Abstract
The first edition of Hamlet cannot be explained as a pirated text. But it could derive from the Hamlet performed late in 1589, written by Shakespeare, inherited and performed by the Chamberlain’s Men in 1594, and still being performed at their playhouse, The Theater, until at least 1595. It may well have been Shakespeare’s first play, or the first play that he wrote without a collaborator; it would seem to have been the earliest surviving play entirely by Shakespeare that reached print. It was not published in the 1590s, or the late 1580s, for the same reason(s) that other early Shakespeare plays were not published until long after they were written. In all these ways, it belongs to the normal activities of theatre companies and stationers in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
“My father’s death”
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Notes
Gary Taylor, “Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s Plays,” in Stanley Wells et al., William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 122. Taylor changed his mind as a result of reading an earlier version of this book.
David Daniell, ed., Julius Caesar (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1998), 6–23, gives a full account of evidence for the date, but reaches the same conclusion as almost all modern scholars.
For a survey of recent examples, see Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, eds., Hamlet [1604] (London: Arden, 2006), 36–44.
The 1623 Folio collection of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies contains at least two texts that seem to have been adapted after Shakespeare’s death. The 2007 Oxford edition of Middleton’s Collected Works, drawing on centuries of Shakespeare scholarship, identified passages written by Middleton in both Macbeth and Measure for Measure. For new evidence supporting this consensus, see Gary Taylor, “Middleton and Macbeth,” in Macbeth, ed. Robert Miola, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 296–305; and Terri Bourus and Gary Taylor, “Measure for Measure(s): Performance-Testing the Adaptation Hypothesis,” Shakespeare 10.2 (2014) (available online, forthcoming in print). By contrast, nothing in the 1623 Hamlet seems to have been written by Middleton, or anyone else. Just as the text of Hamlet first printed in 1603 apparently derives, at one or more removes, from a manuscript written by Shakespeare 14 or 15 years earlier, the text printed in 1623 might derive, at one or more removes, from a manuscript written by Shakespeare two decades earlier. The 1623 edition contains texts of plays written three or more decades earlier (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 1 Henry VI, etc.), so there would be nothing abnormal about this assumption.
The Children of the Chapel were dissolved, and vacated the Blackfriars playhouse, in the summer of 1608, so the passage could hardly have been written after that date. Moreover, once they moved into the Blackfriars, the King’s Men began systematically dividing their plays into five acts, with musical intervals in between, and F1 Hamlet is not systematically divided into five acts: see Gary Taylor, “The Structure of Performance,” in Gary Taylor and John Jowett, Shakespeare Reshaped: 1606–1623 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 3–50.
These conclusions are summarized in Taylor, “Canon,” 122–3; notice the anomalous position of Hamlet in his own graph on p. 99, and the prose statistics in Table 8 (p. 96). For Oras, see Pause Patterns in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama: An Experiment in Prosody, University of Florida Monographs, Humanities, 3 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1960), 46–9, where the A-graphs and B-graphs both place it after both Troilus and Othello, and the C-graphs between them;
for Eliot Slater, The Problem of “The Reign of King Edward III”: A Statistical Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 181;
for Brainerd, “The Chronology of Shakespeare’s Plays: A Statistical Study,” Computers and the Humanities 14 (1980): 221–30, esp. 229. (Taylor notes that Brainerd “also predicts a late date,” but does not say how much later.) Brainerd’s evidence also pointed to a later date for All’s Well that Ends Well (1607), a change accepted in the 2005 revised edition of the Oxford Complete Works; his anomalies also supported claims (unconventional in 1980, but now widely accepted) that Henry VI, Titus, Pericles, Henry VIII, and Two Noble Kinsmen were written in collaboration. In Taylor’s summary, the only evidence that Hamlet might precede Troilus is “the metrical tests,” but he acknowledges serious weaknesses in that data (106–7).
Malone, “Attempt” (1821), 370. This interpretation has been supported by many scholars, including E. A. J. Honigmann, “The Date of Hamlet,” Shakespeare Survey 9 (1956): 24–34.
Among the many arguments for a relationship between Hamlet and Essex, see Karen S. Coddon, “‘Such strange desyns’: Madness, Subjectivity and Treason in Hamlet and Elizabethan Culture,” Renaissance Drama 20 (1989): 51–75;
and James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London: Faber, 2005), 283–317.
James Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 248.
In both the later versions, the anonymous braggart of Q1 is given a name, Osric (F) or Ostrick (Q2). Marino sees “Osric” as an allusion to the title character of a play staged at the Rose in 1597, which was significantly adapted beginning in September 1602 and performed there in November 1602; the title character’s new costume cost 26 shillings (James J. Marino, Owning William Shakespeare: The King’s Men and Their Intellectual Property [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011], 99). If true, this would push the date of the manuscripts behind Q2 and F to the very end of 1602.
Paul Werstine, “The Textual Mystery of Hamlet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 1–26.
Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (London: Routledge, 2004), 135–6.
Paul Werstine, Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 232–3.
The introduction to Satiromastix in Cyrus Hoy’s Introductions, Notes and Commentaries to texts in “The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker,” 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 1:179–97, predates the new scholarship on the date of Poetaster, but in other respects remains authoritative.
David M. Bevington, ed., Troilus and Cressida (London: Arden, 2001), 6–18.
Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 25–42, esp. 38–40.
See the discussion and illustration of mourning in Roland Mushat Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 83–102.
Margreta de Grazia, “Hamlet” without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
For a skeptical survey of the evidence, see Thomas Postlewait, “The Criteria for Evidence: Anecdotes in Shakespearean Biography, 1709–2000,” in Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History, ed. W. B. Worthen and Peter Holland (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 47–9. Postlewait assumes that Betterton got the information “on a trip to Stratford-upon-Avon,” which he certainly took, but that trip was presumably in search of evidence about Shakespeare’s life in Warwickshire; the London theatre community was a better, and nearer, source of information about Shakespeare’s acting. See Andrew Gurr, “Joseph Taylor,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB).
Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet and Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 248–9.
Terri Bourus, “Counterfeiting Faith: Thomas Middleton’s Re-formation of Measure for Measure,” in Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England, ed. Katherine McPherson and James Mardock (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2014), 195–216.
On the Warwickshire background, see Patrick Collinson, “William Shakespeare’s Religious Inheritance,” in his Elizabethan Essays (London: Bloomsbury, 1994). On a sympathy for Catholicism in Shakespeare’s work, my position is closest to Gary Taylor’s in three essays: “The Fortunes of Oldcastle,” Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985): 85–100; “Forms of Opposition: Shakespeare and Middleton,” English Literary Renaissance 24 (1994): 283–314; “Divine []sences,” Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001): 13–30. None of this is dependent on whether Shakespeare is the “William Shakeshafte” of Lancashire.
Stephen Greenblatt, “The Death of Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet,” New York Review of Books 51.16 (21 October 2004): 42–7.
For the East India corporation, see James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London: Faber, 2005), 302–8. Shapiro, understandably given his project, accepts the earliest possible date for the canonical Hamlet (late 1599).
E. A. J. Honigmann, “Shakespeare Suppressed: The Unfortunate History of Troilus and Cressida,” in Myriad-Minded Shakespeare (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989), 112–29.
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© 2014 Terri Bourus
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Bourus, T. (2014). Revising Hamlet?. In: Young Shakespeare’s Young Hamlet. History of Text Technologies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137465641_7
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