With Hamlet, we're moving away from our first unit on visions, histories, and criticisms of communications technologies and on to a series of two "case studies" of literary works and how multiple versions of them matter.
After an introduction to the play itself, then, I'll move on to a brief publishing history of Shakespeare's plays and the folio and the quarto versions of Hamlet.
Introduction, Hamlet
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Hamlet is familiar to many of us. Frequently taught in high school classes and in Shakespeare surveys, recently made into three major motion picture renditions (the Hamlets starring, respectively, Mel Gibson, Kenneth Branagh, and Ethan Hawke), and largely considered one of the chestnuts of both the Shakespeare canon and Western culture, the play generally turns out to be familiar even to first-time readers in the number of expressions from the play that have crept into everyday speech. "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark," "oh, my prophetic soul!", "the play's the thing," and "There is a method to his madness" are only a few examples.
Hamlet, of course, is a tragedy of revenge: that is, a tragedy that contemplates when and how it is acceptable to enact revenge, usually because the existing systems of justice cannot or will not act on the case. An ancient Greek and Roman genre, the revenge tragedy became popular in Elizabethan England in the late 1580s with Thomas Kyd's play The Spanish Tragedy (more on The Spanish Tragedy below). Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare's first tragedy, is another tragedy of revenge.
Earlier accounts of Hamlet, the Danish prince who revenges his paternal uncle's murder of his father, however, present less ambiguity about Hamlet's actions than does Shakespeare's version. A twelfth century history by Saxo Grammaticus, Historia Danica, which was translated from Latin into French in 1576, tells of the delay by Prince Amleth (i.e. Hamlet) in killing his father-in-law Feng, the king on whom Claudius is based, only because Feng suspected that Amleth would kill him and had his followers watching Amleth at every turn. In order to circumvent the constant surveillance, Amleth pretends to be slow in wit, and with the initially unwilling help of his mother Gerutha (of course, the character on whom Gertrude is based), Amleth succeeds in killing Feng and is declared King. In this version, the prince's delay in killing his father-in-law is only for lack of opportunity, and never does he doubt whether or not his father-in-law is actually guilty of murder.
Kyd's play The Spanish Tragedy, although not at all about Prince Hamlet, features a few similarities that Shakespeare would incorporate in his version of Hamlet: a ghost who cries out for revenge from the underworld; a hero who contemplates suicide and who (like Saxo's Amleth) feigns insanity; a female protagonist who goes insane; a play-within-a-play that establishes a murderer's guilt; and an ending scene in which the bodies of royalty and courtiers literally litter the stage. For more about The Spanish Tragedy, see the following information from the site for this semester's Shakespeare class.
In Saxo's version of Hamlet, the prince does not debate the proper time to kill his father-in-law, as Hamlet does in not wanting to kill Claudius at his prayers (apparently, wanting Claudius to "do time" in purgatory as, it appears, Hamlet's father must do because of being murdered before he could confess any unrepentant sin). In Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, also, the hero does not interact with the ghost. Shakespeare's Hamlet, however, plagued with uncertainty, feels the need to double-check the ghost's veracity. From this uncertainty evolve the questions that have intrigued so many critics and fans of this play, such as the following:
- Is Hamlet justified in his delay, and if so, on what grounds?
- What are the costs of his delay, in terms of bloodshed and mayhem, and do the costs offset the benefits of the delay?
- What--the introspection, perhaps the desire for revenge of both body and soul, or still something else--would you consider to be Hamlet's "tragic flaw"?
- Or, does Hamlet's indecisiveness really mask some fundamental dysfunctionality:
- perhaps a real insanity;
- a form of cowardice;
- a thwarted Oedipal desire, as Freud and his follower Ernst Jones have argued, to kill his father and marry his mother, which Claudius performed instead; or
- a flaw in theology, as argued in 1950 by John Dover Wilson, in the Wittenburg-schooled Hamlet believing in purgatory and ghosts at all. (Wittenburg University, founded in 1502, became the seat of the Lutheran Reformation in the years following 1517.)
The play opens with the guards of the castle at Elsinore watching for signs of young Fortinbras of Norway, whom they suspect will invade Denmark. Instead, however, they encounter the ghost of Hamlet, senior, and vow to tell Prince Hamlet about the sighting. Horatio's speculation about why the ghost is appearing offers the first interpretation in the play of odd occurrences; those speculations are followed by Laertes and Polonius's speculation on the sincerity of Hamlet's love for Ophelia, who is below the station of a prince; and later, by Gertude and Polonius's speculation about why Hamlet appears to be insane: a charge that Gertrude has asked Hamlet's classmates Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern to investigate for her.
These uncertainties build to Hamlet's uncertainty about what to do about what the ghost has told him: an uncertainty that will remain with the prince not only until after he has observed Claudius's reaction to the play The Mouse-Trap, but also throughout his thwarted murder of Claudius, his mad courtship of Ophelia and troubled accusations of his mother; the aftermath of his murder of Polonius, including the thwarted attempt at Hamlet's execution in England; and the ensuing, tainted duel between Laertes and Hamlet, at which Claudius will finally die.
