Hamlet (4 page)

Generations of editors have adopted a “pick and mix” approach, moving between Quarto and Folio readings, making choices on either aesthetic or bibliographic grounds, and creating a composite text that Shakespeare never actually wrote. Not until the 1980s did editors follow the logic of what ought to have been obvious to anyone who works in the theater: that the two Quarto and the Folio texts represent three discrete moments in the life of
Hamlet
, that plays change in the course of rehearsal, production, and revival, and that the major variants between the early printed versions almost certainly reflect this process.

If you look at printers’ handbooks from the age of Shakespeare, you quickly discover that one of the first rules was that, whenever possible, compositors were recommended to set their type from existing printed books rather than manuscripts. This was the age before mechanical typesetting, where each individual letter had to be picked out by hand from the compositor’s case and placed on a stick (upside down and back to front) before being laid on the press. It was an age of murky rush-light and of manuscripts written in a secretary hand which had dozens of different, hard-to-decipher forms. Printers’ lives were a lot easier when they were reprinting existing books rather than struggling with handwritten copy. Easily the quickest way to have created the First Folio would have been simply to reprint those eighteen plays that had already appeared in Quarto and only work from manuscript on the other eighteen.

But that is not what happened. Whenever Quartos were used, playhouse “promptbooks” were also consulted and stage directions copied in from them. And in the case of several major plays where a well-printed Quarto was available,
Hamlet
notable among them, the Folio printers were instructed to work from an alternative, playhouse-derived manuscript. This meant that the whole process of producing the first complete Shakespeare took months, even years, longer than it might have done. But for the men overseeing the project, John Hemings and Henry Condell, friends and fellow actors who had been remembered in Shakespeare’s will, the additional labor and cost were worth the effort for the sake of producing an edition that was close to the practice of the theater. They wanted all the plays in print so that people could, as they wrote in their prefatory address to the reader, “read him and again and again,” but they also wanted “the great variety of readers” to work from texts that were close to the theater-life for which Shakespeare originally intended them. For this reason, the
RSC Shakespeare
, in both
Complete Works
and individual volumes, uses the Folio as base text wherever possible. Significant Quarto variants are, however, noted in the Textual Notes and Quarto-only passages are appended after the text of
Hamlet
.

The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:

Lists of Parts
are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, not including
Hamlet
, so the list at the beginning of the play is provided by the editors, arranged by groups of characters. Capitals indicate that part of the name which is used for speech headings in the script (thus “
HAMLET
,
Prince of Denmark”).

Locations
are provided by the Folio for only two plays. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations. Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes, where they are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before. We have emphasized broad geographical settings rather than specifics of the kind that suggest anachronistically realistic staging. We have therefore avoided such niceties as “another room in the palace.”

Act and Scene Divisions
were provided in the Folio in a much more thoroughgoing way than in the Quartos. Sometimes, however, they were erroneous or omitted; corrections and additions supplied by editorial tradition are indicated by square brackets. Five-act division is based on a classical model, and act breaks provided the opportunity to replace the candles in the indoor Blackfriars playhouse which the King’s Men used after 1608, but Shakespeare did not necessarily think in terms of a five-part structure of dramatic composition. The Folio convention is that a scene ends when the stage is empty. Nowadays, partly under the influence of film, we tend to consider a scene to be a dramatic unit that ends with either a change of imaginary location or a significant passage of time within the narrative. Shakespeare’s fluidity of composition accords well with this convention, so in addition to act and scene numbers we provide a
running scene
count in the right margin at the beginning of each new scene, in the typeface used for editorial directions. Where there is a scene break caused by a momentary bare stage, but the location does not change and extra time does not pass, we use the convention
running scene continues
. There is inevitably a degree of editorial judgment in making such calls, but the system is very valuable in suggesting the pace of the plays.

Speakers’ Names
are often inconsistent in Folio. We have regularized speech headings, but retained an element of deliberate inconsistency in entry directions, in order to give the flavor of Folio.

