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The texts of Hamlet : what do you see as the most interesting / significant differences between the F1 and Q2 texts?

A shift in thinking about editorial practices with respect to Shakespeare's plays took place during the first half of the twentieth century with the advent of New Bibliography. Earlier editors had readily accepted the idea that the presence of multiple texts of some plays was evidence that revisions and additions had taken place and they confidently placed themselves within a long tradition of amending and 'improving' Shakespeare's texts. But with the development of New Bibliography, there was a new interest in ascertaining a single authentic text and, in the case of Hamlet, it was the Second Quarto that was identified as the most authoritative text, on the grounds that it was closest to Shakespeare's 'foul papers'. Like Goldilocks, New Bibliography found the First Quarto too rough and the First Folio not rough enough to be derived from the author's original manuscript; the Second Quarto seemed just right. The First Folio text was treated with suspicion because it was considered to show signs of playhouse additions, actors' interpolations, scribal alterations, and compositorial errors and amendments. This was the tarnish that the New Bibliographers regarded it as their mission to remove in order to show the pure silver of the words that Shakespeare wrote: the text as he intended it to be. In their enthusiasm for their task, these editors sometimes lost sight of the fact that they often masked the very evidence that they most relied upon to identify the authorial hand that lay behind the printed text: they imported or invented stage directions, they normalised speech headings and they 'corrected' disputed readings by reference to texts that they had otherwise discarded as 'bad' or corrupted by non-authorial influences. The difficulty of sifting out illicit material was compounded by the fear of losing precious words that may have been intended by Shakespeare as part of the text but, by diverse influences, had found their way into different printings. Thus, theories proliferated of careless composition, amendments written on slips of paper and mislaid and incomplete or unclear deletions. In this way, editors justified presenting the reader with conflated editions that ostensibly relied on one substantive text, but that admitted text from other sources, sometimes one word at a time and sometimes in much larger chunks.

The ultimate end of New Bibliography was reductive: editors sought a single, authorised text, legitimised by its supposed proximity to Shakespeare's original composition; but for each selection that they made from elsewhere, a narrative had to be invented to legitimate their choice. That Shakespeare routinely revised his own texts was inadmissible as a part of this series of narratives, since this would have undermined the central plank of New Bibliographical theory: that play texts existed in two 'good' forms ('foul papers' from the author's own hand and 'promptbook', a version contaminated by its theatrical origins) and in a motley crew of 'bad' forms derived from actors' memories, shorthand copies and various other 'stolne or surreptitious' methods of transmission. Harold Jenkins, in his introduction to the Arden Hamlet demonstrates his own energetic resistance to even the suggestion of revision:

There has been too much irresponsible conjecture about Shakespeare's supposed revisions of supposed earlier attempts. My conception of Shakespeare is of a supremely inventive poet who had no call to rework his previous plays when he could always move on to a new one.

Of course, this is more of an assertion than an argument and Jenkins's 'conception' of Shakespeare is not quite in line with what we know of the commercial conditions in which Renaissance playwrights worked. The hectic pace of the repertory system and the frequency of revivals and re-writes, as evidenced by Philip Henslowe's financial records of the Rose Theatre, gives us a picture of the working life of the playing companies that dictated that it would have been highly unlikely that Shakespeare would be free to discard thoughts of his previous plays in order always to 'move on to a new one'. In such circumstances, how many playwrights, being involved in the re-production of a work written some years previously, could not look again at their old play and see some room for improvement, adjustment or variation?

New Bibliography, then, may be seen as occupying one end of the continuum that stretches from the singular to the multiple recognition of legitimate texts. When, in The Stability of Shakespeare's Text, Honigmann argued that editors prior to the New Bibliography may have been right in supposing that the multiple texts of Shakespeare's plays show evidence of a habit of revising, he began a move towards the further end of the continuum that has continued to the present day. Doubting the 'optimism' of the editors whom he accused of 'draw[ing] upon facts and uncertainties mortised together' to formulate their theories, Honigmann advocated a more 'pessimistic' method that took into account the 'unknowables' in the play's history and tried to 'tamper as little as possible with [the] substantive texts'. Although Honigmann did not go so far as to suggest the recognition of multiple authoritative texts in the manner that is now championed by textual critics such as Randall McLeod and Steven Urkowitz, his was certainly an influential move towards a subsequent disintegration in editorial consensus - as well as in the play texts under dispute.

