The texts of Hamlet (Shakespeare Jahrbuch 153, 2017, 242-245) (original) (raw)
Related papers
New Old Readings in the Texts of Hamlet
1998
This paper seeks to draw attention to several original readings in the early texts of Hamlet – specifically those from which the play is commonly known– which traditional or standard critical editing has relegated to oblivion in the small print of textual apparatuses, that section of critical editions which the average reader seldom or never reads. The standard critical edition of Hamlet aims to reconstruct or approximate the text its author wrote. To that end, editors study the textual transmission of the play, by analysing and comparing its early texts, especially those that are not derivatives from any previous witness and therefore are accorded primary authority: namely, the First Quarto printed in 1603, the Second Quarto dated 1604/5 and the First Folio published in 1623 (no witness has survived that has a direct relationship with the author’s hand, such as holographs or authorially corrected copies). 1 Having a preconceived history of the ‘text’ of Hamlet, editors establish th...
Anglia, 2019
In the past, the differences between Q1, Q2 and F1 of Hamlet have resulted in heated debates among Shakespeareans as to which of these is the most 'authentic'. Unsurprisingly, and given the lack of surviving manuscripts by Shakespeare, scholars and editors have come to the conclusion that the "textual history of Hamlet is full of questions and largely empty of clear answers" (Thompson and Taylor 2006: 76), as Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor concede in their Arden edition of the play. Thompson and Taylor view each of the versions "as an independent entity" (Thompson and Taylor 2006: 92) and decided against editing a conflated version. Instead, they opted for publishing all three versions independently in two volumes, a decision that has led to mixed reactions among reviewers. 1 In dealing with the differences between the three versions of the play, Martina Bross's study Versions of Hamlet: Poetic Economy on Page and Stage (her doctoral thesis, which originated as part of a Research Training Group on Ambiguity at the University of Tübingen and was completed in 2016) confronts the same textual problem but with a different agenda. Bross is not interested in finding the 'real' or even "to reconstruct an 'ideal' Hamlet" out of the different versions, nor is she interested in the still ongoing debate at what point a performance of a play strays too far from an assumed 'original' and becomes an adaptation. Instead, she is interested in the functionality of the textual differences: the cuts, omissions, additions and alterations that differentiate not only the Q1-, Q2-and F1-texts, but also 24 selected stage versions of the play recorded in prompt books from the late 17 th to the early 21 st century. Bross "assumes that the differences found in versions of Hamlet are the results of 'trade-offs,' that is the result of a process in which decisions are made, for instance, by the playwright, by the actor manager or
Fooles of Nature: The Epistemology of Hamlet
English Literary Renaissance, 2020
Bar. Whose there? Fran. Nay answere me. Stand and vnfolde your selfe. Bar. Long liue the King (4-7; 1.1.1-3) 1 W e begin in uncertainty. It is dark, midnight in fact. The circumstances-the speakers are soldiers, situated on a platform, distant enough from each other to be unidentifiable-invite hostility and distrust. Seeking information that will resolve the uncertainty, Francisco demands stability ("Stand") and transparency ("vnfolde your selfe"). The man arriving, in this case Barnardo, must be manageably contained for examination and probed for information that is represented as concealed beneath the surface. Without more light and more soldiers, Francisco cannot be sure that either of his demands will be met. Barnardo in fact ignores his demand for visually verifiable information, but resolves the uncertainty and tension in a different way-by affirming a shared allegiance. It does not matter in the immediate that the king to whom they swear allegiance is, as we discover, a villain. In the enterprise of the watch, the 1. This is the second quarto text of 1604. I have retained original spelling and punctuation to discourage domestication of this very familiar text, which would be counterproductive in an essay dedicated to enhancing our sense of the richness of the experience of Elizabethan readers and theatergoers with Hamlet. My source is The Three-Text Hamlet: Parallel Texts of the First and Second Quartos and First Folio, ed. Paul Bertram and Bernice W. Kliman (New York, 1991). Parenthetical Hamlet references include the Q2 through-line numbers, followed by the equivalent act, scene, and line numbers from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (1972) as provided by The Three-Text Hamlet; the few Q1 and F references are so designated. Quotations of Shakespearean works other than Hamlet are from The Norton Shakespeare, ed.
Dramaturgy of the Acting Version of the First Quarto of Hamlet
It is relatively known that the First Quarto of Hamlet (1603), the first text ever printed in which the tragical history of the Prince of Denmark is related to the playwright William Shakespeare, presents a version notably different from the one commonly known, from the standard version which is reflected in the texts of the Second Quarto (1604/5) and the First Folio (1623).
Acta Neophilologica
This article fuses a survey of the play’s most important standard interpretations with those aspects which may be considered particularly fascinating about this text: the conflict of England’s catholic past with the rise of protestant culture in the early modern period; the meta-dramatic dimension of the play; the theatricality of Renaissance court life; the play’s reflection of the emerging modern subject triggered off by the rise of reformation discourse. To elucidate some aspects which tend to be overlooked in the scholarly discussion of Hamlet, the article will bring two important topics into focus: the courtly discovery of perspective and the dying Hamlet’s request to tell his story to the afterworld at the end of the play.
Revised, expanded version of the draft first posted 15 April 2018. Published on-line first 27 June 2018. Rhodri Lewis argues here that Shakespeare’s best-known tragedy is a commentary on his intellectual context. More specifically, Hamlet’s failures as a historian (ch. 3), poet (ch. 4), and philosopher (ch. 5) reveal Shakespeare’s dissatisfaction with ‘Christian humanism’ (p. 307). “Hamlet turns to moral philosophy, love, sexual desire, filial bonds, friendship, introversion, poetry, realpolitik, and religion in the search for meaning or fixity. In each case, it discovers nothing of significance" (p. 39). As in Derrida’s ‘Structure, Sign, and Play’, anything that seems to be a centre or ground of existence turns out to be empty, absent, or illusory. All that remains is ‘opportunistic nominalism’ (p. 26). "Whatever an individual might strive to believe, he always and only exists as a participant in a form of hunting—one in which he, like everyone else, is both predator and prey" (p. 50)
Sederi VII (1996): 201—215 Dramaturgy of the Acting Version of the First Quarto of Hamlet
2015
It is relatively known that the First Quarto of Hamlet (1603), the first text ever printed in which the tragical history of the Prince of Denmark is related to the playwright William Shakespeare, presents a version notably different from the one commonly known, from the standard version which is reflected in the texts of the Second Quarto (1604/5) and the First Folio (1623). Among its most striking differences we could point out the following. It is a much shorter ver-sion, 2,220 lines, just over half as long as the Second Quarto (the longest textual version) or any modern critical edition. Variation in dialogue ranges from passages of total similitude, paraphrases, to fragments unique to the First Quarto (about 130 lines), together with a number of transpositions and echoes. Some characters bear different names, for instance, Corambis for Polonius, Montano for Reynaldo1, or Rossencraft and Gilderstone for Rosencrantz2 and Guilderstern. There are important structural differences, es...
FEW critics have even admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet the character has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead. These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first business was to study a work of art. The kind of criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most misleading kind possible. For they both possessed unquestionable critical insight, and both make their critical aberrations the more plausible by the substitution-of their own Hamlet for Shakespeare's-which their creative gift effects. We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on this play.