Shakespeare And The First Hamlet

The first edition of Hamlet – often called ‘Q1’, shorthand for ‘first quarto’ – was published in 1603, in what we might regard as the early modern equivalent of a cheap paperback. Yet this early version of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy is becoming increasingly canonical, not because there is universal agreement about what it is or what it means, but because more and more Shakespearians agree that it is worth arguing about. The essays in this collected volume explore the ways in which we might approach Q1’s Hamlet, from performance to book history, from Shakespeare’s relationships with his contemporaries to the shape of his whole career.

The first edition of Hamlet – often called ‘Q1’, shorthand for ‘first quarto’ – was published in 1603, in what we might regard as the early modern equivalent of a cheap paperback. Yet this early version of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy is becoming increasingly canonical, not because there is universal agreement about what it is or what it means, but because more and more Shakespearians agree that it is worth arguing about. The essays in this collected volume explore the ways in which we might approach Q1’s Hamlet, from performance to book history, from Shakespeare’s relationships with his contemporaries to the shape of his whole career.

High quality Introductions and notes are featured in this newest edition of the distinguished Pelican Shakespeare series, now completely revised and repackaged. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Now available in paperback, this is the only modernised critical edition of the 1603 quarto of Shakespeare's Hamlet in print.

It is nearly two centuries since the first quarto of Hamlet was rediscovered, yet there is still no consensus about its relationship to the second quarto. Indeed, the first quarto, the least frequently read Hamlet, has been dismissed as "corrupt," "inferior" or like "a mutilated corpse," even though in performance it has been described as "the absolute dynamo behind the play." Currently one hypothesis dominates explanations about the quartos' interrelationship, supposing that the first quarto (published 1603) was reconstructed from memory by one or more actors who had performed minor roles in a version of the second quarto (published 1604-5). The present study reports on a detailed linguistic reassessment of the principal arguments for memorial reconstruction. The evidence--including a three way comparison between the underlying French source in Les Histoires Tragiques and the two quartos, and the informal features and specific grammatical aspects, and a documented memorial reconstruction in 1779--does not support the dominant hypothesis. The cumulative evidence suggests that the earliest scholars to examine the first quarto were right: the 1603 Hamlet came first, and the second quarto is a substantial, later revision.