Shakespeare: A Complete Introduction

‘Good’ and ‘bad’ quartos and the First Folio

Where do we find the original text of a Shakespearean play? It is not as easy as some imagine. Let us begin with Hamlet as an example. Hamlet first appeared in print in 1603 in a quarto-sized edition known now as Q1 and often referred to as the ‘bad Quarto’. It was published again in a 1604 quarto edition, known as Q2 or sometimes as the ‘good Quarto’. It was later published after Shakespeare’s death by two of his fellow actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, in the first collected edition of his plays, the First Folio, in 1623.

Why is there a ‘bad’ Quarto and a ‘good’ Quarto? There were no copyright laws in Shakespeare’s time, and consequently his company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which later became the King’s Men, did not rush to publish plays in performance since they may not have wanted rival companies to steal them and make money from them. Actors might move from one company to another, having memorized major parts of a popular play. Members of the audience or rival company actors may have tried to memorize, albeit sometimes inaccurately, particular parts of the play. The result would not only be a rival production but also the publication of an unauthorized and sometimes garbled version of the play. This is what may have happened with the 1603 version of Hamlet.

In 1592 Shakespeare himself, as noted earlier, was accused by a fellow writer of ‘stealing’ plays and ideas. As a dramatist he used many sources for his plays, including Hamlet. An earlier play of the same title had probably been performed in 1594 by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the Lord Admiral’s Men in a joint production. The text of this early Hamlet, which is sometimes referred to as the ur-Hamlet, is now lost. It is likely that it was never printed and it may not have been a particularly good play. As G. R. Hibbard notes in his introduction to The Oxford Shakespeare: Hamlet (1987: 13), ‘one aspect of Shakespeare’s genius was his ability to take an old-fashioned drama and utterly transform it’. The following example gives an indication of Q1 in relation to the Folio. In Q1, the ‘bad Quarto’, Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy begins:

To be, or not to be, I there’s the point,

To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:

No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes…

(The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke [1603], Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press [1966: 28])

Compare this Q1 version with the more familiar version taken from the ‘good’ 1605 Quarto and the First Folio:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them. To die – to sleep,

No more;

…

To die, to sleep;

To sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub:

(3.1.56–61, 64–5)

The texts of Shakespeare’s plays, including Hamlet, that we read or produce today are interpretative texts, compiled by modern editors who make choices between readings from the quarto editions and the First Folio, although sometimes they produce an edition based on the Folio text or what they consider to be the most authoritative of the quartos.

As we saw in Chapter 1, the terms ‘quarto’ and ‘folio’ refer to the book size. While single editions were published in quarto, the first Complete Works was published in folio. There appears to be an ‘authorized’ text of Hamlet, the Quarto of 1605 that purports to be ‘Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much again as it was, according to the true and perfect Coppie’ but there are certain differences between it and the Folio edition. Each of the three early texts we have give a number of interesting clues about early performances as well as providing stimulus for modern interpretations. The ‘bad’ Quarto of 1603 may reflect aspects of the first performance of Shakespeare’s play or it may be influenced by one or more earlier lost plays. The 1605 Quarto is probably a response by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men designed to reassert ownership of a popular play in their repertoire. The First Folio edition, published 18 years later, may reflect changes made to the play during its many performances over the years since 1605. The modern editor has to make decisions. Take, for example, Hamlet’s first soliloquy, that is, the first speech he makes when alone on the stage. In the RSC Complete Works, based on the Folio edition, the speech that appears in Act 1, Scene 2 (129f.) begins:

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!

In the Arden and Penguin editions, the word ‘sullied’ is used rather than ‘solid’. Both Q1 and Q2, however, actually use the word ‘sallied’. The use of ‘sullied’ in these modern editions appears to follow an amendment made in an edition by John Dover Wilson for the New Cambridge Shakespeare (1934), although the Hudson Shakespeare (1909) also refers to an ‘anonymous conjecture’ of ‘sullied’ rather than ‘sallied’. A critical judgement, nevertheless, was made by a respected twentieth-century textual critic concerning a word not found in the original texts, but which has subsequently become embedded in certain established editions.

