What's unique to this class (among the seminars I've taken) is that there is no core reading list, apart from the text of the play itself that we read in Weeks 1 and 2. We are simply asked, each week, to find and read primary and/or secondary sources related to each week's theme, compile a cumulative bibliography, and write a weekly paper on our research.
This week's topic is the first quarto (sometimes referred to as the "bad" quarto, in my Internet perusings), which was reportedly the first version of Hamlet to be originally published (1603) and was rediscovered in 1823 (Thompson). Hamlet, despite its recognition and fame among Shakespearean texts, is somewhat problematic editorially in that there are three quite distinct versions of the play floating about in manuscript land: Q1 (the First Quarto; this is also the shortest), Q2 (the Second Quarto; almost twice as long as Q1, though lacking some famous passages of the third), and F (the First Folio, sometimes known informally as "the actor's cut"; Thompson and Taylor, 18).
Wikipedia calls Q1 "a short and generally inferior early text of the Shakespearean play"—ouch. Some, such as David Ward, have posited that it represents a “first draft” of the play and that Q2 is “the product of a critical process of revision.” (One hypothesis from Ward: Q1 was too politically dangerous, and republishing Q2 as an “authorized” version was necessary.) Others see this quarto as less carefully compiled, possibly cobbled together by the memory of actors (Thompson).
Albert B. Weiner, who introduced and edited a 1962 edition of the Q1 (available online, free access!—see bib below), sees Q1 as an abridged version that was "consistently and methodically cut" for tours (48). For instance, note that the lines of four characters—Hamlet, Corambis, the King, and Horatio—are maintained at 70% of the lines appearing in Q2, but other parts are "reduced to little more than walk-ons" (49). Weiner posits that the abridgements were made directly onto Shakespeare's foul papers (first draft that is subsequently copied for the playhouse so that the playhouse has a legible copy, or fair copy) and thus sees textual "corruptions" as the result of an illegible manuscript, as was the case with the Thomas More manuscript (57).
Weiner moves through several existing, circulating theories within Shakespearean/Hamlet scholarship (piracy by actors or reporters and memorial reconstruction) that attempt to explain the existence of Q1, pointing out important flaws in each. Hardin Craig agrees, objecting strongly to these theories,
to stenography, the pirate-actor theory, and the theory of so-called memorial reconstruction or, more simply, reporting, as a means of accounting for agreements and differences between the early version of Hamlet, that of the first quarto, and the later standard version that appeared in quarto form late in the year 1604 and in the First Folio of 1623. (i)However, instead of seeing Q1 as a methodically simplified version of the play as Weiner does, Craig identifies road actors pejoratively as "a great degenerative force" that he feels must have had a hand in altering Q1, a practice he observed still happens with plays today. Instead of seeing Q1 as purposefully pared down for smaller casts and road conditions, Craig sees it the result of shoddy and poorly trained actors. Stressing structural differences between Q1 and Q2, Craig believes that
the first quarto presents an earlier version of Shakespeare's Hamlet that has been possibly shortened and certainly otherwise degenerated by its experience in the hands of a traveling company on the provincial stage and that the second quarto is Shakespeare's revision and amplification of that earlier play. (iv)Ann Thompson seems to agree that Q1 is a traveling actor's version, though the short piece she writes for the British Library webpage is ambiguous as to whether Q1 represents decay or conscious simplification. Maintaining that Elizabethan audiences "are unlikely to have experienced the four-hour version familiar to us in modern editions," Thompson sees it as entirely likely that the versions these audiences would have seen "a shorter acting version" similar in structure to Q1.
Other features of text of Q1 (apart from its dialogue) point to the likelihood of it being an acting version, as well. The text, though less polished and literary (in fact, variously referred to as "garbled," "flat," and "mutilated" by Weiner) is nonetheless noted as "accessible" by Thompson. The stage directions of the Q1 are also rich, and the feature of the quarto most frequently incorporated into modern editions.
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Craig, Hardin. Foreword. Hamlet: The First Quarto, 1603. Great Neck, NY: Barron's Educational Series, 1962. Ebook. Thompson, Ann. "Expert Views: The First and Second Quartos of Hamlet." British Library. n.d. Web. 11 Apr 2011.
Ward, David. "The King and 'Hamlet'." Shakespeare Quarterly 43.3 (Autumn, 1992): 280-302. JSTOR. Web. 11 Apr 2011.
Weiner, Albert B., ed. Introduction. Hamlet: The First Quarto, 1603. Great Neck, NY: Barron's Educational Series, 1962. Ebook.
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