Hamlet: Language and Writing

Dympna Callaghan

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781474216036
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

This lively and informative guide reveals Hamlet as marking a turning point in Shakespeare's use of language and dramatic form as well as addressing the key problem at the play's core: Hamlet's inaction. It also looks at recent critical approaches to the play and its theatre history, including the recent David Tennant / RSC Hamlet on both stage and TV screen.

CHAPTER ONE

Language in print

In this chapter we will focus on developing reading skills as the most important prerequisite to writing about Hamlet. First, we need to address the very practical matter of which text we are reading when we analyse and interpret the play. There are, as we shall see, a number of options here, and in the process of weighing them, we will compare two different versions of Hamlet’s most famous speech. This comparison will allow us to consider what is so distinctive about Shakespeare’s language. Having made our first foray into detailed analysis of a passage in the initial part of the chapter, we will then address the larger framework of Shakespeare’s language constituted by the genre of revenge.

‘What do you read, my lord?’ (2.2.188)

Shakespeare’s language is simultaneously monumental and ephemeral. In the theatre, the oral delivery of Shakespeare’s poetry evaporates with the breath of the actor. Even its print transmission is unstable. We might say with Hamlet that the language of the play exists only ‘whiles memory holds a seat / In this distracted globe’ (1.5.96–7). One of the biggest problems posed by Hamlet is that multiple versions of the play have survived, and we do not know which one, if any of them, was the one that Shakespeare himself thought to be his full and final version. Shakespeare certainly wrote the famous line, ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’, but did he also write, ‘To be, or not to be – ay, there’s the point’? (7.115). That is the line with which Hamlet begins his most famous speech in the play in its first printing in 1603, a text which often uses language in such a way that scholars doubt that it was written by Shakespeare at all.

What we understand to be ‘Shakespearean’ language, then, typically derives from our experience of modern edited texts rather than from Shakespeare’s plays as they were originally printed. Just as it is the surgeon’s task to cut people open (albeit usually for very good reasons), it is the editor’s task to modify the text, usually for very good reasons. Editors make Shakespeare’s language more accessible to modern readers by correcting what they perceive to be errors and by modernizing spelling and typeface. If you look at one of the online facsimiles of Hamlet, you will see that early modern typefaces can be much harder to read. It is not clear, however, whether a text that has been editorially transformed remains Shakespeare’s. Is it still his language? This question applies to any edition, not just to a text whose availability in multiple forms makes it as complex and difficult as Hamlet. There is, as a result, often a very substantial difference between the edited version of Shakespeare’s language and the language that appeared in seventeenth-century printings of the play.

The edition of Hamlet to which this book refers is the Arden Shakespeare Hamlet, based on the Second Quarto (1604–5) text and edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. This will be our touchstone throughout. The Thompson and Taylor edition tells us upfront on the title page which early modern version of Hamlet it is based on (Thompson and Taylor, 139). This is important because no matter how confidently we talk about Shakespeare’s language in relation to Hamlet, exactly what we mean by that is open to considerable dispute.

On the grounds that ‘everyone knows Hamlet’, we tend to assume that the text to which the title Hamlet refers is a single, solid, stable object. In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. Hamlet has survived only as a printed book. There are no extant manuscript copies of any of Shakespeare’s plays in his own handwriting apart from one page of a coauthored play, Sir Thomas More. This is how a question such as ‘What is Hamlet?’ becomes especially complicated since the play has survived in three quite different forms:

1The First Quarto, also known as Q1, was printed in 1603, and there are only two surviving copies in the whole world. Sir Henry Bunbury discovered one of them in 1823 in a cupboard in his manor house. The other copy surfaced in 1856 when a Dublin bookseller bought it from an English undergraduate studying in Ireland at Trinity College. Q1 is by far the shortest of the surviving Hamlet texts and is approximately 2,200 lines in length.

2The Second Quarto, also known as Q2 (1604), is the longest of the three extant texts, coming in at almost 4,000 lines.

3F is the version of the play printed in the First Folio (1623). F is approximately 200 lines shorter than Q2.

4Another phantom text of the play, the lost play known as the Ur-Hamlet (but at the time, just called Hamlet), was probably not written by Shakespeare. We know that it predates the play known to us as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which scholars believe was written in or around 1600. The Ur-Hamlet is mentioned in print by Thomas Nashe in 1589 and by Thomas Lodge in 1596, as well as in the manuscript diary of the theatrical entrepreneur, Philip Henslowe, who records that it was performed in 1594.

The texts of Hamlet, like all other play texts of its era, are designated in terms of the size of the paper on which they were printed. ‘Quarto’ refers to a full folio sheet folded over into four (about the size of a modern exercise book and often with a soft cover), while ‘folio’ refers to a full-sized, unfolded piece of paper (roughly the size of a large, hard-bound journal). What we read on the pages of these texts was determined by the printer and by the compositors who set the typeface from either Shakespeare’s handwritten copy of the play, or a ‘scribal copy’ – that is, a ‘fair copy’, a neatly handwritten version of the text made by one of the veritable army of professional writers (scribes) who flourished in Shakespeare’s day. Thus, the textual choices made in terms of the text’s appearance on the printed page were not necessarily those of Shakespeare himself. Once a manuscript went to the printing house, the playwright might not have had any further control over the text at all.

It is possible that Shakespeare may not have felt that a printed text was ever a final rendition of his work. Of the three versions of the play that have come down to us (respectively, Q1, Q2, and F), we simply do not know which of them – if any – was Shakespeare’s last word, or his final revision of the text. More importantly, since Shakespeare worked in the dynamic environment of the theatre where scenes, characters and poetry might be changed to fit a specific performance context, alterations to the text may have been made as Shakespeare’s playing company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Servants (sometimes referred to as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men), worked on the text in preparation for performance. Whether such changes were made and whether they were overseen or approved by Shakespeare remains a matter of scholarly debate. This does not mean, however, that Shakespeare’s play texts were simply raw material for the stage. His printed playbooks, especially Hamlet, are often so much longer than what seems to have been the standard length of plays in Elizabethan England – or at least what the Chorus describes in Romeo and Juliet as ‘the two hours’ traffic of our stage’ (Prol. 12) – that it is clear that Shakespeare understood dramatic poetry in printed form as literature also intended for reading rather than explicitly for performance. Print might record a stage in the evolution of Shakespeare’s thinking about a play without being understood to petrify it – to turn it to stone, so to speak.

There is, in truth, no answer to the inevitably anachronistic question about which version of Hamlet is really Shakespeare’s or which is the version he intended to pass on to posterity, if indeed, he gave any thought to posterity at all. Certainly, in the seventeenth century, there seems to have been less concern about establishing a single authoritative text for Hamlet than there was in the twentieth century, since multiple versions of Shakespeare’s plays were reprinted as separate texts on several occasions. What is important here is that there is a profound paradox in that Hamlet – a veritable literary monument in the Western world, with all the textual certainty implied by that – is nonetheless one of the most uncertain and unstable texts in the Shakespearean canon.

Numerous theories have been proposed about the texts of Hamlet, among them that Q1, which was lost until its rediscovery in 1823, was a ‘pirated’ text – that is, a text sold to the printer without the author’s knowledge or permission. The assumption in this case is that the text derived from a reconstruction of the play assembled by one of the actors who had performed in it. Another theory is that Q1 represents a version of the play taken down in inept shorthand by a member of the audience. Yet another, is that Q1 is Shakespeare’s rough draft. The argument against the latter theory is, as John Jowett puts it, ‘If Q1 Hamlet is an early draft, it represents a strange and otherwise unknown aspect of Shakespeare’s writing’ (Jowett, 97). Because it is understood to be a corrupt text, Q1 is often called the ‘Bad Quarto’. As we shall see later in this chapter, the language of Q1 is often very far from what is traditionally considered ‘Shakespearean’. Its versification is distinctly inferior and, in addition, Polonius is named Corambis, and Reynaldo is called Montano. Because Q1 is so much shorter than the other texts of Hamlet, some scholars argue it to have been the version of the play that was actually staged. Supporting this theory is the claim on the title page that it has been regularly performed: ‘[a]s it hath beene diverse times acted by his Highnesse servants in the Cittie of London: as also in the two Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, and else-where’.

Q2’s frontispiece, ‘THE Tragicall Historie of HAMLET, Prince of Denmarke. By William Shakespeare’, adds the following information to its title: ‘Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect Coppie.’ Here, the implication is that there was something decidedly untrue and imperfect about the Q1 version of the text that preceded it. Q2 was reprinted in 1611, which would seem to imply that the text was indeed a ‘true and perfect’ copy of Shakespeare’s own manuscript. However, the 1623 Folio text, the third and last printed version of the play, published 19 years after Q2 had appeared and seven years after Shakespeare’s death, differs again from Q2. We cannot dismiss such differences merely on the grounds that the Folio’s version could have been a bela...