Treatment of Hamlet's F1 and Q2 versions displays the movement of textual approaches during the last twenty years and we might see Jenkins's Arden edition of 1982 as representing the tail end of New Bibliographical consensus. Central to Jenkins's argument regarding the relationship between the texts is his belief that Shakespeare made only one Hamlet, that Q2 is 'the one which stands closest to the author' and that any 'incidental additions' or 'variant readings' to be found in F1 are 'spurious' and reflect 'playhouse deviation from the Shakespearean original'. But, in 1984, Edwards argued that a comparison of the two texts 'can show us successive stages in Shakespeare's composition of the play' and that we may thereby 'observe Shakespeare tightening up his own writing'. In 1985, in his introduction to the New Cambridge Hamlet, although Edwards elaborated this argument in positing the 'possibility that the variations in the text of Hamlet are not alternative versions of a single original text but representations of different stages in the play's development', he nonetheless seemed to retreat from any assertion that the manuscript behind the F1 text is fully a product of Shakespeare's hand, but instead suggested a transcript produced by a theatrical scribe who played a part in the additions and subtractions that distinguish F1 from Q2. In 1987, influenced by Honigmann's theory of Shakespeare's revising hand, Hibbard proposed that F1 is derived from a manuscript copy made by the author, who made additions and revisions as he copied. Having taken the revision argument further than Edwards had done, Hibbard also took his own editorial practice a stage further and relegated to an appendix those passages that he believed Shakespeare to have deleted from his original composition (as represented by Q2).

In recent years, a wider range of influences have emerged as explanations of the differences in the texts. For example, in 1996, Leah Marcus differentiated between the three versions of Hamlet in terms of their increasing sophistication as literary (as opposed to oral) cultural artefacts and regarded the chronological order of their printing as indicative of the order of composition, thus Q1 --> Q2 --> F1, and , in 2001, Roslyn Lander Knutson discussed the three texts in relation to the repertory system and the commercial interests of the Lord Chamberlain's/King's Men during the period 1600-1608.

Running parallel with this recent trend has been an alternative view that resists the search for explanations and instead accepts the existence of multiple texts not so much as a conundrum to be solved as a treasure to be enjoyed. In 1986, in a move against the conventional editorial attempts to locate the origins of textual variants, Urkowitz instead proposed the examination of all extant texts for 'theatrical variants' in a democratic move towards the recognition that, in multiple texts, we will find multiple dramatic possibilities, each one equally capable of offering valuable insight into Shakespeare's dramaturgy. Werstine (1988), too, accepted the value of multiple texts and focused his discussion upon the dramaturgical differences in Q2 and F1 and what we may deduce from these differences, if we accept Q2 and F1 as independently cohesive play texts:

...why not examine what we have - namely, the early printed texts themselves - with a view to assessing the extent to which the two may be compatible or incompatible with each other?

In his argument, Werstine uses the differences in the texts to trace contrasting presentations of the relationship between Hamlet and Laertes, and between Claudius and Laertes, especially as these two relationships are played out in 4:vii and 5:ii. Werstine's proposition is that an editorial tradition of conflation confuses the independent logic of the two separate texts and his contrasting readings of the two texts usefully highlight the significantly different dramatic effects that are achieved by relatively small and subtle variations in the texts.

The significant differences between the texts of Q2 and F1 fall into four parts: those passages, usually of two or more lines, unique to Q2 that appear to have been 'cut' from F1; those passages unique to F1 that appear to have been added subsequent to Q2; those stage directions that have been amended to create a significant alteration in the stage action; and those additional expressions and interjections referred to as 'actors' interpolations' that contribute to our understanding of the text as a script for performance. Although there is no space to argue the matter here, I accept the proposition that F1 is a revised version of Q2 and, if pressed, would also concede that Shakespeare may well have been responsible - although who made the revisions does not alter the argument that the revisions are logical improvements in terms of the dramaturgy of the play.

To illustrate the difference between the two texts, I wish to discuss a section of the play that has been much debated: Hamlet's soliloquy, 'How all occasions do inform against me' and the preceding lines that appear in Q2 but not in F1. However, rather than examining this scene (4:iv) directly, I propose to discuss elements of the scenes that adjoin it (4:i, 4:iii and 4:v) in order to illustrate my belief that these scenes indicate a process of revision that makes dramatic sense of the loss of Hamlet's long soliloquy and may shed light on the disappearance of these lines from F1. This is the point in the story where Hamlet is hastily dispatched to England and Ophelia is discovered to be 'distract'.

