James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in
the Life of William Shakespeare (2005) Chapter 15 Second Thoughts Of the many remarkable things about Hamlet, perhaps the most extraordinary is its length. At roughly four
thousand lines, the Second Quarto-the closest thing we have to what Shakespeare wrote in late I599-could not have been performed uncut at the Globe. Nor could his revised version of the play, a couple of hundred
lines shorter, that eventually appeared in the
First Folio. Though the Elizabethan stage dispensed with time-consuming intermissions and changes in scenery, these versions of Hamlet
would still have taken four hours to perform; even at top speed, actors couldn't rattle off much more than
a thousand lines of verse in an hour. With
outdoor performances at the Globe beginning at two in the afternoon and the sun setting in late
win 303 ter and early autumn around five o'clock,
an uncut Hamlet staged in February or October would have left the actors stumbling about in the fading light by the Gravedigger scene; the fencing match, fought in the
dark, could have been lethal. Shakespeare alluded in the prologue to Romeo and Juliet to the "two hours' traffic of our stage." Ben
Jonson was probably closer to the mark when he spoke in Bartholomew
Fair of "two hours and a half, and somewhat more." By any measure, Hamlet uncut was truly, in the play's
own words, a "poem unlimited" (2.2-4).
After a decade in the theater, Shakespeare knew how long scripts ran and could cut to size when he wanted to: Julius Caesar (at
twenty-five hundred lines) and As You
Like It (at twenty-eight hundred) could have gone from
study to stage uncut. As they should have: given the culture of playwriting at this time,
there was little to be gained by submitting a play far
too long to be performed. The most tempting explanation for Hamlet's
unusual length-that Shakespeare had finally begun to care more about how his words were read than how they were staged-is
implausible. Had Shakespeare suddenly become interested in having a play published he could have followed the path just taken by Ben Jonson, who had carefully seen Every Man Out of His Humour into
print. Jonson had indicated on the title page that it contained "more than hath been publicly spoken or
acted" by the Chamberlain's Men in late 1599 and declared himself the play's
"author"- both novel claims. There was a strong market
for Jonson's book, and the printed version was a best-seller, going through a remarkable three editions in eight months. But
Shakespeare neither pressed for the publication of Hamlet nor cared much for
this kind of literary status. And several years would pass before even an unauthorized, pirated version
of Hamlet was published. Shakespeare's early versions of Hamlet
don't show him to be overly concerned with writing something that could be immediately performed or published. He was letting the writing
take him where it would. Alone among contemporary playwrights in 1599, Shakespeare-as shareholder, principal playwright, and part owner of the theater in which his
plays were staged-had the freedom to do so. But he
would never write so long a version of a play again, and only King Lear would undergo such exten- 304 sive revision. His
fellow sharers may even have given him time off from rehearsing and acting to work on Hamlet, for Shakespeare's name is
conspicuously absent from the list of those who acted in Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour this
autumn, though it was given pride of place among those who had performed Every Man In His Humour a year
earlier. The differences between the first and second versions of Hamlet
reveal a good deal about how Shakespeare wrote and for that reason alone are worth attending to. The revisions also
tell a story of Shakespeare's decision to alter the trajectory of the play and shore up the resolve of its hero. Scholars differ on details, and some
remain committed to radically different accounts of the relationship of the surviving versions of
Hamlet and of how the play changed. What follows,
though necessarily simplified (for to deal with all the vexing issues raised by the play's multiple versions would take volumes), seems to me to be the most plausible
and economical reconstruction of what happened. Shakespeare finished tinkering with his first version of Hamlet in the waning months of 1599 but wasn't yet ready to turn it over to his
fellow players. When he returned to his finished
draft not long after, he revised extensively as he wrote out the play again
in a fresh copy. It doesn't appear that he knew in advance what kinds of changes he would make, and most of the thousand or so alterations
are minor and stylistic. This revised Hamlet was still
not, as his fellow players might have hoped, a performance-ready script: Shakespeare trimmed only 230 lines (while adding 90 new ones), so that the revisions wouldn't have reduced the playing time by more than ten minutes. Even
in this second version he was still letting the work follow its own
course. When he was done with the new draft in the winter of 1600, Shakespeare turned it over to
his fellow players; a significant abridgement would still be necessary before it could be performed at the Globe. Because versions of both Shakespeare's first and second thoughts
survive, it's possible to follow the process of revision (while recognizing
