“Hamlet” after Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text by Zachary Lesser (review)

Zachary Lesser’s engaging “Hamlet” after Q1 focuses on the “‘uncanny historicity’” of this “first and last” Hamlet (10, 11), printed in 1603, lost for a couple of centuries, then discovered in 1823, at the very moment when Hamlet was considered the epitome of great art in general and of Shakespearean drama in particular. This strange Hamlet text is uncanny in that it “follows a wandering, echoic path that begins in the nineteenth century, reverberates back into the seventeenth and sixteenth, and returns to haunt the twentieth and twenty-first” (15).

Lesser’s claims about the impact of Q1’s reappearance seem initially hyperbolic, so much so that one pleasure of reading the book is in watching him defend these huge claims. He begins by demonstrating the impact of the discovery of Q1 on Shakespeare scholarship and textual studies. Because Q1 Hamlet emerged at the height of the Romantic movement and the near worship of Hamlet, it challenged the reigning image of Shakespeare as embodied originality, spontaneity, and poetic genius. Scholars and editors divided into two camps. One declared that, since Shakespeare could never have written such a text as Q1, it must have derived from the Q2/F version of the play; it was, they decided, a “stenographic piracy” (34) recorded during performance. Lesser shows that this “‘retrograde bibliography’” (37), in which Q1 derives from Q2/F, would later undergird the theories of the New Bibliographers, who, in distinguishing between “bad” and “good quartos,” would simply replace the shorthand hypothesis with the memorial reconstruction hypothesis. The second camp insisted that Q1 was Shakespeare’s early draft, which he revised and improved to create the Q2/F versions. These scholars credited him not only with Q1 but also with the “pre-Shakespearean” (52) versions of Hamlet left behind in early allusions and in notations in Henslowe’s Diary. For much of the nineteenth century, then, Q1 was either a first draft or a “stenographic piracy.” Lesser demonstrates that it was the uncanny historicity of Q1 Hamlet—especially that its emergence coincided with Romanticism and Hamlet worship—that led to the pivotal theory of “retrograde bibliography” and disturbed textual transmission.

To show the effect of Q1’s uncanny historicity on how we read Hamlet, Lesser focuses on a single Q1 variant—where Q2/F Hamlet reads “‘Do you think I meant country matters?,’” Q1 reads “‘Do you think I meant contrary matters?’”—showing first how newspaper reviews of Q1, when it was published in reprint in 1825, immediately focused on the welcome innocence of “contrary matters” as compared to the bawdy “country matters” (72–73). Lesser’s argument is that today’s accepted meaning of “country matters”—“‘sexual intercourse (quibbling indecently on the first syllable of country)’” (76)—was a relatively new reading in the 1820s, and that it was Q1’s belated appearance that helped harden the bawdy reading “into historical fact” (99) by presenting a “more innocent” (98) reading. As he shows, “this obscenity only became obscene over time through a process of annotation and commentary, one that pivots around the discovery of Q1” (107). His demonstration of the truth of this claim takes him from the expurgated copy of F2 in the Folger collection (expurgated in approximately 1640) to the Restoration “Smock Alley” promptbook to Wycherley’s Country Wife through the ranks of eighteenth-century editorial glosses to reviews of Q1 in French and German newspapers (where, innocent of the recent British findings of obscenity in the phrase “country matters,” reviewers simply could not understand why “contrary” was more innocent than “country”). His conclusion—that “the discovery of Q1 . . . , by presenting a seemingly innocent alternative, . . . reinforced the perceived vulgarity of Q2/F and thereby ensured the dominance of this reading” (89)—is well earned, as is his larger thesis that editorial glossing that pretends to know how a word or phrase would have been understood by Shakespeare...