If we begin by examining stage directions in Q2, we find that a number of superfluous characters seem to be required during the first, third and fifth scenes. In the first scene the King and Queen enter 'with Rosencraus and Guyldensterne' (K1r), but Gertrude dismisses them after only three lines with: 'Bestow this place on us a little while' (absent from F1). Twenty-eight lines later, we find 'Enter Ros. & Guild.' (K1v), the King summoning their return with 'Ho Guyldensterne, / Friends both'. This arrangement seems untidy and creates an impression of the constant comings and goings of courtiers. The third scene begins with 'Enter King, and two or three' (K2r) and then, after the King's eleven line opening speech, 'Enter Rosencraus and all the rest' (K2r), followed seven lines later with 'They enter' (K2r) (i.e. Hamlet with guards). This is a crowd. There are no stage directions to get all these characters off the stage, except when Hamlet is directed 'Exit' (K2v), but the King issues a series of instructions: 'Goe seeke him there' (K2v) and later: 'Follow him at foote .../ Delay it not .../ Away .../ Pray you make hast' (K2v) , evidently dispatching the courtiers in relays. By contrast, F1 does not have the entry of Rosencranz and Guildenstern at the beginning of the first scene (pp2v) and the King enters alone at the beginning of the third scene (pp2v). When Rosencranz enters after the King's eleven line opening speech, he is alone, and when Hamlet enters seven lines later, he is accompanied only by Guildenstern. The effect of reducing the number of extra characters in these scenes has been discussed in terms of economies in casting, but there is no apparent reason why there should be a lack of available actors at this particular point. Instead, the reduction in on-stage characters has a dramatic effect in creating an air of conspiracy and secrecy. While in Q2 the King and Queen are more or less constantly attended, in F1 there are opportunities for private thoughts. In F1, the King's discussion of his next move is not shared with his courtiers, but becomes a soliloquy, shared only with the audience:

I have sent to seeke him, and to find the bodie:

How dangerous is it that this man goes loose:

... to beare all smooth, and even,

This sodaine sending him away, must seeme

Deliberate pause, diseases desperate growne,

By desperate appliance are releeued,

Or not at all.

It is in keeping with the King's sense of danger that he withholds these thoughts from his court. It is also dramatically satisfying that he opens the scene with a soliloquy that expresses his resolve to take desperate action to avoid this danger and ends the scene with another soliloquy that discloses the exact means of accomplishing this. Claudius's soliloquies in this scene operate as a means to make the audience complicit in his plan to kill Hamlet and one cannot avoid the suspicion that he casts the audience in the role of 'England', when, having despatched Guildenstern, he begins his soliloquy with, 'And England, if my loue thou holdst at ought...' (pp3r).

In the fifth scene, but in F1 only, Gertrude also expresses a sense of danger. In this scene, the Q2 (K3v-K4r) and the F1 (pp3r) text again differ in the number of characters on stage: in Q2 there is 'a Gentleman' who informs Gertrude of Ophelia's distraction, but in F1 this interview is conducted in private (or in secret) between the Queen and Horatio. There are other alterations in the scene: because of the loss of the gentleman character, there is a re-distribution of lines which means that it is the Queen who expresses an awareness of danger, not Horatio; and, significantly, while Horatio goes to admit Ophelia, the Queen is able to deliver four lines as a soliloquy:

'Twere good she were spoken with,

For she may strew dangerous coniectures

In ill breeding minds. Let her come in.

To my sick soule (as sinnes true Nature is)

Each toy seemes Prologue, to some great amisse,

So full of Artlesse iealousie is guilt,

It spill's it selfe, in fearing to be spilt.

While Q2 depicts the King and Queen surrounded and supported by courtiers, Hamlet seems isolated by comparison and his soliloquy on revenge, 'How all occasions do inform against me' enacts a solitary defiance of the confident Danish court. However, the effect that the changes from Q2 to F1 have on the drama lie in their revelation of the King and Queen as more isolated figures, whose confidence is slipping away as they become aware of the desperation of the situation. The King and Queen's drama in F1 takes place in secret, away from the eyes and ears of those whose opinions now constitute a danger to them; they express their fears to the audience, not to other characters on-stage; and because they are now given the individual focus of addressing their thoughts directly to the audience, the tension of their situation is effectively heightened without any need at this point for the audience to be informed that Hamlet's thoughts will, 'from this time forth, / ... be bloody, or be nothing worth'.

If my argument, that this part of the drama has been altered from Q2 to F1 in order to focus on the King and Queen and their increasing dilemma, as the potential repercussions of the death of Polonius begin to hit home, then the dramatic reasons for cutting the scene that interrupts these developments become clear. At this point in the play, to shift focus back onto Hamlet, especially in a long soliloquy which focuses on his situation, his thoughts, his feelings, breaks the tension that is building in the Danish court. Instead, in F1, the scene that introduces Fortinbras and his army (a necessary pre-requisite if the last scene of the play is make sense) is reduced to the minimum and we are left to surmise that Hamlet is on his way to England: his meeting with Fortinbras's army does not serve the dramatic plot of F1 and can be excised with no loss of meaning.

