The Arden Shakespeare Hamlet, and: The Arden Shakespeare Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623 (review)

Modern editions of Hamletderive from one or more of three early seventeenth-century texts of the play: the first quarto (1603), the second quarto (1604–5), and the First Folio (1623). The Arden2 editor, Harold Jenkins, regarded these three printings as imperfect renderings of a single work, "Shakespeare's Hamlet." ¹Believing that wherever they differed at least one was faulty, he aimed to reconstruct "the play as Shakespeare wrote it" before it was corrupted by scribes, compositors, actors, or other nonauthorial agents. ²He held definite views about the origins of the early texts and the relationships between them: Q2 was printed from Shakespeare's own "foul papers," F from a scribal transcript at several removes from Shakespeare's autograph and subjected by theater folk to cuts and other unauthoritative changes, and the much shorter Q1 from a version concocted by actors from their patchy memories of the play in performance. The Q2 printer had consulted Q1, especially in Act 1; F had been indirectly influenced by Q2. Adopting Q2 as his control text, Jenkins incorporated passages found only in F and selected from the available variants and the conjectural emendations of later editors in accordance with his textual theory and with full use of his acute literary judgment. Reading his trenchant notes in defense of his choices remains an invigorating experience.

Subsequent editors have believed that Shakespeare himself was responsible for much of the variation between Q2 and F and that his revisions included cutting passages from the version rendered in Q2 and adding lines printed only in F. In editing Hamletfor the Oxford Complete Works, Gary Taylor "adopted F as the control-text for substantive variants"; G. R. Hibbard also based his edition on F. ³Nevertheless, both these editors attempted to offer a text corresponding to Shakespeare's final intentions as these had crystallized in the theater, when the script was prepared for the stage, rehearsed, and performed.

The Arden3 editors, Thompson and Taylor, take a different approach. They agree with Gary Taylor and Hibbard that Q2 is based on Shakespeare's original Hamletand that F is based on his revised version. ⁴They also accept the current tendency to elevate the status of Q1, believing that behind it lies a theatrical abridgment of intrinsic interest. They judge "that each of the three texts has sufficient merit to be read and studied on its own" (11). So they provide, in two volumes, three modern-spelling Hamlets: one based on Q2 (assigned a volume to itself), one based on F, and one based on Q1. Each is conservatively edited. Thomson and Taylor "preserve the copy-text reading wherever we can reasonably defend it and emend only when, to us, it is implausible" (510). They avoid introducing F-only passages into their Q2-based text and Q-only passages into their F-based text. They do import a few F readings to correct blatantly erroneous Q2 readings and vice versa, but they conflate far less frequently than Jenkins, Taylor, or Hibbard. ⁵

The Q2-based volume contains the critical, theatrical, and textual introductions to Hamletas we know it from Q2 and F, as well as the primary commentary. Q1, diverging so greatly from the other two, is equipped with its own stage history and explanatory notes, whereas the F commentary concentrates on differences from Q2. The Q2-based edition, potentially usable on its own, includes the F-only passages in appendixes. In an excellent account of "The Nature of the Texts" (appendix 2 [474–532]), Thompson and Taylor survey previous approaches to editing Hamletand set forth the reasons for their own procedures. Whereas Jenkins sought certainties or probabilities...