that some of the changes can be attributed to compositors, bookkeepers, scribes, censors, and others through whose
hands they passed). Shakespeare tinkered obsessively-far more than his reputation for never blotting 305 a line would suggest. He turned Hamlet's
famous cry, "What's Hecuba to him, or he to her" into the more sonorous "What's
Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba" (2.2.559). He
modernized old-fashioned words and simplified obscure ones so that Gertrude's description of the
drowning Ophelia chanting "snatches of old lauds" is changed to
"snatches of old tunes" (4.7.177) and Ophelia's "virgin crants"
becomes "virgin rites" (5.I.232). There are dozens of similar examples. Seemingly insignificant changes prove to be consequential. The most famous is the substitution of a single word in the opening line of
Hamlet' s first soliloquy, which had begun, "0 that this too too sallied flesh would melt." The second time around this
appears as "too too solid flesh" (I.2.129). Hamlet's initial sense of being assaulted or assailed
("sallied" conveys a sense of being sullied or polluted by his mother's infidelity) is
replaced by an anguished desire for nothingness that has less to do with his .mother's behavior than with his own inaction. The smallest of changes complicate Hamlet's character. When an armed Hamlet comes upon Claudius at prayer, Shakespeare first had his hero say, "Now I might I do it, but now
a is a-praying." When he returned to this passage he substituted the words "do it pat" for
"do it, but"-so that the line now read: "Now I might I do it
pat, now he is praying" (3-3.73-74). There is a world of difference. In the earlier version, a more
hesitant Hamlet can't take revenge because Claudius is praying. In the revised version a more opportunistic Hamlet can act precisely because he has caught his adversary off guard but won't because to do so would mean sending a shriven Claudius to heaven. A more striking example of revision occurs early on when Hamlet angrily turns on Ophelia: I have heard of your paintings well enough. God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another; you jig and amble, and you list, you nickname God's creatures, and make wantonness ignorance. When Shakespeare reworked these lines he shifted the grounds of
Hamlet's attack and sharpened its staccato rhythm: 306 I have heard of your prattlings too well
enough. God has given you one pace, and you make yourself another; you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nickname God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. It's no longer about how Ophelia looks but how she speaks and moves, prattling and lisping (while "pace" replaces "face,"
connecting up with "jig" and "amble"). Shakespeare also caught himself on the verge of incomprehensibility. In the revised text, for example, Claudius straightforwardly brings
act 4, scene I to an end, saying: we'll call up
our wisest friends To let them
know both what we mean to do And what's
untimely done. 0, come away, My soul is full of discord and dismay. Had Shakespeare's earlier version not survived, we could never have guessed that in the middle of this speech Claudius digressed in an
impossibly dense metaphor about how "slander flies in a line of fire like a
cannon- ball": we'll call up
our wisest friends, And let them
know both what we mean to do And what's
untimely done. [So envious slander] Whose whisper
o'er the world's diameter, As level as the
cannon to his blank, Transports his
poisoned shot, may miss our name, And hit the
woundless air. O, come away My soul is full of discord and dismay. The sheer number of changes to the earlier version suggest a degree
of uncertainty on Shakespeare's part, as if he were not quite as sure as
he 307 had been in Julius Caesar or
As You Like It where his characters
and plot were heading. The revisions went smoothly enough until Shakespeare got to act 4, scene 4 and Hamlet's final soliloquy: "How all occasions do
inform against me / And spur my dull revenge." Until
now the soliloquies had deepened our sense of Hamlet's character while circling around problems whose complexities resisted resolution-though by the end of each Hamlet
manages to find a way forward, hopeful that the right course of action would become clearer. As he prepares to depart for
England in act 4, Hamlet comes upon young Fortinbras leading an army
through Denmark on the way to Poland "to gain a little patch of ground / That hath in
it no profit but the name" (4-4.I8-I9). Except for
the play's final moments, this is the only time that we see Fortinbras,
though we have heard of him periodically. Horatio tells us in the opening scene that "young Fortinbras" of "unimproved mettle, hot and full," is leading an army of
"lawless resolutes" (I.I.95-98) to regain lands that his father had lost to Hamlet's thirty years earlier. Fear of Fortinbras's invasion produces "this posthaste and rummage in the land" (I.I.I07) and explains why Bernardo and Francisco are standing guard as the play
begins. We later learn that Fortinbras's bedridden uncle, the King of Norway, at Claudius's urging, has apparently persuaded him to redirect his
attack against the Poles. Fortinbras is Hamlet's foil: a restless young prince chafing under his uncle's
authority and eager to avenge his father. The chance encounter is the turning point of the play, crystallizing for Hamlet the futility of heroic action.