I hope, in this consideration of a short series of episodes in the play, to have illustrated that the Q2 and F1 texts have different dramatic structures at this point and that the loss of a large piece of Q2's text is not detrimental to F1, so long as we consider the text as a script for performance, reading stage directions and on-stage factors that affect the performance alongside the words to be spoken.

It is also in the words spoken on-stage that a further significant difference is found between Q2 and F1. These words have been described as actors' or playhouse interpolations and they tend to have been universally despised, by editors who adhere to the principles of New Bibliography, as coarse and unsubtle corruptions. Jenkins (1960) lists sixty-five examples that he claims 'incur suspicion'. It is interesting to note that some of these have acquired such stigma that, even when Hibbard (1987) chose F1 as his copy text and relegated Q2 passages to an appendix, he could not bring himself to use the most famous of them all: Hamlet's so-called O-groans. Hibbard's footnote explanation for this absence is coy and evasive:

311.1 He gives a long sigh In thus 'translating' F's 'O, o, o, o.', which has been the object of unjustified derision, I follow the suggestion of E.A.J. Honigmann in Shakespeare Survey 29 (1976), 123.

In his discussion of the scorn that has been poured on Hamlet's final words in F1 ('The rest is silence. O, o, o, o.' (qq1r)), Charney (1978) cites a number of other moments in Shakespearean tragedy when a series of Ohs seems to be quite acceptable to editors: Othello, Titus Andronicus, Lady Macbeth and King Lear are all reduced to inarticulate O-sighs or O-groans at moments of intense emotional anguish. Whether these derived from actors' performances, or whether they were Shakespeare's method of directing the actors' performances, it is not seriously doubted that they would have constituted part of the contemporary performance of the plays at the time when Shakespeare was an actor and writer for the Lord Chamberlain's/King's Men. Charney's opinion, that 'to accept some of these examples and discard others as the grotesque and unseemly interpolations of actors seems to me an arbitrary and capricious was of dealing with Shakespeare's text', seems justified. There are a number of occasions in F1 Hamlet - for example when Hamlet is reduced to repetition of 'Well, well, well' on meeting Ophelia, or when he asks for Yorick's skull by saying 'Let me see', or when Laertes concedes a point in the duel with 'A touch, a touch' - when such additions clarify the action or offer the actor an opportunity for further emotional emphasis. Charney looks upon these as evidence of the text's existence, not primarily as a piece of literature, but as the script for a performance and he suggests that in the retention of these small additions we preserve vital evidence of Shakespeare's theatre:

... any play text we choose to print represents a subtle compromise between the written and the spoken word. One would think, as a matter of historical vitality, that editors of Shakespeare would be eager to include as many indications of contemporary performance as they could substantiate.

The acceptance of Shakespeare's plays as theatrical documents may have been a long time coming, but the tide is now flowing. Successive editions of Hamlet have revealed an increasing tendency to incorporate F1 and Q1 (the texts previously thought to have been corrupted by their association with theatrical performance) into current thinking about the play texts and, in 1999, Thompson and Taylor declared their intention to print all three texts in the next Arden edition. This apparent attempt at an even-handed approach has its problems. For example, they declare their plan to publish two volumes:

... one book will contain a fully edited and annotated text of Q2 (the longest text) with the usual Introduction, Commentary, Account of the Text and all the apparatus readers expect from the Arden series. This book will be entirely free-standing and will simply be 'the Arden Hamlet' for most students and general readers. Another book will contain fully edited texts of Q1 and F... We shall assume that all readers of the second book will have access to the first one, but not vice versa.

Whilst avoiding the perils of conflation and eclecticism, this strategy may be seen as a deliberate privileging of Q2, the stand-alone text, at the expense of F1, the secondary and dependent text. Will a new generation of 'students and general readers' remain ignorant of the delights of F1, unaware that perhaps it may be Hamlet's own sense of honour and conscience (rather than an instruction from his mother) that dictates that he should apologise to Laertes, or that perhaps the King and Queen respond to the death of Polonius with fear and secrecy, rather than in the public gaze of the court? Whilst the desire to separate the texts so that we may more readily observe their discrete characteristics is a worthy one, the economics of publishing and the limited budget of the book-buying public may lead to a lessening of interest in F1, if it comes to be seen as a 'specialist' text whose presence has been excised from 'the Arden Hamlet' (as Thompson and Taylor describe their Q2 text). What is interesting and characteristic about F1 is that it is different from Q2. Its attraction lies in its qualities, not as a text that has just arrived from the writer's study, but as a script that has been tested in performance, displaying the fluidity of a Renaissance drama text and the capacity for change that springs from performance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

