‘Hamlet’ After Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text by Zacharyn Lesser (review)

In the field of Shakespeare studies an extraordinary amount of ink has been expended on the topic of the “bad quartos”: those short versions of a handful of plays, which vary — sometimes significantly — from their longer counterparts. Theories as to their origins have proliferated for more than two centuries. Are they stenographically transcribed texts, imperfectly copied down during performance? Have they been “memorially reconstructed” by bit part actors? Are they texts that have been cut down for performance? First drafts? Simplified versions created for specific audiences? No theory quite fits all the evidence — and certainly no theory commands universal agreement among scholars.

Enter, then, to the fray, Zachary Lesser. Lesser has established a very considerable reputation as a textual scholar in recent years, not least with his masterful study Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge University Press, 2004). In his latest book, Lesser offers an analysis of one of the most famous of the “bad quartos” — the short text of Hamlet published in 1603. Its most notable variations from the received text are well known: the compressed nature of this first published quarto (known as Q1) has the effect of “speeding up” the play, drawing it generically closer to a conventional revenge tragedy; the queen acknowledges Claudius’s guilt and agrees to assist in his unmasking; a number of characters bear different names (Polonius becoming Corambis, for instance); and, most famously, perhaps, “To be, or not to be, that is the question” becomes “To be, or not to be, I there’s the point”.

Lesser adopts an approach to Q1 which is wholly different from that of all previous scholars. Where his predecessors have endlessly speculated as to the provenance of the short quarto, Lesser attends to its greater history — and to the significance of that history for our engagement with the text of Hamlet (however constituted). Lesser’s starting point is a very simple — but often overlooked — fact: Q1 was not actually discovered until 1823. Its existence had been suspected, since the edition of Hamlet published in 1604/5 announced on its title page that it had been “Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect Coppie”, but, before 1823, no copy of Q1 had ever come to light. By focussing on Q1’s moment of discovery, rather than its moment of origin, Lesser brings a new perspective to the text. In his view, “the seemingly endless quest for the origins of Q1 has been part of why we have failed to grasp the significance of its history” (22–3). His analysis works forwards, investigating the impact that the discovery of Q1 had on Shakespearean textual studies in the nineteenth century and beyond, but it also works backwards, shedding new light on the relationship among the various texts of the play in their own time.

At the heart of Lesser’s book is a set of intelligent close analyses of a series of much debated moments in the text of Hamlet: the meaning of the phrase ‘country matters’ in Hamlet’s exchange with Ophelia just prior to the performance of The Mousetrap; the question of whether Gertrude’s “closet” is a bedroom or an antechamber; the meaning of the word “conscience” in the “To be, or not to be” soliloquy. In each case, Lesser demonstrates — fascinatingly — that these issues largely became editorial and analytical cruces after the appearance of Q1 early in the nineteenth century. So these aspects of the text can be seen as something like retrospective creations from the appearance of the early text in a late period. Lesser’s exploration of these textual moments is shrewd, compelling and provocative. To take one instance: the presence of Gertrude’s bed in the closet scene in theatre and film productions of Hamlet is conventionally linked to the...