The play is rife with references to sickness and contagion; you will notice many as you read. Certainly, something IS rotten in Denmark, but what? You might also consider the function of surveillance in this play (how many plays-within-a-play might you argue that you are really watching?); the function of Polonius, Hamlet, Gertrude, and Laertes' relations to Ophelia; why Hamlet can see his father's ghost and Gertrude cannot; what the gravedigger scene adds to the play; what the dumbshow accomplishes that the play The Murder of Gonzago does not, or the point of the players' speeches that Hamlet requests in 2.2. You will bring to the play still more questions and observations.
Publishing history, Shakespeare's plays
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In order to consider the differences between the three versions of Hamlet as discussed in the introduction to your New Cambridge version, it is important to review how Shakespeare's plays came to be published. The first collected anthology of Shakespeare's works was published in 1623, after Shakespeare's death, in the edition that has come to be called "The First Folio." (The name, as we discussed when we viewed the rare books in Moellering, derives from the folding of the paper: folio editions feature paper that is folded in half once after it comes out of the press, and are thus generally quite large and expensive; quarto editions feature paper that is folded twice after it comes out of the press.) The editors of the first folio claim that they used as their copy text manuscripts in the author's own hand. However, only one manuscript purported to be in Shakespeare's hand -the manuscript for the play Sir Thomas More, on which Shakespeare collaborated--still exists and thus can provide evidence for that claim.
Before their publication in 1623, many of Shakespeare's plays, including Hamlet, were previously published in relatively inexpensive quarto editions. The acting company who performed the play effectively owned the rights to it; thus, Shakespeare would only have had any rights over the publication of Hamlet because he was a shareholder in the acting company, The King's Men, not because he was the author. Plays appear to have been sold and published after the plays had been performed and were unlikely to sell further tickets (think of playscripts as a version of releasing films on video).
Theoretically, every play at one time would have existed in the author's hand in a version called the "foul papers," so called because this document on which the original composition occurred would have inked-on cross-outs, corrections, and so forth (as the existing "foul papers" of many early modern plays do). Often, foul papers would be scribally reproduced into a a cleaner, "fair copy," which would then be used as "promptbooks" by the stage manager and would be the acting company's one document of the entire play. Very probably, fair copies were also the copies shown to the state censor, who would license the plays for performance, as well as, later on, licensing them for publication. Individual actors would only receive a written copy of their lines and the cues that preceded them.
Some of Shakespeare's plays, including King Lear and Hamlet, feature substantial differences between the folio and quarto copies. Assuming that the editors of the first folio really did use Shakespeare's "foul papers," which would be a closer record of the author's original intention, some suggest that the differing quartos were derived from the fair copies, which might have been abbreviated for performance, or featured scribal error or changes and annotations by the acting company. Acting companies might change the play for any number of artistic or performance reasons; similarly, some suggest, fair copies might have been self-censored in anticipation of the Master of the Revels, the state licensor. Also, the quarto copies, being less expensive publications than the folio, presumably were produced more quickly, and may have had more error or emendation on the part of the typesetter (for example, a typesetter short on the characters for punctuation might choose to go without, which could produce some differences in meaning). Quarto editions were not yet divided into five acts, either; that change came with the first folio.
Another theory for the differences between quarto and folio versions of the play exists, though. Some quarto versions of Shakespeare's plays have been deemed "bad quartos"; this means that they never were based on either foul or fair papers, but rather, by a "memorial reconstruction" of the play: that is, a reconstruction of the play derived from the actors' memories. Memorial reconstructions may have occurred by necessity when acting companies were on tour and away from their promptbooks; they also would have been a way for enterprising (and not so loyal) actors to make money.
This gets us to the three versions of Hamlet. The first quarto version of Hamlet, which dates to 1603 and is quite short, is generally considered to be a "bad" quarto. This so-called first quarto was first discovered and examined by Shakespearean editors in 1823. Only two copies exist.
The second quarto, which dates to 1604-05, and which is considerably longer, is generally agreed to be set from Shakespeare's "foul papers" and also to be the copy-text from which the folio version is based. Most contemporary Shakespeare editors use Q2 as the copy-text, even if (as do most Shakespeare editors) they ultimately produce a conflated version. A notable exception is the Oxford Shakespeare series (the version of Shakespearean texts from which the Norton Shakespeare takes shape), which uses the folio version as the copy-text, presumably because the folio features texts that Shakespeare would have had a chance to edit), but nonetheless includes lines that appear in the second quarto, either in an appendix at the end or (as in The Norton Shakepseare) in indented lines in a separate typeface.
Shakespeare critics have also theorized about still another, no longer extant version of Hamlet(sometimes referred to as the "Ur-Hamlet") that preceded Shakespeare's version, but that was apparently performed in the late 1580s, and included a ghost that beseeched "Hamlet, revenge!"
In Puzzling Shakespeare, Leah Marcus summarizes a few narratives that Shakespearean editors might wistfully construct if they want to argue for Shakespeare's authorship of the apparently inferior first quarto. They include the idea that Shakespeare did author the first quarto, faults and all, but was inexperienced in doing so and possibly later revised it; or that Shakespeare, having written a quality drama in what we now call quarto two, edited the second quarto down for a shorter performance. Whether or not the theories are correct ultimately does not matter; they illustrate the assumptions behind various theories of the origin of this play that would be messy in any case, but which is made still messier by the multiple versions and emendations.
Major differences, Q and F versions of Hamlet