Looking on as Fortinbras's troops march off to the wars, Hamlet sees the invisible rot at the heart of
this martial display: This is th'impostume of much wealth and peace That inward
breaks,- and shows no cause without Why the man dies. His words echo a line in Holinshed's Chronicles that had stuck with Shakespeare: "sedition," Holinshed had written, "is
the apostume of the 308 realm, which when it breaketh inwardly, putteth the state in great danger of recovery." There's no cure for this
cancer. It may well be the darkest moment in the play. The soliloquy that immediately follows returns to ideas Hamlet has long wrestled with. Beastliness has been
much on his mind, whether it's that of Phyrrus, an "Hyrcanian beast" (2.2-45 I), that "adulterate
beast" Claudius (I.5-42), or even his mother: "0 God, a beast that
wants discourse of reason / Would have mourned longer"
(I.2.I50-5I). Hamlet now unexpectedly reverses himself. "Thinking too
precisely" is as beastly as acting impulsively. "What is a man," he
asks, "if his chief good and market of his time / Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no
more" (4·4·33-35)· He can't shake the idea of his own beastliness, which now seems to him
grounded in his cowardly habit of hairsplitting analysis: Now whether it
be Bestial
oblivion, or some craven scruple Of thinking too
precisely on th' event, (A thought
which quartered hath but one part wisdom, And ever three parts coward), I do not know Why yet I live
to say "this thing's to do," Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means To do't. Hamlet repudiates the very thing that had won us over, his refusal to
act unthinkingly. He has discovered that he's a
beast if he acts and a beast if he doesn't. The example of Fortinbras confirms for him that there can be no right way forward: Examples gross
as earth exhort me; Witness this
army of such mass and charge, Led by a
delicate and tender prince, Whose spirit,
with divine ambition puffed, Makes mouths at
the invisible event, Exposing what
is mortal and unsure, 309 To all that
fortune, death, and danger dare, Even for an eggshell. It's Hamlet at his most sardonic. Fortinbras
is a "gross" example not only in the sense of "obvious" but aIso "monstrous". The ironic "delicate" and "tender" are the last adjectives
the ruthless Fortinbras calls to mind. Fortinbras is "puffed" with
ambition and childlike makes "mouths" or faces at unseen outcomes. He is willing to
sacrifice the lives of his followers for nothing, for "an eggshell"-with the hint here of broken eggshells as empty crowns (an image Shakespeare would develop in King Lear). Hamlet's conclusion has exasperated critics, and some have refused to take him at his word, insisting that he means the exact opposite of
what he says and that we should take his words "not to stir" as
a double negative, "not not to
stir." But this is desperate. Hamlet concludes that greatness consists not in refraining to act unless the cause is great but in fighting over any imagined slight: Rightly to be
great, Is not to stir
without great argument, But greatly to
find quarrel in a straw When honor's at the stake. It's the discredited argument for a culture of honor left in tatters
by the events of the previous year. In the
aftermath of Essex's Irish campaign, Elizabethans didn't need to be reminded what an "army of such
mass and charge" leading to the "imminent death of twenty thousand
men" amounted to. The relentless pursuit of honor
can be used to justifY anything. Fortinbras is a perfect example, for he is
willing to sacrifice his men for a "fantasy and trick offame": to my shame I
see The imminent
death of twenty thousand men, 310 That for a
fantasy and trick of fame, Go to their
graves like beds, fight for a plot Whereon the
numbers cannot try the cause, Which is not
tomb enough and continent To hide the
slain. It's a grim, almost savage soliloquy. And the image of Fortinbras marching through Denmark on his way to slaughter Poles can't help but invite comparison to a scene enacted thirty years earlier when Hamlet's
father had taken the same route to the same end.
