Post by shaxper on May 21, 2002 14:57:16 GMT -5
For those of you who don't already know, Arden is planning something incredibly different with their new edition of Hamlet. Instead of attempting to discern an original intended version of Hamlet from the three (somewhat different) major surviving sources, they are simply printing the three sources, admitting that it is impossible to know what was intended for this play. Here's a copy of the London Times Review, which I borrowed from The Discussion Zone (http://shakespearehigh.com):
[From the Times Online (19 May 2002)]
'Will the real Hamlet please stand up?'
A new edition will offer three versions of the play.
This is a road to Shakespeare madness, says Colin Burrow
The forthcoming Arden edition of Hamlet — the most authoritative text — will apparently contain not one but three versions of the play. This has ruffled feathers in the academic world, and has been the subject of a long article in The New Yorker. Is it the end of Shakespeare as we know him, or the start of a radically new vision of the play? Is it all just academic madness? And why do we need to print three versions of Hamlet?
Well, everybody knows Hamlet says “To be or not to be, that is the question”, and “To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub”. Except in one version of the play he doesn’t say either of these things. He says: “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 instead of dying with “The rest is silence”, in one version he ends:
“The rest is silence. O, o, o”.
The reason for these discrepancies is because three texts of Hamlet were printed in the early 17th century. They’re all different and Shakespeare did not oversee a final printed version. Nobody knows for sure how the three Hamlets relate to one another and every editor of the play has a different view of how they relate to what Shakespeare wrote. Some think he revised the play. Others think he wrote a single masterpiece that the printed versions all mutilate in different ways.
The First Quarto (a quarto is a smallish book made up of sheets folded into four) was printed in 1603. It contains the “ay, marry there it goes” line. It is generally known as a “bad” quarto, because it was probably reconstructed from memory by an actor who had played Marcellus (one of the guards in the first scene.) He has an actor’s eye for the
detail of early productions: the mad Ophelia does not simply enter in the First Quarto, she enters “playing on a lute, and her hair down, singing”. Such details may well tell us how these moments were staged in the Elizabethan theatre.
But usually poor old Marcellus (or whoever) just can’t catch more than the vague gist of the play when he is offstage. Moments when Hamlet is alone and thinking aloud come out sounding as though people have been playing Chinese whispers with Shakespeare.
It’s not quite “blessed are the cheese-makers”, but it’s getting on that way. “The undiscovered country, from whose bourn (boundary) no traveller returns” becomes gibberish: “The undiscovered country, at whose sight/
The happy smile, and the accursèd damned.” There are some scenes and characters in the First Quarto that are interestingly different from the other texts of the play, and which may indicate that Shakespeare (or someone) tinkered with the structure and the characters. But the First
Quarto basically shows us how Hamlet sounded to actors who waited backstage.
A year after this, another Hamlet appeared, which was twice as long as the First Quarto. The Second Quarto probably derived from Shakespeare’s “foul papers”, or his rough drafts of the play. It’s far too long to have been performed in its entirety, but gives us most of the Hamlet we know.
It’s not simply Shakespeare, though. The compositor (the printer who set the type) clearly found the manuscript a pig to read. When this Hamlet sees Claudius praying and decides not to kill him because doing so would send him to heaven, he says: “This is base and silly, not revenge.” The words the printer had before him and misread were not “base and silly”
but “hire and salary”. Hamlet meant that sending Claudius to heaven would be a reward rather than a punishment for his murder of old Hamlet. “Base and silly” probably does not reflect what Shakespeare wrote. But despite these problems the Second Quarto is probably closest to Shakespeare’s earliest and longest version.
Then in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, the First Folio appeared. (A folio is made by folding sheets of paper in half; this was the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays).
[From the Times Online (19 May 2002)]
'Will the real Hamlet please stand up?'
A new edition will offer three versions of the play.
This is a road to Shakespeare madness, says Colin Burrow
The forthcoming Arden edition of Hamlet — the most authoritative text — will apparently contain not one but three versions of the play. This has ruffled feathers in the academic world, and has been the subject of a long article in The New Yorker. Is it the end of Shakespeare as we know him, or the start of a radically new vision of the play? Is it all just academic madness? And why do we need to print three versions of Hamlet?
Well, everybody knows Hamlet says “To be or not to be, that is the question”, and “To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub”. Except in one version of the play he doesn’t say either of these things. He says: “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 instead of dying with “The rest is silence”, in one version he ends:
“The rest is silence. O, o, o”.
The reason for these discrepancies is because three texts of Hamlet were printed in the early 17th century. They’re all different and Shakespeare did not oversee a final printed version. Nobody knows for sure how the three Hamlets relate to one another and every editor of the play has a different view of how they relate to what Shakespeare wrote. Some think he revised the play. Others think he wrote a single masterpiece that the printed versions all mutilate in different ways.
The First Quarto (a quarto is a smallish book made up of sheets folded into four) was printed in 1603. It contains the “ay, marry there it goes” line. It is generally known as a “bad” quarto, because it was probably reconstructed from memory by an actor who had played Marcellus (one of the guards in the first scene.) He has an actor’s eye for the
detail of early productions: the mad Ophelia does not simply enter in the First Quarto, she enters “playing on a lute, and her hair down, singing”. Such details may well tell us how these moments were staged in the Elizabethan theatre.
But usually poor old Marcellus (or whoever) just can’t catch more than the vague gist of the play when he is offstage. Moments when Hamlet is alone and thinking aloud come out sounding as though people have been playing Chinese whispers with Shakespeare.
It’s not quite “blessed are the cheese-makers”, but it’s getting on that way. “The undiscovered country, from whose bourn (boundary) no traveller returns” becomes gibberish: “The undiscovered country, at whose sight/
The happy smile, and the accursèd damned.” There are some scenes and characters in the First Quarto that are interestingly different from the other texts of the play, and which may indicate that Shakespeare (or someone) tinkered with the structure and the characters. But the First
Quarto basically shows us how Hamlet sounded to actors who waited backstage.
A year after this, another Hamlet appeared, which was twice as long as the First Quarto. The Second Quarto probably derived from Shakespeare’s “foul papers”, or his rough drafts of the play. It’s far too long to have been performed in its entirety, but gives us most of the Hamlet we know.
It’s not simply Shakespeare, though. The compositor (the printer who set the type) clearly found the manuscript a pig to read. When this Hamlet sees Claudius praying and decides not to kill him because doing so would send him to heaven, he says: “This is base and silly, not revenge.” The words the printer had before him and misread were not “base and silly”
but “hire and salary”. Hamlet meant that sending Claudius to heaven would be a reward rather than a punishment for his murder of old Hamlet. “Base and silly” probably does not reflect what Shakespeare wrote. But despite these problems the Second Quarto is probably closest to Shakespeare’s earliest and longest version.
Then in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, the First Folio appeared. (A folio is made by folding sheets of paper in half; this was the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays).