Note on the Text

doi:10.23943/princeton/9780691204512.002.0009

Front Matter

Note on the Text

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https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691204512.002.0009

Pages

xvii–xxii

Published:

April 2020

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I work from Harold Jenkins’s Arden 2 edition of Hamlet, cited parenthetically within the main body of the text.¹ At the same time, I relatively frequently make reference to alternative readings in the 1604/5 Second Quarto (Q2) and 1623 Folio editions. Less frequently, I refer to those in the 1603 First Quarto (Q1). In so doing, I use textual variance or ambiguity to emphasise, and occasionally to mitigate, points whose force is predominantly critical.

Since the “unediting” Shakespeare movement began in the 1980s, and various forms of it assumed positions of orthodoxy a decade or so later, we have learned a great deal about the textually contingent nature of Shakespeare’s plays. We have also been reminded that editorial decisions have too often been based on criteria of taste or ideology or critical preoccupation, not those of textual scholarship.² The fruits of this change in editorial approach have been several. In particular, the Oxford Shakespeare (based on the Folio) and Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor’s Arden 3 Shakespeare (based on Q2) have been constant points of reference for me.³ Likewise, Bernice Kliman’s Enfolded Hamlets prints the Q2 and Folio texts alongside one another, and made things a lot less challenging than would otherwise have been the case.⁴ On a related tack, we have learned that Shakespeare may well have tweaked, corrected, interpolated, or amended his works over time, and that there is a case to be made for suggesting that the Folio Hamlet is Shakespeare’s later revision of Q2. And yet it has also been proposed that the Folio is chiefly derived from a playhouse copy (or reconstruction) of a text that is independent of the one printed in Q2, and that this copy (and/or text) may have shared a measure of consanguinity with (the earlier?) text of Q1.⁵ The truth is that we do not know the order of priority in which the two most authoritative surviving versions of Hamlet stand in relation to one another. We should not be too put out by this state of affairs. In Paul Menzer’s helpful summation, “the knowledge that plays were built to be broken (both theatrically and textually) provides an escape route from a paradigm that views texts as indivisible and autonomous with precise provenances and discernible genealogical relations”.⁶ To recognise the circumstances of transmission and production that generally sit behind the printed versions of early modern plays—in other words, their textual contingency—is to recognise the sterility of some arguments for insisting on their poly-textual representation: of course there is textual difference between different printings of early modern plays. And? In contrast to the avowals of most recent Hamlet editors, I have come to believe that the Q2 and Folio texts authoritatively witness the same Shakespearean work, and that a critical edition of the play should therefore take account of them both.

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