By this edition of HAMLET I hope to help the student of Shakspere to
understand the play--and first of all Hamlet himself, whose spiritual
and moral nature are the real material of the tragedy, to which every
other interest of the play is subservient. But while mainly attempting,
from the words and behaviour Shakspere has given him, to explain the
man, I have cast what light I could upon everything in the play,
including the perplexities arising from extreme condensation of meaning,
figure, and expression.
As it is more than desirable that the student should know when he is
reading the most approximate presentation accessible of what Shakspere
uttered, and when that which modern editors have, with reason good or
bad, often not without presumption, substituted for that which they
received, I have given the text, letter for letter, point for point, of
the First Folio, with the variations of the Second Quarto in the margin
and at the foot of the page.
Of HAMLET there are but two editions of authority, those called the
Second Quarto and the First Folio; but there is another which requires
remark.
In the year 1603 came out the edition known as the First Quarto--clearly
without the poet's permission, and doubtless as much to his displeasure:
the following year he sent out an edition very different, and larger in
the proportion of one hundred pages to sixty-four. Concerning the former
my theory is--though it is not my business to enter into the question
here--that it was printed from Shakspere's sketch for the play, written
with matter crowding upon him too fast for expansion or development, and
intended only for a continuous memorandum of things he would take up and
work out afterwards. It seems almost at times as if he but marked
certain bales of thought so as to find them again, and for the present
threw them aside--knowing that by the marks he could recall the thoughts
they stood for, but not intending thereby to convey them to any reader.
I cannot, with evidence before me, incredible but through the eyes
themselves, of the illimitable scope of printers' blundering, believe
_all_ the confusion, unintelligibility, neglect of grammar,
construction, continuity, sense, attributable to them. In parts it is
more like a series of notes printed with the interlineations horribly
jumbled; while in other parts it looks as if it had been taken down from
the stage by an ear without a brain, and then yet more incorrectly
printed; parts, nevertheless, in which it most differs from the
authorized editions, are yet indubitably from the hand of Shakspere. I
greatly doubt if any ready-writer would have dared publish some of its
chaotic passages as taken down from the stage; nor do I believe the play
was ever presented in anything like such an unfinished state. I rather
think some fellow about the theatre, whether more rogue or fool we will
pay him the thankful tribute not to enquire, chancing upon the crude
embryonic mass in the poet's hand, traitorously pounced upon it, and
betrayed it to the printers--therein serving the poet such an evil turn
as if a sculptor's workman took a mould of the clay figure on which his
master had been but a few days employed, and published casts of it as
the sculptor's work.[1] To us not the less is the _corpus delicti_
precious--and that unspeakably--for it enables us to see something of
the creational development of the drama, besides serving occasionally to
cast light upon portions of it, yielding hints of the original intention
where the after work has less plainly presented it.
[Footnote 1: Shakspere has in this matter fared even worse than Sir
Thomas Browne, the first edition of whose _Religio Medici_, nowise
intended for the public, was printed without his knowledge.]
The Second Quarto bears on its title-page, compelled to a recognition of
the former,--'Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as
it was, according to the true and perfect Coppie'; and it is in truth a
harmonious world of which the former issue was but the chaos. It is the
drama itself, the concluded work of the master's hand, though yet to be
once more subjected to a little pruning, a little touching, a little
rectifying. But the author would seem to have been as trusting over the
work of the printers, as they were careless of his, and the result is
sometimes pitiable. The blunders are appalling. Both in it and in the
Folio the marginal note again and again suggests itself: 'Here the
compositor was drunk, the press-reader asleep, the devil only aware.'
But though the blunders elbow one another in tumultuous fashion, not
therefore all words and phrases supposed to be such are blunders. The
old superstition of plenary inspiration may, by its reverence for the
very word, have saved many a meaning from the obliteration of a
misunderstanding scribe: in all critical work it seems to me well to
cling to the _word_ until one sinks not merely baffled, but exhausted.