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The Arden Shakespeare Hamlet (Second Quarto)
Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor
Thomson
Paperback £8.99
The Arden Shakespeare Hamlet (Texts of 1603 and 1623)
Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor
Thomson
Hardback £55
Dateline: 10th October, 2006
"The textual history of Hamlet is full of questions and
largely empty of clear answers." So say Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor
in Arden's new two-volume edition of the play, which for the first time
enables the general reader to compare all three very different versions
of the text. There seems to be nothing straightforward or ordinary about
Hamlet, beginning with play's first recorded performance off
the coast of Africa in 1607 by the crew of the Red Dragon. No other
Shakespeare play (except King Lear, which survives in two distinctly
different versions) has been the subject of such lively and sometimes
acrimonious critical debate.
In 1709 Nicholas Rowe became the first of many editors to publish a
conflation of two surviving Hamlet texts, the First Folio (F)
of 1623 and the Second Quarto (Q2) of 1604. This became common practice,
since it was generally held that Q2, published in Shakespeare's lifetime,
was a more authoritative text based on an authorial manuscript. F contains
about 88 lines with no counterpart in Q2, and about 222 lines of Q2
have no counterpart in F. Of the 3,902 printed lines in Q2 only 220
are identical to their counterparts in F. In the absence of Shakespeare's
original manuscript editors were faced with the task of producing a
text they believed to be as close as possible to the author's intentions.
However, in 1823 matters were made even more complex when a copy of
the First Quarto Hamlet came to light. Only half as long as Q2,
and the only version that could have been performed uncut on Shakespeare's
outdoor stage, Q1 is quite unlike both Q2 and F. Some of the characters
have different names - Polonius becomes Corambis, Reynaldo Montano,
and Hamlet's student friends are Rossencraft and Guilderstone. Scholars
were perplexed by Q1's brevity and comparative poverty of language.
Was it Shakespeare's own first draft of Hamlet, an actors' memorial
reconstruction or a simplified adaptation made for a tour of the less
sophisticated provinces?
Whatever its origins, Q1 was heaped with derision for its mangling
of some of the most famous lines in the English language. The Q1 equivalent
of "To be or not to be" is rendered as:
To be or not to be - ay, there's the point.
To die, to sleep - is that all? Ay, all.
No, to sleep, to dream - ay, marry, there it goes…
…and so on for twenty equally confused lines. It must have seemed
that the only useful purpose served by Q1 was to prod Shakespeare into
publishing the expanded and corrected text of Q2. Yet as Thompson and
Taylor relate in the 1603/1623 volume, Q1 has a brief but interesting
stage history of its own.
The first modern Q1 Hamlet was staged by William Poel in 1881,
since when there have been at least 27 other productions of the play.
Due to Q1's short running time - literally "the two hours traffic
of our stage" - Hamlet simply doesn't have time to consider anything
too curiously. The action moves along at breakneck speed and the play
is much more like the conventional revenge tragedies of Shakespeare's
contemporaries. As Kenneth Branagh's 1997 film version demonstrated
all too clearly, more of Hamlet isn't necessarily better. Even Q1's
pared-down language can provide an agreeable frisson of surprise to
audiences (and actors) over-familiar with the usual conflated texts.
Q1's stage directions, such as the entrance of Ofelia "playing
on a Lute, and her hair down", Hamlet's leap into her grave, and
the Ghost's appearance in Gertred's closet wearing a "night gowne"
(or at least casual clothes) have influenced many otherwise conventional
productions. But Q1's most remarkable feature is the famous Scene 14
meeting of Horatio and Gertrude, which establishes the Queen's innocence
of any involvement in her first husband's murder and stresses her support
for Hamlet. This scene, unique to Q1, has also been incorporated into
a few conflated-text productions.
Thompson and Taylor's groundbreaking edition manages to fit an extraordinary
amount of information into two volumes. The extensive footnotes are
of Arden's usual high quality, and the Second Quarto volume's 136 page
introduction and 105 pages of appendices cover topics as diverse as
Hamlet's "points" (such as the Prince's "crawl"
across the stage in 3.2), the religious and political aspects of the
play, and the extraordinary afterlife the principal characters have
enjoyed in prequels, sequels and re-workings such as John Updike's novel
Gertrude and Claudius.
The editors make no claim to have plucked out the heart of Hamlet's
mystery, pointing out that the play's many ambiguities and discrepancies
are part of its apparently universal and timeless appeal: "It is
surely arguable that part of the fascination of this play is its refusal
to give all the answers and its resistance to yield to any 'theory'".
Their new Arden Hamlet is quite simply the most comprehensive
edition of the play currently available, a status I suspect it will
enjoy for many years to come.
J.D. Atkinson
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