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Hamlet - Texts

Hamlet - Texts: Encyclopedia II - Hamlet - Texts

There are three extant texts of Hamlet from the early 1600's in both Quarto and Folio format. The play first appeared in print in 1603 in a version now known as the 'Bad Quarto'. This edition follows essentially the same plot as the play we know as Hamlet but it is much shorter and its language is often very different; for example, where the accepted version reads "To be or not to be, that is the question", the Bad Quarto reads "To be or not to be, aye there's the point". These differences, which usually seem aesthetical ...

Hamlet: Encyclopedia II - Hamlet - Texts

Hamlet - Texts

There are three extant texts of Hamlet from the early 1600's in both Quarto and Folio format.

The play first appeared in print in 1603 in a version now known as the 'Bad Quarto'. This edition follows essentially the same plot as the play we know as Hamlet but it is much shorter and its language is often very different; for example, where the accepted version reads "To be or not to be, that is the question", the Bad Quarto reads "To be or not to be, aye there's the point". These differences, which usually seem aesthetically weaker than the other versions, have led to the suggestion that the text may have been published without the permission of the playing company, and put together by stenography or by minor actors recalling the lines of others by memory. In particular, the finger has been pointed at the character Marcellus as the likely culprit for the source of the "Bad Quarto" because his scenes and lines are rendered most "accurately" compared to other Quartos and when he is absent from stage the text diverges more. Most modern textual scholars find this theory fanciful, since a minor actor would be unlikely to have memorised the lines of other actors, even inaccurately -- but actors and other theatrical professionals (who often have large portions of plays they work on memorized without even attempting to) would likely dispute this point.

The authorised 'Second Quarto' (Q2) was published in 1604, and was described on its title page as "enlarged to almost as much again as it was". This is the longest text of Hamlet to be published in the period.

The third edition was the version published in the First Folio of Shakespeare's complete works. This text is shorter but also contains scenes not in Q2.

Modern editions are a compromise between the Second Quarto text and the Folio text. Some conflate the two to produce one very long text. Others assume that the Folio text represents Shakespeare's final intentions and that the cuts were made by him; they therefore present the cut Q2 passages in an appendix.

In the theatre, performing the full, conflated Q2/Folio text takes around 4 hours. Because of this, most productions use a cut text. For example, the Royal Shakespeare Company's Artistic Director Michael Boyd staged Hamlet in the summer of 2004 using lines from various Quartos; his text was dubbed the "Boyd Quarto" by newspaper reviewers.

Some theatre companies have experimented with performing the Bad Quarto, which takes only 2 hours. They claim that while it reads badly on the page, in performance it is faster-paced and more direct than the 'official' versions.