• Shakespeare, William, The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke: Second Quarto:1604-5: Shakespeare Quartos in Collotype Facsimile (London: The Shakespeare Association, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1940).
• Shakespeare, William, Mr William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories and Tragedies: A Facsimile of the First Folio, 1623 (London: Routledge, 1998).
• Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, Arden Edition, Jenkins, Harold, ed. (London: Methuen, 1982).
• Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, New Cambridge Edition, Edwards, Philip, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
• Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, Oxford Edition, Hibbard, G.R. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

Secondary Sources

• Bowers, Fredson, 'McKerrow's Editorial Principles for Shakespeare Reconsidered', Shakespeare Quarterly, 6: 3 (Summer 1955), 309-324.
• Charney, Maurice, 'Hamlet's O-groans and Textual Criticism', Renaissance Drama 9 (1978), 109-119.
• Edwards, Philip, 'Shakespeare's Alterations in Hamlet', in Scattergood, John, ed., Literature and Learning in Medieval and Renaissance England: Essays Presented to Fitzroy Pyle, (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1984), 175-184.
• Foster, Donald, 'A Romance of Electronic Scholarship; with the True and Lamentable Tragedies of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Part 1: The Words', Early Modern Literary Studies, 3.3 (January 1998), http://www.humanities.ualberta.ca/emls/03-3/fostshak.html (accessed 03/03/03).
• Greg, W. W., The Shakespeare First Folio: It's Bibliographical and Textual History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955).
• Hibbard, G.R., 'The Chronology of the Three Substantive Texts of Shakespeare's Hamlet', in Clayton, Thomas, ed., The Hamlet First Published (Q1, 1603): Origins, Form, Intertextualities (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992).
• Honigmann, E.A.J., The Stability of Shakespeare's Text (London: Edward Arnold, 1965).
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• Leggatt, Alexander, 'Standing Back from Tragedy: Three Detachable Scenes', in Ioppolo, Grace, Shakespeare Performed: Essays in Honour of R.A. Foakes (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000).
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• Marcus, Leah S., Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London: Routledge, 1996).
• McLeod, Randall (as Random Cloud), 'The Marriage of Good and Bad Quartos', Shakespeare Quarterly, 33: 4 (Winter 1982), 421-431.
• Melchiori, Giorgio, 'Hamlet: The Acting Version and the Wiser Sort', in Clayton, Thomas, ed., The Hamlet First Published (Q1, 1603): Origins, Form, Intertextualities (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992).
• Taylor, Gary, 'The Folio Copy for Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello', Shakespeare Quarterly, 34: 1 (Spring 1983), 44-61.
• Thompson, Ann & Taylor, Neil, 'The Politics and Poetics of Editing Hamlet', in Jansohn, Christa, ed., Problems of Editing, (Tuebingen: Niemeyer, 1999), 150-163.
• Urkowitz, Steven, '"Well-Sayd Olde Mole": Burying Three Hamlets in Modern Editions', in Ziegler, Georgianna, ed., Shakespeare Study Today: The Horace Howard Furness Memorial Lectures, (New York: AMS, 1986).
• Urkowitz, Steven, 'Five Women Eleven Ways: Changing Images of Shakespearean Characters in the Earliest Texts', in Habicht, Werner, ed., Images of Shakespeare, (Newark: University of Delaware, 1988).
• Urkowitz, Steven, 'Good News about 'Bad' Quartos', in Charney, Maurice, "Bad" Shakespeare: Revaluations of the Shakespeare Canon, (Newark: University of Delaware, 1988).
• Urkowitz, Steven, 'Preposterous Poststructuralism: Editorial Morality and the Ethics of Evidence', in Hill, W. Speed, ed., New Ways of Looking at Old Texts II, (Tempe: MRTS, 1998).
• Ward, David, 'The King and "Hamlet"', Shakespeare Quarterly, 43: 3 (Autumn 1992), 280-302.
• Wells, Stanley, 'The Unstable Image of Shakespeare's Text', in Pringle, Roger, ed., Images of Shakespeare, 1988.
• Werstine, Paul, 'The Textual Mystery of Hamlet', Shakespeare Quarterly, 39: 1 (Spring 1988), 1-26.
• Werstine, Paul, 'Narratives about Printed Shakespeare Texts: "Foul Papers" and "Bad Quartos"', Shakespeare Quarterly, 41:1 (1990), 65-86.
• Werstine, Paul,'A Century of "Bad" Shakespearean Quartos', Shakespeare Quarterly, 50:3 (1999), 310-333.

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