"Hamlet" After Q1

An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text

Zachary Lesser

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780812290394
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

In 1823, Sir Henry Bunbury discovered a badly bound volume of twelve Shakespeare plays in a closet of his manor house. Nearly all of the plays were first editions, but one stood out as extraordinary: a previously unknown text of Hamlet that predated all other versions. Suddenly, the world had to grapple with a radically new—or rather, old— Hamlet in which the characters, plot, and poetry of Shakespeare's most famous play were profoundly and strangely transformed.Q1, as the text is known, has been declared a rough draft, a shorthand piracy, a memorial reconstruction, and a pre-Shakespearean "ur- Hamlet, " among other things. Flickering between two historical moments—its publication in Shakespeare's early seventeenth century and its rediscovery in Bunbury's early nineteenth—Q1 is both the first and last Hamlet. Because this text became widely known only after the familiar version of the play had reached the pinnacle of English literature, its reception has entirely depended on this uncanny temporal oscillation; so too has its ongoing influence on twentieth- and twenty-first-century ideas of the play.Zachary Lesser examines how the improbable discovery of Q1 has forced readers to reconsider accepted truths about Shakespeare as an author and about the nature of Shakespeare's texts. In telling the story of this mysterious quarto and tracing the debates in newspapers, London theaters, and scholarly journals that followed its discovery, Lesser offers brilliant new insights on what we think we mean when we talk about Hamlet.

CHAPTER 1

As Originally Written by Shakespeare

Textual Bibliography and Textual Biography

As soon as Henry Bunbury’s discovery became public, its importance “to every English gentleman and scholar” led to calls for a reprint edition, “for the sake of the immortal author, and for that of society.”¹ Payne and Foss promptly obliged, and later that same year, their reprint was itself reprinted in Leipzig, demonstrating its importance beyond England and, as I discuss further in Chapter 3, drawing the attention of no less a Shakespearean commentator than Goethe. Payne and Foss included a brief introductory note on the origins of the text, the only editorial apparatus in the book. Spare as it is, this note, which also appeared in the Leipzig edition, set the agenda for much of the discussion that followed, influencing not only Goethe but numerous others as well:

The present Edition of Hamlet is an accurate reprint from the only known copy of this Tragedy as originally written by Shakespeare, which he afterwards altered and enlarged. It is given to the world under the impression of rendering an acceptable service to literature. Some variations in the plot, as compared with the received Text, will be perceived; but its chief value consists in bringing to light several lines of great beauty subsequently omitted, and in many new readings of passages which have been the subject of much controversy among the critics. The typographical errors and even negligent omissions in the Text are common to all the Editions published during the life time of Shakespeare, who, it is believed, never superintended the publication of any of his works, excepting the Poems of Venus and Adonis, and Tarquin and Lucrece.
The last leaf is wanting; but as the Play is perfect to the death of Hamlet, the loss is of comparatively small importance.²

Like this note to the reader, journalistic accounts throughout 1825, and in the following years, focused on the intersection of bibliography and biography, detailing the intriguing variants in the Q1 text and speculating on what they could tell modern readers about Shakespeare’s writing process. Most of them agreed with Payne and Foss that Q1 represented the play “as originally written by Shakespeare.”

Over the ensuing decades, this “exhumated curiosity” pushed critics and editors to develop new theories of the origins of Shakespearean texts, which implied new conceptions of Shakespearean authorship.³ What kind of an author was Shakespeare? Clearly he was a genius—indeed, the paradigm of poetic genius—but what exactly was a genius? How did he work? The stakes of Q1 were high, according to one contemporary writer nothing less than “the most interesting and instructive subject of philosophical inquiry in the annals of intellect.”⁴ Did Shakespeare write his plays in a poetic fury of inspiration, as John Heminges and Henry Condell seemed to claim when they told readers of the First Folio that Shakespeare’s “mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he vttered with that easinesse, that we haue scarse receiued from him a blot in his papers” (sig. A3r)? Or did he persistently return to old material, polishing individual lines and reframing the action of a play until it perfectly expressed his meaning? So Ben Jonson apparently thought, for he wrote in his commendatory poem in the same volume that “he, / Who casts to write a liuing line, must sweat, / (such as thine are) and strike the second heat / Vpon the Muses anuile” (sig. A4v). While Jonson saw exhausting artisanal labor behind Shakespeare’s lines, John Milton’s commendatory poem in the Second Folio followed Heminges and Condell, praising Shakespeare’s natural creativity: “to th’ shame of slow-endevouring Art / Thy easie numbers flow” (sig. A5r). As these lines make clear, the debate over whether Shakespeare revised—and whether, if he did, this was a good thing—goes all the way back to 1623. But the uncanny historicity of Q1, its belated appearance at the height of the Romantic engagement with Hamlet, ensured that this “new (old) Play” would become the key to understanding Shakespeare’s textual biography.