Verse
is indicated by lines that do not run to the right margin and by capitalization of each line. The Folio printers sometimes set verse as prose, and vice versa (either out of misunderstanding or for reasons of space). We have silently corrected in such cases, although in some instances there is ambiguity, in which case we have leaned toward the preservation of Folio layout. Folio sometimes uses contraction (“turnd” rather than “turned”) to indicate whether or not the final “-ed” of a past participle is sounded, an area where there is variation for the sake of the five-beat iambic pentameter rhythm. We use the convention of a grave accent to indicate sounding (thus “turnèd” would be two syllables), but would urge actors not to overstress. In cases where one speaker ends with a verse half line and the next begins with the other half of the pentameter, editors since the late eighteenth century have indented the second line. We have abandoned this convention, since the Folio does not use it, and nor did actors’ cues in the Shakespearean theater. An exception is made when the second speaker actively interrupts or completes the first speaker’s sentence.

Spelling
is modernized, but older forms are occasionally maintained where necessary for rhythm or aural effect.

Punctuation
in Shakespeare’s time was as much rhetorical as grammatical. “Colon” was originally a term for a unit of thought in an argument. The semicolon was a new unit of punctuation (some of the Quartos lack them altogether). We have modernized punctuation throughout, but have given more weight to Folio punctuation than many editors, since, though not Shakespearean, it reflects the usage of his period. In particular, we have used the colon far more than many editors: it is exceptionally useful as a way of indicating how many Shakespearean speeches unfold clause by clause in a developing argument that gives the illusion of enacting the process of thinking in the moment. We have also kept in mind the origin of punctuation in classical times as a way of assisting the actor and orator: the comma suggests the briefest of pauses for breath, the colon a middling one, and a full stop or period a longer pause. Semicolons, by contrast, belong to an era of punctuation that was only just coming in during Shakespeare’s time and that is coming to an end now: we have accordingly used them only where they occur in our copy-texts (and not always then). Dashes are sometimes used for parenthetical interjections where the Folio has brackets. They are also used for interruptions and changes in train of thought. Where a change of addressee occurs within a speech, we have used a dash preceded by a full stop (or occasionally another form of punctuation). Often the identity of the respective addressees is obvious from the context. When it is not, this has been indicated in a marginal stage direction.

Entrances and Exits
are fairly thorough in Folio, which has accordingly been followed as faithfully as possible. Where characters are omitted or corrections are necessary, this is indicated by square brackets (e.g. “[
and Attendants
]”).
Exit
is sometimes silently normalized to
Exeunt
and
Manet
anglicized to “remains.” We trust Folio positioning of entrances and exits to a greater degree than most editors.

Editorial Stage Directions
such as stage business, asides, indications of addressee and of characters’ position on the gallery stage are used only sparingly in Folio. Other editions mingle directions of this kind with original Folio and Quarto directions, sometimes marking them by means of square brackets. We have sought to distinguish what could be described as
directorial
interventions of this kind from Folio-style directions (either original or supplied) by placing them in the right margin in a smaller typeface. There is a degree of subjectivity about which directions are of which kind, but the procedure is intended as a reminder to the reader and the actor that Shakespearean stage directions are often dependent upon editorial inference alone and are not set in stone. We also depart from editorial tradition in sometimes admitting uncertainty and thus printing permissive stage directions, such as an
Aside?
(often a line may be equally effective as an aside or a direct address—it is for each production or reading to make its own decision) or a
may exit
or a piece of business placed between arrows to indicate that it may occur at various different moments within a scene.

Line Numbers
are editorial, for reference and to key the explanatory and textual notes.

Explanatory Notes
explain allusions and gloss obsolete and difficult words, confusing phraseology, occasional major textual cruxes, and so on. Particular attention is given to non-standard usage, bawdy innuendo, and technical terms (e.g. legal and military language). Where more than one sense is given, commas indicate shades of related meaning, slashes alternative or double meanings.

Textual Notes
at the end of the play indicate major departures from the Folio. They take the following form: the reading of our text is given in bold and its source given after an equals sign, with “Q” indicating that it derives from the principal Quarto (Q2 in the case of
Hamlet
, though we also record some significant Q1 readings) and “Ed” that it derives from the editorial tradition. The rejected Folio (“F”) reading is then given. A selection of Quarto variants and plausible unadopted editorial readings are also included. Thus, for example, “
3.4.181 bloat
= Ed. F = blunt. Q = blowt,” indicates that we have adopted the editorial reading “bloat” where Folio has “blunt” and Quarto “blowt.”