Were his actions against the Poles any less brutal than Fortinbras's-and
are we to think that these are the "foul crimes" (1S12) that
still haunt him? Will Fortinbras's costly campaign be recalled in similar heroic language? "How all occasions" is a fitting culmination to the
sequence of soliloquies that preceded it-but only if we want to see the resolution of the play as dark and existential. Hamlet knows
that he has to kill Claudius but cannot justify such an action since the traditional avenger's
appeal to honor rings hollow. This bitter and hard-won
knowledge serves as a capstone to earlier, anguished soliloquies. Yet as
Shakespeare saw, it derailed the revenge plot. The resolution of the play
was now a problem, for it had to be more motivated than the "accidental judgments" and
"casual slaughters" Horatio describes
(5.2.361). Yet for a resigned Hamlet-capable only of bloody "thoughts" not deeds (4-4.66)-to take
revenge after this is to concede that he is no better than Fortinbras. In the final scene, mortally wounded and having killed Claudius, Hamlet hears the "warlike noise" (5.2.349) of Fortinbras's
approaching army and declares,"1 do prophesy th' election lights / On Fortinbras; he has my dying voice" (5.2.355-56). What could possibly justifY
Hamlet's urging Fortinbras's succession? These words are either spoken ironically or are the stoical
observation of someone who knows that even Alexander the Great and Caesar return to dust. The entry of Fortinbras backed by his lawless troops confirms that there will be no "election" in
Denmark-the country is his for the taking. Hamlet can have no
illusions about the fate of Denmark under the rule of an opportunist willing to sacrifice the lives of
his 311 own followers. A play that began with
hurried defensive preparations to withstand Fortinbras's troops ends with a
capitulation to them, the poisoned bodies of the Danish ruling family sprawled onstage, a fitting image of the "impostume
of much wealth and peace, / That inward breaks." In allowing his writing to take him where it would in his first
draft, Shakespeare had created his greatest protagonist, but the trajectory
of Hamlet's soliloquies had left the resolution of the play incoherent
and broken too radically from the conventions of the revenge plot that
had to sweep both protagonist and play to a
satisfying conclusion. Shakespeare now had to choose between the integrity of his character and his
plot, and he chose plot. Hamlet's climactic soliloquy
had to be cut. When he revised this scene, Shakespeare eliminated the long soliloquy entirely, along with Hamlet's words with Fortinbras's Captain. All that was left to the scene was a perfunctory nine-line exchange between a courteous Fortinbras and the Captain that provided a
plausible explanation for why Fortinbras would be in a position to pick
up the pieces at the end of the play. One immediate effect of the cut was
that in the revised version (in which Hamlet neither sees Fortinbras's army
nor speaks of him so trenchantly), the lines in which Hamlet offers Fortinbras
his "dying voice" strike a more upbeat, hopeful note. Their
edge is furthered softened by Shakespeare's decision to return to the opening scene and change Fortinbras's "lawless resolutes" into the more
understandable "landless" ones the kind of men, younger sons and gentleman volunteers, who had sought their fortune in Ireland. Eliminating Hamlet's soliloquy firmly shifted the play's center of gravity. Far more weight now fell on what
was now the play's final soliloquy, immediately preceding Fortinbras's
entry. There, Claudius had declared that the only thing that can cure him is "the present death of Hamlet": "Do it, England, / For like the hectic in my blood
he rages, / And thou must cure me" (4.3.65-67). The elimination of
Hamlet's words in the following scene turns Claudius into a more formidable
adversary as well as one who has the last word until
act 5. Shakespeare retreated from locating the conflict within Hamlet's consciousness and reverts
at the end to a more conventional (and for the audience more viscerally
satisfying) struggle between adversaries. 312 With Fortinbras' s role now diminished to
the point where he could no longer serve as Hamlet's opposite, Shakespeare had to go back and turn Laertes into a worthier antagonist and
ultimately Hamlet's double. In a clumsy but now necessary addition, Hamlet announces this by telling Horatio that "to Laertes I forgot myself, / For by the
image of my cause I see / The portraiture of his"
(5.2.76-78). And in the revised version, Hamlet voluntarily seeks a reconciliation with Laertes (where in the earlier version he had only done so at
his mother's urging). Shakespeare still had to find both a new turning point and a
rationale for why Hamlet had to kill Claudius. He
managed to do both by adding a few key lines to one of Hamlet's speeches in
act 5, scene 2. In the earlier version of this scene, Hamlet had launched into another litany of Claudius's crimes- Does it not,
think thee, stand me now upon? He hath killed
my king and whored my mother, Popped in
between th' election and my hopes, Thrown out his
angle for my proper life, And with such
cozenage, is't not perfect conscience? (5.2 .63-67) -only to be interrupted in midspeech by the