The editorial indifference of Payne and Foss to the lack of the final leaf in their copy of Q1 may now seem amusing. But stage productions of the play throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries usually concluded with the death of Hamlet, treating the rest of the finale as “of comparatively small importance”: since Fortinbras was routinely omitted entirely, the curtain often dropped on “the rest is silence” or Horatio’s elegiac “flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”⁵ More telling, in historical context, is Payne and Foss’s blithe assurance about the nature of the text they were reprinting. Even shortly after the reprint appeared, Shakespeare scholars would no longer feel quite so comfortable describing most of the textual variation between Q1 and the received text as the kind of “typographical errors” and “negligent omissions” prevalent in the quartos generally. And it would of course be impossible today, after the twentieth-century revolution in textual bibliography, to state simply that Q1 gives us the “Tragedy as originally written by Shakespeare,” not only without providing evidence but indeed without providing any specific reference to the text at all. But in fact this transformation in bibliographic theory and evidentiary standards derives in part from the emergence of Q1 at this moment.

To the New Bibliographers of the early twentieth century, the lack of attention to the processes of scribal and print transmission made nineteenth-century assertions like these seem unscientific and impressionistic. And indeed, the theories of authorship and the text that developed in response to the reprint of Q1 largely predate the episteme of New Bibliography, with its polemical emphasis on the scientific assessment of bibliographic evidence. Instead, these theories were firmly rooted in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century critical concerns about the nature of poetic genius and authorial development, in questions of taste and propriety more than paleography and stemmatics. As both this chapter and Chapter 4 show, however, the New Bibliographic narrative of its predecessors’ premodernity obscures its own continuities with that earlier scholarship. For the New Bibliographers, as for their Victorian predecessors, Q1 Hamlet was a foundation stone in the construction of Shakespeare’s textual biography and the consolidation of his authorship, serving as a key text in the related theories of “bad quartos” and memorial reconstruction. Much of this work has depended on the blurb on the title page of Q2—“Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect Coppie”—which has long prompted the biographical imagination (see Figure 3). As I show at the end of this chapter, the New Bibliographers in particular read a Shakespearean romance into these words. After tracing the history of responses to Q1, which have consistently sought to understand the bibliography of Hamlet through the biography of Shakespeare, I therefore return to this title-page advertisement in an effort to reread the relationship between Q1 and Q2 Hamlet without this biographical imperative.

The claim by Payne and Foss that Shakespeare “afterwards altered and enlarged” the play suggests that they were influenced by the title page of Q2, with its promotion of that text as enlarged. Thirty-five years earlier, Edmond Malone had similarly noted Q2’s claim to be printed “according to the true and perfect Coppie” and guessed that Shakespeare must have revised his own “rude sketch of that which we now possess; for from the title page of the first edition, in 1604, we learn, that (like Romeo and Juliet, and the Merry Wives of Windsor) it had been enlarged to almost twice its original size.”⁶ Malone’s “star was not propitious”: he died in 1812, and Q1 was found “too late, alas!” for him to see it.⁷ But after Bunbury’s find, Malone was seen to have been posthumously justified in his inference. Writing in 1832, Thomas Caldecott likewise quoted the Q2 blurb and concluded that “the lately discovered copy” provided “full confirmation” that Shakespeare’s plays “must have undergone considerable alteration,” with Q1 “exhibiting, in that which was afterwards wrought into a splendid drama, the first conception, and comparatively feeble expression, of a great mind.”⁸

The immediate assessment in the newspapers was largely the same: “The author himself elaborated and augmented it after it had been for some time on the stage”; it is “the first rude sketch of Hamlet.”⁹ In comments like these, the rough quality of the text of Q1 is itself taken as evidence that it preserves Shakespeare’s preliminary draft. Few doubted that Q1 also contained numerous textual corruptions, but at the outset, as in Payne and Foss’s introductory note, these were largely assigned to the same sources of corruption that editors throughout the eighteenth century had seen as plaguing all of Shakespeare’s quartos.¹⁰ The Gentleman’s Magazine, for instance, complained of the “vicious and incorrect mode of editing the play in 1603,” but nonetheless believed that the edition “shew[ed] that the great beauties of our immortal Bard have been the results of much contemplation, and of laboured revision and correction, at moments most favourable for inspiration.”¹¹ Here the inferior text of Q1 reveals that Jonson rather than Milton had correctly perceived the genius of Shakespeare’s art, a poetics based in “laboured revision and correction.” But there was not even universal agreement that the text of Q1 was inferior. Some thought that chronological priority simply implied textual superiority: “Hamlet first appeared [on stage], according to Malone’s calculation, in 1600 … therefore, [Q1] was published only three years after the tragedy was produced. Hence it may be, in many respects, a more exact copy of the original than any subsequently printed.”¹²