Much of this may be dismissed as academic pedantry, but actually the words ‘solid’, ‘sallied’, ‘sullied’ indicate important differences for an actor who is to deliver this speech or, indeed, for anyone reading this famous soliloquy. The example helps to demonstrate that the texts we buy or pull up on our laptop are the results of editorial choices. This leads us into another important issue. Shakespeare’s Hamlet was originally written not as a literary text but as a performance script. As it became a ‘literary text’ over the centuries, its ambiguities surfaced, confirming the view that, despite the 1605 ‘authorized’ version by the company, there can be no authoritative single original text. The history of Hamlet criticism, however, is one that consists of numerous attempts to ‘fix’ the play’s meanings, or indeed to reduce them to one organic meaning.

Attempts to fix meanings

Some dramatists who have harboured literary aspirations over the years – for example George Bernard Shaw – have attempted, unsuccessfully, to fix the meaning of their plays by legislating how a play should be performed and what its meaning should be. As noted earlier, Chekhov famously complained that the Russian director Constantin Stanislavsky actually misinterpreted his plays, turning his ‘comedies’ into ‘naturalistic tragedies’. Stanislavsky, committed as he was to a naturalistic style of performance, nevertheless, gives us a clue: Shakespeare’s texts, including Hamlet, have the capacity to generate multiple interpretations, dependent on the influence of the historical conditions and cultural assumptions of the performances and their audiences, which change over time.

Different kinds of Hamlet

It is because of these historical and cultural shifts that we talk about different kinds of Hamlet – Romantic Hamlet, Political Hamlet, Tragic Hamlet, Violent Hamlet, Alienating Hamlet, all of which depend on the interpretations of particular actors and, in modern theatre, different directors. We also talk about Hamlets in terms of an actor’s name: Asta Neilsen’s Hamlet, Gielgud’s Hamlet, Olivier’s Hamlet, Nicol Williamson’s Hamlet, Jacobi’s Hamlet, McKellen’s Hamlet, Frances de la Tour’s Hamlet, Angela Winkler’s Hamlet, David Tennant’s Hamlet, Jonathan Slinger’s Hamlet, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet, and so forth.

The actor Jonathan Slinger, for example, in the 2012 RSC production proved to be an uncomfortable Hamlet, deliberately preventing the audience from empathizing with him, in particular by his violence towards Ophelia. During the Vietnam War, Nicol Williamson’s Hamlet was a man in the shadows, fearful of big politics. In 1975 Ben Kingsley’s Hamlet concentrated on weighing the balance between life and death, a performance that coincided with an extra-theatrical tragedy of the untimely death of the first female director at the RSC, Buzz Goodbody. In 1979 Frances de la Tour played the title role in an all-female cast at the Half Moon Theatre in London, following a tradition of female Hamlets. The nineteenth-century actress Sarah Bernhardt, for example, played Hamlet in 1899.

In 1980 Jonathan Pryce created another of the great Hamlets of the twentieth century in a production at the Royal Court Theatre in which the Ghost was portrayed as coming from within the depths of the protagonist’s own being. In 1988/9 Mark Rylance interpreted Hamlet as insane and he appeared for much of the play wearing pyjamas in a performance that became known as the ‘pyjama Hamlet’. At the turn of the century and into the new millennium, David Tennant (RSC) and Rory Kinnear (National Theatre) have portrayed Hamlets that reflected the growing isolationism of the individual in society and the fragmentation of Western values. This aspect was present also in Slinger’s performance, which was set in a school hall reminiscent of a 1950s English grammar school that had fallen into disrepair. The production programme included an image of gallery visitors milling round Damian Hirst’s challenging work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991).

Original performance

Shakespeare’s original theatres, their architecture, location and ambience, the nature of their audiences and the competitive business of the theatrical environment, naturally influenced the nature of the plays’ composition. Some pioneering work on the nature of the audience and also on what is often called ‘the War of the Theatres’ or ‘the Stage Quarrel’ – but which at the time was termed by the dramatist Thomas Dekker (c.1570–1632) Poetomachia, the Poet’s War – was undertaken by Alfred Harbage in the mid-twentieth century. As we have seen, like other critics and directors of that period, Harbage was influenced by the dominant ideologies of the time, but his work firmly established an area of importance for further study.

Andrew Gurr, in Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, warns about the complexities involved with trying to understand the composition and interaction of the first players and playgoers with the text:

‘Shakespearean receivers were far from passive objects. They are likely nowadays to be invoked all too often in a vicious circle of internal evidence, as arbiters of this or that otherwise inexplicable or undesired feature of the plays. Understandably, because they are the most inconstant, elusive, unfixed element of the Shakespearean performance text, their contribution is presented as an easy means of explaining away features of the dramaturgy which seem incongruous to modern audiences.’

Gurr, A. (1987: 3), Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Gurr asks, for example, how a soliloquy may have been delivered before an audience of 3,000 people at the Globe, some of whose heads were at the actors’ feet. We may have some indication of this today since the opening of the replica of the Globe in 1997, but the modern audience is not the same as that of the early seventeenth century. Gurr also provides a corrective to any stereotypical formulations that make out that audiences were mainly ‘artisan’ or ‘privileged’. As we journey through the plays, we are noticing possible interactions between actor and audience being signalled in the text. We’re also noting changes of dramatic style, including music and song reflecting the years going by and the changes of audience market demand, particularly from Elizabeth I to James I.

Further, the type of playhouse in which the original performances was to take place must have had an influence on the writing of the play even if it was going to be performed at both the private and the public theatre. Gurr prefers to call the public theatres, which as we saw in Chapter 1 probably first started in the 1567 with the Red Lion in Whitechapel, amphitheatres. The ‘private’ smaller indoor theatres or ‘Halls’ began in 1575 at St Paul’s Cathedral Choir School and also included The Blackfriars. They became venues for plays, often satiric, performed by boy actors.

It was the competition of the boys’ players, ‘an eyrie of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question, and are most tyrannically clapped for’t’ (Hamlet, 2.2.340–42), that is the reason, Rosencrantz tells Hamlet, for the ‘tragedians of the city’ to be on tour. Hamlet asks if the writers of the private theatres ‘do’ the boy actors ‘wrong to make them exclaim against their own succession?’ (351–2), since they might well wish one day to be members of the adult companies. The boy players had come into particular prominence at the turn of the century, promoting the works of the satiric dramatists of which John Marston was one.

The relationship of his Antonio’s Revenge with Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a vexed question. Which play was written first? Were they both dependent on the ‘ur-Hamlet’; or were the two dramatists knowingly writing plays on a similar story but from different angles as if they were shadowing each other? Certainly, the two plays reflect each other at times. David Farley-Hills believes, for example, that ‘Shakespeare does everything he can to encourage us to identify with the revenge hero’, while ‘Marston uses dramatic techniques…to exclude audience feeling…not unlike that of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, to keep the intellectual sightlines clear of emotional clutter’ (Farley-Hills, D. (1990: 17), Shakespeare and the Rival Playwrights, 1600–1616. London and New York: Routledge). So much depends, as we’ve seen throughout our journey, on how we read, produce, perform and ‘receive’ the plays today. This is an ephemeral undertaking that allows for a plethora of interpretation.

Modern adaptations

We saw in Chapter 13 how Peter Hall and John Barton adapted the Henry VI plays and Richard III into a sequential work, The Wars of the Roses, in which John Barton even wrote some of the scenes. In Shakespearean production the freedom to adapt the Shakespearean text or sequences of plays subsequently became less controversial. Directors and theatre companies realized that Shakespeare’s plays were blueprints for performance that could include the kind of dynamism and creativity that could be released by adaptation and modernization.

At the far end of the spectrum, Shakespeare’s plays were deconstructed by Charles Marowitz or entirely new plays written, such as Arnold Wesker’s The Merchant or Edward Bond’s Lear within the political context of the later twentieth century. Radical productions by, for example, the Half Moon Theatre and Cheek by Jowl created compelling interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays, while productions at the Donmar Warehouse in London appeared to have greater freedom than the larger mainstream theatres, especially under the direction of Sam Mendes but not only during his tenure. In the mainstream ‘establishment’ companies, however, experimentation and interpretation also took place, and continue to do so. For productions of Shakespeare’s plays, an appropriate Shakespearean text still has first to be found, which, as we’ve seen, isn’t as easy as it may at first appear. In this, King Lear, for example, presents a number of challenges, not only for directors but also for editors.

Editorial decisions

There are two versions of King Lear, one published as a quarto in 1608 and the other in the First Folio of 1623. When editing the play for The Oxford Shakespeare in 1988, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor made a decision to include both versions of the play rather than, as was usual, conflating the two into a single text:

‘King Lear first appeared in print in a quarto of 1608. A substantially different text appeared in the 1623 Folio. Until now, editors, assuming that each of these texts imperfectly represented a single play, have conflated them. But research conducted mainly during the 1970s and 1980s confirms an earlier view that the 1608 quarto represents the play as Shakespeare originally wrote it, and the 1623 Folio as he substantially revised it. He revised other plays, too, but usually making small changes in dialogue and adding or omitting passages, as in Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida and Othello …But in King Lear revisions are not simply local but structural, too; conflation, as Harley Granville-Barker wrote, “may make for redundancy or confusion”, so we print an edited version of each text.’

