Synopsis
Hamlet was "the Mona Lisa of literature" long before T. S. Eliot gave it that apt characterization in his review-essay on "Hamlet and His Problems" (1919). The cause of that questionable shape was chiefly the action, or deferral or lack of action, of the Prince, and what it all meant. This was problem enough without even taking account of the fact that the Hamlet of the quarto edition of 1604 is not quite the same Hamlet as the one of the posthumous Folio edition of 1623. Similar but by no means the same: there are hundreds of differences of word and phrase between the two, and the Folio contains passages not found in the quarto but does not contain some that are, including the quarto's last soliloquy, "How all occasions do inform against me / And spur my dull revenge."
But these differences are small compared with those of the Hamlet actually first published, in 1603, a version entirely unknown for two hundred years after the Folio was published, when a copy was found in a closet in 1823--one of the most important, mystifying, and controversial Shakespearean recoveries of the nearly two centuries since. Thus the fullest version (1604) was published second, with the Folio giving, then, still a third version. This First Quarto is only about half as long as the Second, though it contains a scene between Horatio and the Queen that is not in either of the other two versions. And even within itself it is a play divided: some parts are identical to the Second Quarto and the Hamlet most familiar to readers, but others are either unique or so different in expression (inferior?) that the differences are hard to explain, because "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so"--as Hamlet himself says--in the Folio, but not in Q2 or Q1. "To be, or not to be, I there's the point."
It is not a matter of asking the "real" Hamlet to (please) stand up--all the Hamlets are real--but of determining what historical realities these Hamlets do or may represent, how they came to be as they are. Is Q1 the record of an early draft, incompletely revised by Shakespeare, for example, or the product of an actor's variable memory? Reflecting on these and related problems with a view to solution is the purpose of the present collection. But controversy is inherent in the activity, the times, the writers' perspectives, and the subject, and disagreement is an integral part of this collective endeavor by distinct individuals.
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