This reaction is surprising only when viewed retrospectively through the lens of later bibliographic developments. Hamlet was not the only play to exist in multiple texts, and before the discovery of Q1, the earlier versions of plays such as Romeo and Juliet and The Merry Wives of Windsor were matter-of-factly assumed to be Shakespearean drafts. Chronology in printing, that is, was imagined to align smoothly with chronology in writing: first published, first written. The New Bibliographers considered these plays as much as Hamlet to be bad quartos; indeed, Merry Wives served as a primary locus for the development of their theory of memorial reconstruction, in W. W. Greg’s 1910 edition of the play.¹³ But George Steevens reprinted them and others in his edition of Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare (1766) for a very different reason:

There are many persons, who not contented with the possession of a finished picture of some great master, are desirous to procure the first sketch that was made for it, that they may have the pleasure of tracing the progress of the artist from the first light colouring to the finishing stroke. To such the earlier editions of KING JOHN, HENRY THE FIFTH, HENRY THE SIXTH, THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, AND ROMEO AND JULIET, will, I apprehend, not be unwelcome; since in these we may discern as much as will be found in the hasty outlines of the pencil, with a fair prospect of that perfection to which He brought every performance He took the pains to retouch.¹⁴

It is easy enough to spot the Bardolatry in Steevens’s capitalization of the third-person pronoun. More important is that, for Steevens and indeed for all the great eighteenth-century editors without exception, this deification of Shakespeare is completely compatible with the notion that His plays were created through a long process of revision from “first sketch” to “finishing stroke.”

Despite their often vitriolic disagreements over particular emendations and textual theories, the early editors all agreed on this point, and largely without argumentation. The Merry Wives of Windsor was “entirely new writ” (Alexander Pope) following “the first imperfect Sketch of this Comedy” (Theobald); the quarto reproduced “the first sketch of this play” (Johnson), a “first draft” that was “but the skeleton of the true one” (Edward Capell), and it was “revised and enlarged by the authour, after its first production” (Malone).¹⁵ Romeo and Juliet was altered “since the first edition; but probably by Shakespear” (Pope); “the play was alter’d” in “a revision, at the time of enlarging it” (Capell), and Q1 was “apparently a rough draught” (Malone).¹⁶ Shakespeare made revisions throughout King Lear, from “two lines … added in the authour’s revision” to longer passages and entire scenes (Johnson).¹⁷ Henry V had been “extremely improved” (Pope) and “much enlarged and improved after the first edition,” with the folio being “the second draught of the same design” (Johnson); “the Chorus’s … (with many other noble Improvements) were since added by the Author, not above 8 Years before his Death” (William Warburton).¹⁸

With the Henry VI plays, The Taming of a/the Shrew, and King John, editorial opinion was more varied, although revision typically remained central. Editors sometimes suspected that these early plays were not completely Shakespeare’s but rather had “been brought to him as a Director of the Stage; and so to have receiv’d some finishing Beauties at his hand” (Theobald on Henry VI).¹⁹ Others saw them as fully Shakespearean, with the early quartos representing “the first Sketch only” (Warburton) or the “first draught” (Capell).²⁰ And even in plays without such wide divergences between quarto and folio, editors saw evidence of Shakespearean revision: a few lines in Richard II, “expunged in the revision by the authour” (Johnson);²¹ various passages in 2 Henry IV, “inserted after the first edition” and “plainly by Shakespear himself” (Pope);²² an altered metaphor in Troilus and Cressida, an “improvement … of the Poet’s after his first edition” (Capell);²³ the passage about the boy players in Hamlet (Capell), or even a single variant—“o’er-offices” (F) or “o’er-reaches” (Q2) in the gravey...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction. The Urn-Hamlet
• Chapter 1. As Originally Written by Shakespeare: Textual Bibliography and Textual Biography
• Chapter 2. Contrary Matters: The Power of the Gloss and the History of an Obscenity
• Chapter 3. Enter the Ghost in His Night Gowne: Behind Gertrude’s Bed
• Chapter 4. Conscience Makes Cowards: The Disintegration and Reintegration of Shakespeare
• Conclusion. Q1 in the Library at Babel
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments