In connection with the publication of the 1603 Quarto, reference must be made to the following entry in the Stationers' Registers:— "[1602] xxvj to Julij. James Robertes. Entered for his Copie vnder the handes of master Pasfield and master Waterson Warden A booke called 'the Revenge of HAMLETT Prince [of] Denmarke,' as yt was lateli Acted by the Lord Chamberlayne his servants vjd." James Robertes, the printer of the 1604 edition, may also have been the printer of the Quarto of 1603, and this entry may have had reference to its projected publication; it is noteworthy that in 1603 "the Lord Chamberlain's Servants" became "The King's Players," and the Quarto states that the play had been acted "by His Highness' Servants." On the other hand, the entry may have been made by Roberts to secure the play to himself, and some "inferior and nameless printer" may have anticipated him by the publication of an imperfect, surreptitious, and garbled version, impudently offering as Shakespeare's such wretched stuff as this: 66 To be, or not to be, I there's the point, To Die, to sleepe, is that all: I all? No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes, The happy smile, and the accursed damn'd." The dullest poetaster could not have been guilty of this nonsense: a second-rate playwright might have put these last words in Hamlet's mouth:— "Mine eyes haue lost their sight, my tongue his vse; "The rest is silence "-Shakespeare's supreme touch is here. A rapid examination of the First Quarto reveals the following among its chief divergences:-(i.) the difference in length; 2143 lines as against 3719 in the later Quarto; (ii.) the mutilation, or omission, of many passages "distinguished by that blending of psychological insight with imagination and fancy, which is the highest manifestation of Shakespeare's genius"; (iii.) absurd misplacement and maiming of lines; distortion of words and phrases; (iv.) confusion in the order of the scenes; (v.) difference in characterisation; e.g. the Queen's avowed innocence (" But as I have a soul, I swear by heaven, I never knew of this most horrid murder "), and her active adhesion to the plots against her guilty husband; (vi.) this latter aspect is brought out in a special scene between Horatio and the Queen, omitted in the later version; (vii.) the names of some of the characters are not the same as in the subsequent editions; Corambis and Montano, for Polonius and Reynaldo. What, then, is the history of this Quarto? In the first place it is certain that it must have been printed without authority; in all probability shorthand notes taken by an incompetent stenographer during the performance of the play formed the basis of the printer's "copy." Thomas Heywood alludes to this method of obtaining plays in the prologue to his If you know not me, you know no bodic: 66 (This) did throng the Seats, the Boxes, and the Stage The plot: put it in print: (scarce one word trew).” The main question at issue is the relation of this piratical version to Shakespeare's work. The various views may be divided as follows:-(i.) there are those who maintain that it is an imperfect production of an old Hamlet written by Shakespeare in his youth, and revised by him in his maturer years; (ii.) others contend that both the First and Second Quartos represent the same version, the difference between the two editions being due to carelessness and incompetence; (iii.) a third class holds, very strongly, that the First Quarto is a garbled version of an old-fashioned play of Hamlet, written by some other dramatist, and revised to a certain extent by Shakespeare about the year 1602; so that the original of Quarto I represented Shakespeare's Hamlet in an intermediate stage; in Quarto 2 we have for the first time the complete metamorphosis. All the evidence seems to point to this third view as a plausible settlement of the problem; there is little to be said in favour of the first and second theories. The Lost Hamlet. There is no doubt that a play on the subject of Hamlet existed as early as 1589, in which year there appeared Greene's Menaphon, with a prefatory epistle by Thomas Nash, containing a summary review of contemporary literature. The following passage occurs in his 'talk' with 'a few of our triviall translators': "It is a common practice now a daies amongst a sort of shifting companions, that runne through every arte and thrive by none to leave the trade of Noverint (i.e. attorney) whereto they were borne, and busie themselves with the endevours of art, that could scarcelie latinize their neck verse if they should have neede; yet English