Wells, S. and Taylor, G. (1988: 909), ‘Introduction to The History of King Lear’, William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Oxford: The Clarendon Press

Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, in producing their complete edition in 2007, The RSC Shakespeare Complete Works, based it on the First Folio, ordered the texts of the plays as printed in 1623 but included the texts of Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen that were originally missing from the Folio. With King Lear they published, therefore, only the Folio text: The Tragedy of King Lear, with Quarto The History of King Lear, variations appended. The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works (2011), which is being used as the text for this book, brings together individual texts edited by a variety of scholars, published as single editions of the plays from the Arden Shakespeare 2 series. The general editors Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan order the plays alphabetically, but as we have seen in our discussion of The Merchant of Venice, there are differences between John Russell Brown’s edited Arden 2 version of the play included in Arden’s Complete Works and the more recent single revised Arden Shakespeare 3 version, 2010–13, edited by John Drakakis.

Aligning plays with events

In recent years, as we will see in Chapter 24, a popular critical vogue for historical biography has developed that has been fused with new historicism. Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004) perceives Hamlet as ‘a highly political play’ of its time ‘about betrayal and assassination’ written immediately before the Essex Rebellion, and he notes the ‘remarkable scene’ in which Laertes, leading an insurrection, breaks into the royal palace to confront the King and Queen. He also notes that the play was written shortly after the death of Shakespeare’s own son Hamnet, in August 1596, suggesting that the names Hamnet and Hamlet ‘in the loose orthography of the time…were virtually interchangeable’. He comments: ‘Even if the decision to redo the old tragedy were a strictly commercial one, the coincidence of the names – the act of writing his own son’s name again and again – may well have reopened a deep wound, a wound that had never properly healed.’ (Greenblatt, S. [2004: 310, 311], Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare).

Greenblatt proceeds to the very edge of critical speculation by seeking to align the play with the death of Shakespeare’s father in September 1601, and asks a provocative but unanswerable question, ‘How did the father’s death become bound so closely in Shakespeare’s imagination with the son’s?’

Nostalgia

In Performing Nostalgia (1996), Susan Bennett offers a different perspective. She suggests that there is nostalgia for the past which comes from the present, and that in our materialistic, consumerist age historical artefacts are transformed into commodities.

‘Re-enactments of history are perhaps the most literal, if not always the most spectacular, examples of what Patrick Wright refers to as a trafficking in history. Whilst (Michel) Foucault has persuasively accounted for history as “inertia and weight, as a slow accumulation of the past, a silent sedimentation of things said”…it is also true that what has been accumulated has also been appraised for is currency (both cultural and economic)…The past, in the present, has become a powerful (element of a) trading economy on a global scale.’

Bennett, S. (1996: 15), Performing Nostalgia. London: Routledge

There is, of course, a significant difference between a theme-park ‘Globe Theatre’, as in Busch Gardens in the USA, and the meticulously researched and reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe in London, which since its opening in 1997 – the year after Bennett’s book was published – has demonstrated in its productions an intellectual grasp of some of what it means to perform the plays in a reconstructed playhouse that is in many ways similar to Shakespeare’s own. But, even so, Bennett’s remarks rightly reflect issues of our own society that influence our interpretations and expectations.

Interpretation and performance

These examples serve to indicate the range of critical and performance interpretations not only of Hamlet but Shakespeare’s plays in general. It is easy for someone to say, ’Go back to the original’ but we have to ask ‘What or which original?’ Plays are subject to what is sometimes called ‘cultural transformations’, allowing the often-changing contemporary relevance of the plays to become a significant issue to discuss. Integrated with that we, of course, have to ask questions concerning the original context and any dangers of drift into cultural nostalgia. Historicize and we sometimes fall into mere speculation. Dismantle or deconstruct the plays, and we have to ask ourselves in what order, and how do we reconstruct.

However we attempt to locate a text and an interpretation, Shakespeare appears to keep asking questions. As Shakespeare’s contemporary John Marston said, ‘Remember the life of these things consists in action.’ These tragedies are dynamic. They live in performance and develop through interpretation. Each age, each production, and each interpretative or imaginative reading has to find its Hamlet or its King Lear, Macbeth or Othello.