own hand-written text of the play.  Now, Q2 contains over 200 lines that are not found in F, though F has some 70 lines not present in Q2.  While some of these discrepancies may be accidental, it seems likely that most of the cuts in F were intentional, probably intended to enhance a given performance in some way.  Some of the cuts remove some of the more opaque or clunky passages in Q2.  F does away with some long speeches in Act 1 before the Ghost appears.  About 25 lines get dropped from the Closet Scene in Act 3 and another 25 from the plotting of Laertes and Claudius.  A lot of the Osric stuff and the whole of a redundant and repetitive Lord find their way to the cutting room waste bin.  So, for the most part, what we see is a bit of streamlining, eliminating cruxes if possible, and generally punching up the play for an audience.

So, if we wanted to generalize kind of grossly, we might say that F is a working script of Q2, the one most close to the author’s own hand.  The title page of Q2 includes a rather curious promise: “Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect Coppie.”  Clever listeners will have twigged that the necessity of a “new and improved” version implies that the previous version was in some way deficient.  The title page indicates those deficiencies: evidently the previous version had been much altered or expurgated and did not conform to the author’s intentions.  This, then, friends and neighbors, is Q1, the notorious “bad quarto.”

At 2154 lines as printed, compared to Q2’s 3723, Q1 isn’t even two-thirds as long as the more authoritative texts – indeed, it isn’t much north of half.  How to account for nearly 1600 lines of text?  And why are so many speeches and key scenes so different?

For example, here’s part of Hamlet’s second soliloquy, from Q2:

        O what a rogue and pesant slave am I.

  Is it monstrous that this player heere

        But in a fixion, in a dreame of passion

        Could force his soule so to his owne conceit

        That from her working all the visage wand,

        Tears in his eyes, distraction in his apsect,

        A broken voyce, an his whole function suitng

        With formes to his conceit; and all for nothing,

        for Hecuba.

And here is Q1’s rendering:

   Why what a dunghill idiote slave am I?

        Why these Players here draw water from eyes:

        For Hecuba, why what is Hecuba to him, or he to Heccuba?           

        What would he do and if he had my losse?

We immediately note the different wording and the much hastened pace: Q1 takes only three lines to get to Hecuba, while Q2 takes nine.  Is this a bad thing?  Well, maybe not, especially if you’re standing through the whole show, but we sacrifice a good deal of subtlety and subtext in the name of expediency.  

Or the third soliloquy – the big To Be or Not To Be.  Here’s Q1:

To be, or not to be, I there’s the point.

To die, to sleep, is that all? I all:

No, to sleep, to dreame, I mary 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 sight

The happy smile, and the accursed damn’d.

This is not a speech to ring down the ages.  

So what’s the deal with this “bad quarto”?  Well, scholars mostly agree now that the first quarto is the product of memorial reconstruction; that is, somebody is desperately trying to remember a play they’ve seen, or perhaps acted in, and writing it down.

Well, why would anyone want to do that?  We used to think – with a reasonable seasoning of cynicism – that such memorial reconstructions were the nefarious work of pirate publishers, trying to cash in on the latest hits without the overhead costs of rights and permissions.  We imagined greasy little men, huddled in the shadows of the Globe, taking down the play in shorthand and flogging it to some literary bootlegger for a few filthy pieces of silver.  It does seem the kind of thing that would happen.  But a more sunny interpretation has been put on the production of unauthorized editions recently.  Harold Jenkins reckons the “natural object of the exercise was not to sell them (though they were evidently sold later) but to act them.”  So, some local community group wants to put on Hamlet but, alas, they’ve no script.  What to do?  Try to reconstruct one as best as possible.

According to Jenkins and others, Q1 is a textbook example of such a script and it was probably assembled by a professional actor who had once played the role of Marcellus in Hamlet, because those lines, and the speeches around them, coincide most accurately with the lines in the later two versions.

Beyond that, evidence of recalling the play from memory can be seen in the fact that often, words from Q2 or F appear as synonyms in Q1.  So, in Ophelia might speak “hard words” in one and “cross words” in another.  Or Gertrude may “march” in one play but “walk” in the other.  This is evidence of getting the spirit if not the letter.  More interesting is when Q1 presents a word that sounds like the word in the other texts but is in no way the same word.  So, Horatio tells Hamlet to “season” his admiration, meaning to mitigate or temper his wonder as the news of the Ghost.  But in Q1, the verb is “ceasen” – as in, to cease, to stop.  Is the invalid king of Norway “impudent” in his refusal or, absurdly, “impotent”?  I think you can easily imagine how such mistakes can be made when relying on your ears alone, especially in a crowded, noisy theater.

I could go on citing such differences and omissions, but I think you get the point.  Check out Harold Jenkins’ introductory essay to the Arden Shakespeare edition of Hamlet, to which I am much indebted.  But I would be remiss if I left a discussion of Q1’s oddity without mentioning Corambis.

Who?

Corambis.  And Montano.

Wait.  Who?

Corambis and Montano.  These are the names that appear for the characters Polonius and Reynaldo, respectively, in Q1.  It’s a bit of a mystery why these names are different.

Well, surely, one might think, those names appear in the first quarto and then were changed in the second and the folio.  Just a bit of editing.  And that might be a satisfactory resolution if we accept the old notion that Q1 is somehow an older version of Shakespeare’s play that he reworked over time.  Except that that’s not what Q1 is.  It’s a pirate copy with no connection to Shakespeare’s hand at all, really.  Nor is it, as some have hypothesized, a revenant version of the so-called ur-Hamlet, a play from the late 1580s, perhaps by Shakespeare or Thomas Kyd, which has been lost to us in its original form. So why would that actor who once played Marcellus and who now wants to stage his own Hamlet change the name of one of the principal characters as well as a quite minor one?  Answer is there none.  Nobody has offered a satisfactory solution to this particular puzzle.  It’s just one of those quirks which lends a bit of off-kilter absurdity to the play’s history.

So, there you go.  I hope this helps our graduate student in their studies, and I hope everyone else found this quick hit entertaining and edifying.  Thanks for listening, everyone, and I’ll be back soon with another thrilling installment of the Classic English Literature Podcast.  Cheery-bye!