Seneca read by candlelight yeeldes manie good sentences, as Bloud is a beggar, and so forth; and if you intreate him faire in a frostie morning, he will afoord you whole Hamlets, I should say Handfulls of tragical speaches. But O grief! Tempus edax rerum; what is it that will last always? The sea exhaled by drops will in continuance be drie; and Senaca, let bloud line by line, and page by page, at length must needs die to our stage.' The play alluded to by Nash did not die to our stage till the end of the century; in Henslowe's Diary we find an entry:"9. of June 1594... R[eceive]d at hamlet. viijs:" the play was performed by the Lord Chamberlain's men, the company to which Shakespeare belonged. "[Hate Virtue is] a foul lubber," wrote Lodge in Wit's Miserie, and the World's Madness, 1596, "and looks as pale as the wisard of the ghost, which cried so miserally at the theator, like an oyster-wife, Hamlet revenge. In all probability Thomas Kyd was the author of the play alluded to in these passages; his probable authorship is borne out by Nash's subsequent allusion to "the Kidde in Æsope's fable," as also by the character of his famous Spanish Tragedy.t Hamlet and The Spanish Tragedy may well be described as twin-dramas; they are both dramas of vengeance; the ghost of the victim tells * Several other allusions occur during the early years of the seventeenth century, evidently to the older Hamlet, e.g. Dekker's Satiromastix, 1602 (“My Name's Hamlet revenge"); Westward Hoe, 1607 (Let these husbands play mad Hamlet; and cry revenge); Rowland's The Night Raven, 1618 (“I will not cry Hamlet Revenge," etc.). There is a comic passage in the Looking Glass for London and England, written by Lodge & Greene, probably before 1589, which strikes me as a burlesque reminiscence of the original of Hamlet, Act. I. Sc. ii. 184-240; Adam, the smith's man, exclaims thus to the Clown:-" Alas, sir, your father,— why, sir, methinks I see the gentleman still: a proper youth he was, faith, aged some forty and ten; his beard rat's colour, half black, half white; his nose was in the highest degree of noses," etc. †The Spanish Tragedy and Kyd's other plays are printed in Dodsley's Old Plays. An interesting point in Kyd's biography (vide Dict. Nat. Biog.) is that his father was in all probability a sort of Noverint. So much so was this the case that "young Hamlet,” and “old Hieronimo," were often referred to together, and the parts were taken by the same actors, cp. Burbadge's elegy: 'Young Hamlet, old Hieronimo, Kind Leir, the grieved Moore, and more beside Occasionally the two plays were, I think, confused: thus, Armin in his Nest of Ninnies (1608) writes:-" There are, as Hamlet saies, things cald whips in store"; Hieronimo certainly says so in the most famous passage of the Spanish Tragedy. his story in the one play as in the other; the heroes simulate madness; a faithful Horatio figures in each; a playscene brings about the catastrophe in the Spanish Tragedy, even as it helps forward the catastrophe in Hamlet; in both plays Nemesis involves in its meshes the innocent as well as the guilty,-the perpetrators of the wrong and the instruments of vengeance. To this same class of drama belongs Titus Andronicus, and it is interesting to note that early in his career Shakespeare put his hand to a Hamletian tragedy.* Nash's reference to the Senecan character of the lost Hamlet receives considerable confirmation when one remembers that Kyd translated into English, from the French, Garnier's Senecan drama entitled Cornelia, and it is possible that even in Shakespeare's Hamlet we can still detect the fossil remains of Senecan moralisations which figured in the older play, and which were Kyd's reminiscences of Garnier.t The German Hamlet. It is possible that although the pre-Shakespearian Hamlet has perished, we have some portion of the play preserved in a German MS. version bearing the date, "Pretz, October 27th, 1710,' which is probably a late and modernised copy of a much older manuscript. The play, entitled "Der Bestrafte Brudermord oder: Prinz Hamlet aus Dännemark" (Fratricide Punished, or Prince Hamlet of Denmark) was first printed in the year 1781, and has been frequently reprinted; the text, with an English translation, is given in Cohn's fascinating work, "Shakespeare in Germany in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: An account of English Actors in Germany and the Netherlands, and of *Vide Preface to Titus Andronicus. †e.g. A thoroughly Senecan sentiment is the Queen's 'Thou know'st 'tis common; all that lives must die, It occurs almost verbatim in Cornelia. |