entrance of a courtier. You can see why Shakespeare cuts him off in the aftermath of "How
all occasions," Hamlet's complaint seems rhetorical and verges on self-pity. It may be "perfect conscience"-that is, conform to what is
right-but in such a relative world, what difference does
that make? When he rewrites this scene, Shakespeare delays the courtier's entrance and extends
Hamlet's argument to allow him to build to a new conclusion: Does it not, think'st thee, stand me now upon- He that hath
killed my king and whored my mother, Popped in
between th' election and my hopes, Thrown out his
angle for my proper life, And with such
cozenage-is't not perfect conscience To quit him
with this arm? And is't not to be damned 313 To let this
canker of our nature come In further evil? The additional lines counter Claudius's desire for a "cure"
and restore the metaphor that had been cut about the "impostume,"
though it's no longer an undetectable cancer that destroys the
state. Now, a cure is possible: this canker, Claudius, can and must be
removed. And to fail to do sois to invite damnation. Salvation, not honor, now
justifies the killing of a king. Hamlet realizes that he no longer needs to dread being damned for
"taking arms against the foe," a fear so eloquently expressed in the
"To be or not to be" soliloquy, where he was tormented by "the dread
of something after death" (3.1.77). The Hamlet of
the revised version is no longer adrift, no longer finds himselfin
a world where action feels arbitrary and meaningless. The change is so deft that it's as if Shakespeare had activated something that had been dormant in the play~ Other
lines-"There's a divinity that shapes our ends" (5.2.10) and "There is special
providence in the fall of a sparrow" (5.2.219-220)-now fall neatly into place
and reinforce the argument for salvation through revenge.
And this new determination- with its emphasis on salvation-corresponds with Hamlet's words in what is now his final soliloquy, back in act 3, where he
commits himself to killing his uncle only when Claudius is "about some
act / That has no relish of salvation in't" (3-3.91-92). For most of the revised version, Hamlet is the same reflective, melancholy Dane as he is in the
earlier one. It's only near the end that the two
Hamlets significantly diverge each one achieving a different kind of clarity. Shakespeare was also forced to change Hamlet's unforgettable words as he prepares to fight Laertes. In the
earlier version Hamlet's speech served as a coda that echoes the resignation of his famous soliloquy,
"To be or not to be": "If it be, 'tis not to come; if it be not
to come, it will be now; ifit be not now, yet it will come; the
readiness is all, since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is't to leave betimes. Let be" (5.2.220-24). Hamlet's emphasis here, as it has been all along in this first version,
is on knowing, or rather, his acceptance of not knowing: you can't regret
what you don't know. Samuel Johnson's paraphrase
of Hamlet's philosophical 314 resolve is helpful: "Since no man know aught of the state oflife which he leaves, since he cannot judge what other years may produce, why
should he be afraid ofleaving life behind?" When he revised these lines, Shakespeare made the last sentence less dispiriting. Hamlet finally has an answer to
his persistent fears about the afterlife: "The readiness is all, since
no man has aught of what he leaves. What is't to leave betimes?"
(5.2.222-24). Now that he is a more committed avenger, Hamlet's calm insistence that there are no easy
answers" Let be"-must also be eliminated. And while the new Hamlet also acknowledges that death is both certain and inevitable and that it
doesn't matter if you die young, he shifts attention away from the
impossibility of knowing (which has also dropped out) to
the unimportance of having. In this revised version, Hamlet's last piece of advice is that you
can't take it with you-"since no man has aught of
what he leaves." SamuelJohnson summarizes the difference and signals his preference: "It is
more characteristic of Hamlet to think little of leaving because he cannot solve its many mysteries, than because he cannot carry
with him his life's goods." Johnson prefers the Hamlet of the first draft here, the one
characterized by a philosophical equanimity in the face of a disappointing world,
rather than the one whose revenge is now tied to salvation and a
renunciation of wor Idly things. As Shakespeare saw (and as editors from the eighteenth century on who are reluctant to part with these and other profound lines that
Shakespeare eliminated, confirm), the cuts come at a
price. The radical argument for a sacred act of violence that underpins the lines "is't not to be damned / To let this canker of our nature come / In further
evil?" returns us to the self-justifying fantasy of the conspirators inJulius Caesar ("Let's be sacrificers, but not
butchers" [2.1.166]) and more broadly to the language of theologically sanctioned tyrannicide
that permeated that play. But Shakespeare inJulius
Caesar had also shown that while this argument can be justified intellectually, in the real world chaos and
bloodletting invariably follow. It didn't help, then,
that the earlier version of Hamlet had included a long speech by Horatio reminding playgoers how "a little ere the mightiest Julius fell, / The graves stood