MAJOR PARTS:
(
with percentage of lines/number of speeches/scenes on stage
) Hamlet (37%/341/12), King (14%/100/11), Polonius (9%/86/8), Horatio (7%/105/9), Laertes (5%/60/6), Ophelia (4%/58/5), Gertrude (4%/70/10), Rosencrantz (2%/44/6), First Player (2%/8/2), Ghost (2%/15/2), First Clown (2%/34/1), Marcellus (2%/34/4), Guildenstern (1%/29/5), Osric (1%/19/1).

LINGUISTIC MEDIUM:
75% verse, 25% prose.

DATE:
1600? Not mentioned by Meres in 1598; registered for publication in summer 1602. Allusions to
Julius Caesar
(1599) in the dialogue suggest that it was performed after that play; a reference to Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
by the Cambridge academic Gabriel Harvey seems to date from before February 1601. The exchange concerning boy actors alludes to rivalries in the London theaters during 1600 and 1601, but it may have been inserted in the play sometime after its original composition (the passage is absent from the Second Quarto text). An old
Hamlet
play, of unknown authorship and now lost, was extant in the late 1580s to mid-1590s; it is not known whether Shakespeare had any direct involvement with it.

SOURCES:
Given the frequency with which Shakespeare reworked old plays, it may be assumed that the old
Hamlet
play was his chief source. The Danish prince Amleth is a revenger in the twelfth-century
Historiae Danicae
of Saxo Grammaticus, familiar to Elizabethan readers via a retelling in François de Belleforest’s
Histoires tragiques
(1570). In Belleforest, the Gertrude figure definitely begins her affair with her husband’s brother before the murder, in which she is suspected of complicity. The Player’s speech on the fall of Troy is influenced by the language of Christopher Marlowe’s
Dido Queen of Carthage;
Hamlet’s philosophizing sometimes resembles the tone of Michel de Montaigne’s
Essais
, but a direct link has not been proved.

TEXT:
The First Quarto was published in 1603 under the title
The Tragicall Historie of HAMLET Prince of Denmarke by William Shakespeare. As it hath beene diuerse times acted by his Highnesse seruants in the Cittie of London: as also in the two Vniuersities of Cambridge and Oxford, and else-where
. Much shorter than the later texts, and with many garbled lines, it seems to be a reconstruction of an acting version. There are some notable differences from the later texts (e.g. Polonius called Corambis, “To be or not to be” and the “nunnery” dialogue positioned with the “fishmonger” exchange, not after the arrival of the players), but some of the stage directions are valuable (e.g.
“Enter Ofelia playing on a Lute, and her haire downe singing”
for the mad scene). The Second Quarto, published in 1604/05, was clearly an “authorized” text, intended to displace the First Quarto, as may be seen from its title-page claim, “Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect Coppie.” Most scholars believe that the text derives from Shakespeare’s manuscript; over 4,000 lines long, it is unlikely to have been staged in full. The text in the 1623 Folio seems to have been set from the theater promptbook or a transcript of it. It has much fuller stage directions than the Second Quarto, and considerable textual variations: about 70 new lines are present, while about 230 Quarto lines are absent, including the whole of Hamlet’s last major soliloquy, “How all occasions do inform against me”—in Folio, he is not there to witness Fortinbras’ army. Hundreds of individual readings differ, strongly suggesting that the Second Quarto and Folio represent different stages in the play’s life. Some scholars regard the revision as systematic (e.g. making subtle changes to Hamlet’s relationship with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern), but it may have been more incremental and haphazard. Given the major differences, the editorial practice of conflation, which began with Nicholas Rowe’s insertion of the Second Quarto’s final soliloquy in his Folio-based text of 1709, has recently fallen into disrepute. We edit the Folio text, but include the Quarto-only passages (edited and annotated) independently at the end. Though Folio seems to have been set from a theatrical manuscript, it was also influenced by the Quarto tradition; so too, a modern edition of Folio can benefit from Quarto readings when the Folio text is manifestly erroneous, as it is on numerous occasions.