Shakespeare's Hamlet (review)

Reviews 163 treatment offinale, the substantive differences may not be very significant. Stephanie Hollis Department of English University of Auckland Edelman, Charles, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Sydney, Sydney University Press, in association with Oxford University Press Australia, 1995; paper; pp. vi, 74; R.R.P. AUS$9.95. Charles Edelman's user-friendly book begins with a lively chapter outlining the history of changes in the critical reception of Shakespeare's play, followed by a helpfully straightforward outline of the textual problems associated with the existence of the three very different, early printed editions. It is important that students should know that their received notions about the play are conditioned by sociological attitudes as reflected and preserved in-printing and performance history. Neither the 1623 Folio text, which probably preserves Shakespeare's own revisions, nor the often bowdlerised or otherwise re-written performance editions from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, contain passages such as the seventh soliloquy which furnish the evidence for Hamlet's supposed delay. These passages are found only in the second quarto and in modern conflated editions of the play prior to the Oxford text. Since textual alterations have a significant effect on possible interpretation, it would have been appropriate, given Edelman's opening, to have gone on to indicate the provenance of some of the selected quotations later in the book, suggesting ways in which one variant or another might alter audience understanding. This is a difficult subject area, normally not considered appropriate for students at the level at which the book is aimed. But given the increasing emphasis placed on both drafting and re-drafting of students' own work, and the pressing need for an educated citizenry to be able to read between the lines of both market advertising and political pronouncement, it is one with which teachers should be grappling. Dr Edelman then provides a systematic commentary on the text. This is again well pitched for the proposed readership, although I cannot go along with the insistence that the Ghost's description of Claudius as 'that adulterate beast' is unambiguous evidence of Gertrude's unfaithfulness to King Hamlet while he was still alive. The point of the word is that Claudius is an impostor, a sink of depravity and a cause of general corruption, as well as a possible 164 Reviews adulterer in the sexual sense. Of course Gertrude is implicated by her choice of second husband, but the real question is not, 'at what point did she go to bed with Claudius?' but, 'how could she have allowed herself to do so at any point?' and subsequently, 'what can she possibly do now?' This last question is in fact heightened by a tiny but, to m y mind, significant change in the Folio text of the play, where her line 'What shall I do?' is a personal expression of horrified despair, whereas in Q 2 , coming as it does there after Hamlet's command, 'One word more, good mother' it is merely a dutiful response to his somewhat hectoring control. Indeed m y only real quibble with the book concerns its approach to the character of Gertrude. She appears in the play almost as often as Claudius, but has very few lines and is consequently usually disregarded. Judging by the number of references to her in this short book, however, Edelman unusually, andrightly,regards her as important. But, presumably because of bis reading of the word 'adulterate', and his natural sympathy with Hamlet, he tends to give her personal integrity short shrift. But Gertrude is not simply a private person, she has a dynasty to maintain which is not helped either by Hamlet's contradictory injunctions to her not to go to her husband's bed and not to let Claudius know that he is only 'mad in craft', or by his murder of her chief minister in her private apartments. It is this appalling fact after all, which leads to Laertes' insurrection, and her necessary but discomforting denial of Claudius' responsibility for Polonius' murder. Such intractable political and ethical questions are what really make the play interesting, and it is a shame that, even allowing for the textual variants, Edelman does not...