tenantless, and the sheeted dead / Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets" 315 (LLII4-17)· In Julius Caesar,
fresh in the minds of playgoers at the Globe, Cassius had also seen in these portents "instruments of fear and
warning / Unto some monstrous state" (1.70-71). Gesturing toward the
argument that Hamlet was damned if he didn't kill Claudius was one thing;
foregrounding its now disturbing political implications
was another: ultimately, killing a bad ruler, though justified, fails
to resolve anything. So Shakespeare went back and cut Horatio's speech, too. The changes may have temporarily solved Hamlet's problem but not the deeper one,
which remains in the play, of what justifies-not just morally but
pragmatically- the killing of a bad ruler: when Hamlet finally stabs Claudius, it's easy to forget that in both versions everyone onstage cries out,
"Treason, treason" (5.2.323). As Shakespeare's
plays from Henry the Sixth to Julius Caesar had already shown, removing the canker, however necessary, doesn't cure the state, because men who are even more ruthless than their predecessors fill the political
vacuum, just as Fortinbras will. The revised version still had to be shortened for the stage, cut to fewer than three thousand lines. Whether
Shakespeare abridged it himself, left it to others, or collaborated in the effort, we don't know, but
this performance version of Hamlet was an
immediate and unqualified success. Fellow playwrights, who qUickly quoted,
parodied, and shamelessly stole from it, were clearly dazzled. It must
have had a great run that first year or two; demand was so great that the Chamberlain's Men, or some part of the company, also took it on the road, performing it by early
1603 in Oxford, Cambridge, and probably
elsewhere. Since the two universities were not ordinarily on the same touring
route, it may have toured more than once at this time. For this
itinerant production a new and further abridged version of Hamlet was made, though this script, too, is lost (so that the two most valuable scripts for understanding how Hamlet
was actually performed no longer exist). Scholars have been able to reconstruct much of this textual history because in 1603 one or more of those involved in the touring
production, including the hired actor who played Marcellus (we know it was this actor because in putting the text together he remembered his own
lines a lot better than he did anyone else's) cobbled together from memory a 2,200-line version of the road production and sold it to publishers
in Lon- 316 don. In the course of three years the play
had now gone through five versions, each one shorter than the last. Book buyers
coming upon "The Tragical History of Hamlet Prince of
Denmark, by William Shakespeare" in 1603 would have encountered a mangled version of what they had heard onstage, with some scenes transposed, some characters given names that probably derived from the old and lost Hamlet (Polonius is named Corambis and Reynaldo is Montano),
and some of the most memorable speeches badly butchered. The opening lines
of Hamlet's most famous soliloquy offer a striking example.
What audiences had once heard as: To be, or not
to be, that is the question, Whether 'tis
nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and
arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms
against a sea of troubles, And by opposing
end them; to die to sleep No more, and by
a sleep, to say we end The heartache
and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is
heir to-'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. now appeared in print as: To be, or not
to be. Ay, that's the point. To die, to
sleep, is that all? Aye, all. No, to sleep,
to dream, aye, marry, there it goes, For in that
dream of death, when we awake, And borne again
before an everlasting judge, From whence no
passenger ever returned, The
undiscovered country, at whose sight The happy smile, and the accursed damned. But for this,
the joyful hope of this, Who'd bear the
scorns and flattery of the world Scorned by the
right rich, the rich cursed of the poor? 317 The pirated edition nonetheless proved to be enormously popular, so popular that it was read to shreds: only two copies of this First
Quarto survive, each missing a page or two, and the first wasn't
rediscovered until 1823. In response to this unauthorized quarto, in late 1604 the
Chamberlain's Men decided to turn over a better version of the play to be
published. They could have supplied anyone of a number of manuscript versions: a copy of their playhouse promptbook; the longer revised sCript that was behind it; a better version of the touring text that was
behind the First Quarto; or Shakespeare's dark
first draft. They chose this first draft-"newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much again as
it was, according to the true and perfect
copy." Why this draft was chosen is another of the play's mysteries. The company may
simply have decided not to release a version of the play that other
companies could easily stage. As a sharer, Shakespeare would have had a say in the decision, though we don't know which version he preferred. Even
if Shakespeare wanted to see his early draft in print, he made no effort to touch it up before
