Transcript

Hamlet, the book of the play

Well, very good. Here we are in the hall of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford, where I'm
standing with the small tip of a very large iceberg. We have a library here containing 50,000
items that have been hand chosen since 1951. And a huge number of them relate to
Hamlet, whether they're text of the play, essays about the play, books about the play, film
versions of the play, things relating to film versions and stage versions of the play, and so
on.

And all I want to do with this little pile in front of us is, one, give you the basic facts about
where we get our texts of Hamlet from, the three things you need to know about Hamlet, as
we have it, from about 1600, and then to raise the question, which versions of Hamlet do
you know, which version of Hamlet, which is the real one? Because it is actually quite
complicated.

Right. We'll start then in Shakespeare's own lifetime. And the first thing you really need to
know about Hamlet is that Shakespeare didn't make up the story, as he didn't make up the
stories for most of his plays, apart, apparently, from The Tempest.

Hamlet is a very old legend. It had been written down in Latin in the early Middle Ages. And
there's a version of it that Shakespeare possibly knew at firsthand, possibly at secondhand,
that was published in France in 1582, in which the hero is called Amlet, as you might expect.

It's very violent. The hero pretends to be an idiot. He changes his death sentence when he's
sent to England, something like as we have it in the play. But it's a complete blood bath
when he gets back.

He burns down the usurper's court. They're having a party to celebrate the fact that he's
dead. And he, pretty much, kills the lot of them and declares himself king. He does not die at
the end.

Now Shakespeare also knew an earlier play about Hamlet in existence, probably, in 1589. It
was probably written by Thomas Kyd, of whom we'll be hearing more later in a subsequent
episode. It was a revenge tragedy. And included the ghost.

This missing play-- it's sad, but we don't have a text of it-- had a ghost in it who cried out,
"Hamlet, revenge," at some point in the script. That's one of the only things that we've got
written down about this one.

Right. Well, let's start with a book. Now, in 1603, we get our first printed text of
Shakespeare's Hamlet. The book, which later in its life gets called, "The Bad Quarto," it's the
shortest version of Hamlet to date from Shakespeare's own time.
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And it's listed as-- this is what the title page calls it-- "The tragical history of Hamlet, Prince
of Denmark, by William Shakespeare. As it hath been diverse times acted by his highness'
servants in the city of London, as also in the two universities of Cambridge and Oxford and
elsewhere." So this is offering itself as the souvenir book of a very successful stage show,
which has been played in London by this important theatre company which has toured, and
which is written by somebody who's already a very famous script writer, William
Shakespeare.

Now this inspires demand for a better version, because it appears, in retrospect, to be a bit
garbled. The same printer puts out, in 1604, this book, what's now called, "The Good Quarto
of Hamlet," which again is, "The tragical history of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, by William
Shakespeare." But this time, it adds to the title page this phrase, "Newly imprinted and
enlarged to almost as much again as it was, according to the true and perfect copy."

So what they're claiming is that this is much longer, and it's better, it's more accurate. And
that's certainly how it looks. It is indeed almost as long again as it was. It takes about four
hours, if you perform every word in here.

And various odd features of the first quarto have been straightened out. "To be, or not to
be" no longer begins "To be, or not to be? Aye, there's the point." Polonius is no longer
called Corambis. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are no longer called Rossencraft and
Guilderstone. It looks as though the first quarto was a bit hasty, a bit botched. And this is
the long version.

Now somebody, however, shortened it. It's too long to perform, if you do all of it, as I've
said. And by the time Shakespeare's friends, Heminges and Condell, put out a complete
edition of Shakespeare's plays after he's dead in 1623, Hamlet has been tidied up even
more.

In the folio, this volume, the Hamlet they print on this nice, big folio paper has been
shortened a bit, apparently so that you can perform it. One whole soliloquy has gone. "How
all occasions do inform against me" has been taken out. There are lots of other cuts. But
every now and then, there are some new passages, as though Shakespeare's had another
idea, or as though he just wants to write in a new transition to cope with some of the cuts.

Now as a result, most copies of Shakespeare's Hamlet that you read now, including the one
we're supplying with this course, actually bring together all the stuff we think is by
Shakespeare in the second quarto, which is all of it, and all the extra bits that are just in the
folio. And this produces some interesting problems for anybody who's printing
Shakespeare's Hamlet. What do you do with all the stuff that's in the first quarto with
Corambis, with that alternative version of "To be, or not to be," with all the extra bits of
dialogue that we don't get in either of the two versions that we think are better?

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What are we going to do with a play which, by the time you've put this one together with
this one, is much too long to act in a theatre. It's four and a half hours or so, if you do a
conflated text of both of these. And what's lying around me are some answers to these
questions.

The Arden edition, for instance, the most recent Arden simply reprints all three of them
separately from one another. So you buy a copy of Hamlet, and you get three different
plays, each called Hamlet. When the Complete Oxford Edition of Shakespeare edited Hamlet
in 1986, this nice big book here, they follow the folio text, but then also give you all the stuff
that's in the good quarto that the folio leaves out at the end.

So you think you've read the whole play of Hamlet. And then you get these things called
"additional passages" in rather jumbled effect at the end. And they are quite long. They
occupy two or three more pages.

And then there are other solutions too to the question of what we want from a version of
Hamlet. For one thing, one of the things we might want from a version of Hamlet is actually
a souvenir of the version we saw in the theatre. From the first text onwards, there's an
uneasy relation between the book of Hamlet, the printed text, and the performance, which
perhaps is what you'd expect from a play in which texts are forever being rewritten.

The whole plot of the last act of Hamlet depends on Hamlet rewriting the commission for
his execution, which has been given to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. And when Hamlet
himself puts on a play, when he has the actors who come to Elsinore act The Murder of
Gonzago, he himself rewrites the script, gives them a different version. And lots of these
versions reflect the differences between reading Hamlet and seeing it acted.

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