Explore the vast range of titles available.

The first or ‘bad’ quarto of Hamlet is the subject of much debate. Is it an early version of the play as some scholars suggest? Or is it corrupted memorial reconstruction, a product of ‘fast writing’ transcription, or just a pirated version of the play rushed into print? In this article I posit that the first quarto is indeed a valid text that deserves to be recognised for its unique, unfussy, playable brilliance. That the text provides clues (if one knows how to look), that elucidate answers to many of the questions that productions must contend with. I believe it to be a time-capsule version of sorts that is a product of what the actors truly performed, rather than a celebration of the poet’s aspirationally complex verse.

This article challenges A.W. Pollard’s foundational distinction between good and bad quartos, which confuses ethical and bibliographical categories. Some quartos are badly inked, or printed on poor-quality paper. But Q1 Hamlet is a professional, well-made commodity. Zachary Lesser has conjectured that Q1 sold poorly, and has claimed that the similarity of the title pages of Q1 and Q2 supports that hypothesis. But both title pages are typical of Ling’s books, and their similarities are no more remarkable than those in Ling’s different quartos of Michael Drayton’s poems. Q1 Hamlet apparently sold more quickly than Q2. Using D.W. Winnicott’s theories about the ‘good enough mother’ and ‘transitional objects’, we can identify Q1 as a ‘good enough quarto’.

Q1 Hamlet (1603) routinely sets prose speeches so that they appear to be blank verse. This article argues that such was an attempt to confer prestige upon the text, particularly in the wake of the saturation of Shakespeare books on the literary marketplace around 1600 – a phenomenon that saw his prose works achieve less favour than those in pentameter. The publishers of Q1 Merry Wives (1602) and Q1 Hamlet may have hedged their bets on these Shakespeare texts by amplifying their verse, long the gold standard of the Shakespearean brand. Like The True Tragedie of Richard III (published 1594) and The Famous Victories of Henry V (entered 1594), which presented their opening pages to readers as iambic pentameter, Q1 Hamlet seems to have beautified its dialogue for readers in the early modern book marketplace.

Of the fifteen verbal links Wiggins associates with Q1 Hamlet in his catalogue of British Drama, the inclusion of Dido, Queen of Carthage is potentially the most problematic in terms of establishing a 1588–1589 date for the play. This article re-examines the editorial and critical history of the most commonly cited overlap between these two plays – the entirety of ‘Aeneas’s tale to Dido’ – and it provides new evidence that challenges their continued association.

The first quarto of Hamlet has traditionally been an embarrassment to attribution studies. Textual and bibliographical studies from the 1980s and beyond have permitted suspect texts to be recovered and performed, but critical appreciation tends to focus on such matters as characterization and performance possibilities rather than the text’s rhetorical integrity and aesthetic qualities. More recently, we have seen greater critical attention to Shakespeare’s suspect texts, which has increased our appreciation for and expanded our notion of Q1 Hamlet as a ‘text’. Opinion remains divided, however, on the question of who ‘wrote’ this play. This essay addresses the authorship debate somewhat indirectly by providing a different view of Hamlet Q1 based on a stylistic analysis that is grounded in Renaissance rhetoric. It characterizes the play’s style as the rhetoric of speed, with brachylogia as its representative rhetorical figure. Through review of theories about the composition of Hamlet Q1 and a rhetorical analysis of its style, the essay seeks to examine how Hamlet’s first quarto might have a recognizable style and how that style might be related to current concepts of authorship.

Robert Heilman gives an appreciation of Shakespeare as a whole man. Northrop Frye writes on balance and symbolism. Harry Levin shows how Shakespeare used names to indicate and enhance character. J.V. Cunningham looks at Shakespeare in his workshop; Gunnar Bokland, and Maynard Mack also contribute brilliant studies. Originally published in 1965. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This chapter contains sections titled: Notes References and Further Reading