it was handed over to the printer-and it was so difficult to decipher that
the confused compositors had to check the opening scene against a copy of the bad First Quarto is was intended to
replace. There's one more twist: when it came time to publish Hamlet in the 1623 Folio, Heminges and Condell broke with their usual practice of printing play texts that
were based on good extant quartos: they decided to reject the early
version found in the Second Quarto of 1604/5 in favor of the (unpublished)
revised one, perhaps because it more closely resembled the acting version with which they were familiar. Their decision to do so opened up a Pandora's box: editors who could now choose between two good but quite different texts of Hamlet were sorely tempted to combine the best of both, and few could resist the
urge to do so. As a result, since the eighteenth
century the play has existed in multiple, hybrid versions-some editors relying more heavily on the
Second Quarto, others on the Folio text, and still others promiscuously draWing on both as
well as on lines from the First Quarto. One reason why no two readers' or actors' Hamlets are alike is that no two
modern versions of Hamlet are either. Combining
different parts of these texts, 318 editors have cobbled together an incoherent Hamlet that Shakespeare neither wrote nor imagined. It's not the
excision of motive but its duplication that makes the conflated versions of Hamlet that are now taught and staged so puzzling: Hamlet is both resigned and determined,
caught between knowing and having, damned if he does and damned if he doesn't kill Claudius. We're left with a
Hamlet who is confused-but not the confusion Shakespeare intended. Some recent editors have come to regret their decision to fall into
line and produce a conflated Hamlet they didn't believe in; others have
dug in their heels, preferring what's familiar. The
only major edition to break with tradition and choose an unconflated
text is the Oxford Shakespeare though its editors went with Shakespeare's revised version rather than his first draft, basing their edition on the
Folio text. The long-awaited publication of the new Arden edition of Hamlet promises
to change this situation. In offering each of the three surviving early versions of Hamlet separately, its editors will encourage
others to follow their lead. In a generation or two, I suspect, soon, only scholars interested in the history of the play's reception will still be reading a
conflated Hamlet. Changing how we think about Shakespeare's greatest play means
revising how we think about Shakespeare. The Romantic
myth of literary genius, which has long promoted an effortless and unfathomable
Shakespeare, cannot easily accommodate a model of a Shakespeare whose greatness was a product of labor as much as
talent. The humbler portrait of Shakespeare presented here is of a writer who knew himself, knew
his audience, and knew what worked. When
Shakespeare saw that he had to wrest his play from where Hamlet had led
him, he did so unflinchingly. He didn't write Hamlet to please himself. If he had, he would have
rested content with the more complicated hero of
his first draft. Only an extraordinary writer of the first order could have produced that first draft; and only a greater writer than that could have sacrificed part of that
creation to better show "the very age and body of the time his form and pressure" (3.2.23-24). Shakespeare
didn't write "as if from another planet," as Coleridge put it: he wrote for the Globe; it wasn't
in his mind's eye, or even on the page, but in the aptly named theater where his
plays came to life and mattered. 319 Ben Jonson, who knew Shakespeare well enough not to underestimate him as a writer, also knew that part of his greatness was bound up in his gift for second thoughts. Jonson's
praise of Shakespeare's craft in the First Folio, largely overlooked today, is worth recalling: he Who casts to
write a living line, must sweat, (Such as thine are) and strike the second heat Upon the Muses'
anvil; turn the same, (And himself
with it) that he thinks to frame; Or for the
laurel he may gain a scorn, For a good
poet's made as well as born. And such wert thou. Like every great writer before or since, Jonson understood that the
best poets are both made and born: that all great writing had to be
hammered out and all great poets stand or fall by
that "second heat," their labored revision. In these knotty lines Jonson also hints at the physical toll this process exacts, for when Shakespeare would "turn" his
writing, he would turn "himself with it." Writing,
even for Shakespeare, was a battering experience. Shakespeare's greatness, Jonson tells us, was a result not just of exceptional talent but also of a quarter
century of relentless, driving effort. If we want to see Shakespeare's greatness and his personality
illuminated, we need only look at the trail of sparks-still visible in the surviving versions- that flew in the heat of
revising Hamlet. To see this is also to acknowledge that the Hamlet
Shakespeare left us was, in the play's own words, "a thing a little soiled
with working" (2.1.40). This trace of grit and sweat, more than anything else, may help explain why
"Prince Hamlet," in the words of the Elizabethan playgoer Anthony Scoloker, managed then, as it manages now, "to
please all." 320 |