Who's Behind the Q1 Hamlet Anyway?

Usually, after I've directed one of these "bad quarto" plays, I come away feeling like I have a better sense of how the text was produced. Not like it's an opinion that counts for much, and not like I think my experiences as a director should count for legitimate scholarly evidence, but when someone asks me "so what do you think?" I usually have an answer for them.

The title page of the 1603 (Q1) Hamlet.

With Hamlet I'm stumped.

There are a lot of really good theories out there that sell me on one answer or another, except for that one thing: the Q2 of Hamlet was printed the following year. Nicholas Ling (the N.L. of the title pages) had a hand in both printings, so even the old fashioned stories of corrupt stationers and literary piracy require some X-Files level conspiracy theories about the secret machinations of the Stationers' Company to sell a book that, as Peter W.M. Blayney has demonstrated, would have been a financial gamble in the best of cases.

If we accept that the Q2 text of Hamlet has the closest link to Shakespeare's draft, and I don't think that's an unreasonable assertion, it's hard not to see Q2 as an immediate corrective to Q1. The Arden 3 editors argue that the Folio copy derives from the Q2 copy, and then the Q1 copy derives from the F copy, and if we imagine that Shakespeare, who was also trying to make a name for himself as a literary poet, saw his name appear in print with what he viewed as a deformed copy of his work, he might have felt the need to make a deal with Ling in an attempt to restore his reputation.

The title page from the 1604 (Q2) Hamlet.
Though the title page is blemished, the date
is visible in the bottom-center of the page. 

But this still doesn't tell us where the Q1 copy came from. Or why Ling would have printed the book a second time when he didn't know the text well enough to raise questions or stop publication the first time around.

Ultimately, Q2 is the best evidence we have for how we should treat Q1: but even then, we can't really be sure that Q2 derives from Shakespeare's manuscript. I think it's plausible that the printing of Q1 sparked Shakespeare's concern with his legacy as a poet, and perhaps inspired him to be the "literary dramatist" that Lukas Erne sees him as, but that's a stretch based, in part, on my feeling that, while Q2 might make for better reading, Q1 actually makes for a better play, and this would be the sole example of Shakespeare taking an active interest in his legacy as a literary playwright.

For all we know, it might have been Ling himself who was disappointed with the Q1 Hamlet, and sought out a better copy text for a subsequent printing. But that depends on Ling, or his readers, being familiar with the stage performance of Hamlet and not finding the printed book faithful enough to the stage production. Which would, in turn, mean that Q1 probably wasn't the version played on stage, but also doesn't explain scene 14, as well as some of the other markers that the Q1 Hamlet derives, at least in part, from some performance text somehow. If someone was memorially reconstructing the play, why bother to invent a scene that collapsed several scenes into one? And what about all the "Os" and "Ahs" that seem to be transcriptions of actors speaking the speech?

The title page from the 1605 printing of
the Q2 Hamlet. 

Lacking better evidence, I just can't say where Q1 came from. I don't know what it is, and I don't have enough information to venture a guess, and lacking any further evidence, all we can do is suppose.

But there are some things I do know: for everyone who found the Q1 text to be lacking in compared to the conflations they're more familiar with, we've had someone say that this version of the play makes a lot more sense to them; some audience members who had never heard of us or of textual variants before came back to see the show again; and a couple of kids who came to see the play seemed to enjoy it. For all that, I stand by my earlier assessment: the longer texts of Hamlet might make for better literature, but the "bad quarto," at least in terms of its structure, makes for a better play.

Whatever it's origins, I am certainly glad we've had the chance to explore these questions in performance, I am grateful to the company of Hamlet, The First Quarto, and for all of our audience members for making the journey with us.

Two Kates, Two Answers. A look at the final speech in both texts.

In my last post, I wrote about what a “bad quarto” is, and how different printings of plays by Shakespeare can be wildly different. In the case of The Taming of a/the Shrew there is not even any scholarly consensus on whether The Taming of a Shrew was written by Shakespeare, or which play came first. Today I’m going to look at the ways in which the two plays are different in a very particular passage.

The two plays follow the same plot for the most part—the characters (excepting Sly and Kate) have different names but most of the scenes run parallel to their counterparts in the other play. In the final scene of the play (in both versions) Kate and her husband return to Kate’s father’s house for the wedding celebration of Kate’s younger sister(s). At one point the men make a bet about whose wife will come when he calls, and only Kate comes when commanded, promptly obedient, and fetches the other women as well. Kate’s husband then asks her to instruct the other women how they should treat their husbands, and in both versions Kate gives a long speech, but the content of those speeches is quite different. In The Shrew Kate gives a longer lecture, and covers a broader range argumentation over full forty-four lines. In A Shrew Kate has only 29 lines and confines her argument to a religious premise that women are inferior by design and by their own actions and history. Here are the two speeches in full, we’ll discuss them in closer detail in the following paragraphs. 

Kate in The Shrew gives her speech mainly comparing husbands and wives to kings and subjects. In her introduction (where she insults the women for their disagreeable facial expressions) she titles their husbands with the terms, "thy lord, thy king, thy governor." Throughout the speech she gives several reasons why women should not fight their husbands. In the first place, it's unattractive (with the troubled fountain analogy), secondly it's wrong (women owe their husbands obedience), and thirdly if you try to fight them you'll lose because they're stronger ("our lances are but straws").

Kate in A Shrew gives a bit more of a complex argument, even though she does it in a shorter space of time. Instead of merely asserting that husbands are the lords of their households, she gives an elaborate invocation of God as the creator of all things and bestower of power. Just as God creates, he also bestows order, gives bodies, and in his good will, woman became the "woe" to man, and therefore for her sin Adam died. In response women should behave should Sarah, Abraham's wife in the old testament, and their defining feature should be their obedience to the authority of their husbands, service to them in every way. Kate ends her speech (as in The Shrew) by offering her hand beneath her husband's foot. This speech reminds me of two speeches by Shakespeare's women. In the courtroom scene in The Merchant of Venice Portia answers Shylock's question about why he should be merciful by broadening the argument to show how God is merciful. Isabella, in Measure for Measure also talks about authority as coming from God. By contrast Isabella does not link authority and virtue, and unlike Anonymous' Kate, Isabella points out a certain fragile and arbitrary quality to authority. For Isabella authority is something you are dressed in, but for Kate, the ordering of the chain of authority is set in the epic language of creation and the cosmos.

BBC Shakespeare Retold, a personal favorite

At the level of the text, both of these speeches make me feel a little sick. It upsets me that these ideologies were ever considered valid, and upsets me still more that I continue to see similar sentiments expressed in our culture today. But I stand with Tony in considering the shorter of the two speeches to be the less misogynist of the two. There are many less debasing insults to women in the version from A Shrew, and the justification, while not one I stand with, is at least succinct and specific in its argument. However, like every text intended for performance, the words themselves only convey a fraction of the meaning when performed onstage. Either of these speeches is a wildly different statement depending on Kate's state of being. Has her husband broken her so she's speaking out of brainwashing? Is she showing up her sister? Has she learned the cultural expectations so well that she can perform them on cue whenever it's advantageous to do so? Is she wildly, passionately in love? I do not know what Tony plans on doing with this scene as he directs it, but I know that the audience is in for a unique view of this story. Whatever interpretation of the scene the actors present, the text they will speak is so rarely performed that it will be well worth the audience's attention. 

Henry V and Shakespeare's Rape Culture

Tom Berger, scholar in residence at the American Shakespeare Center's graduate program at Mary Baldwin College, was fond of reminding us to be careful about applying our post-Enlightenment sensibilities to pre-Enlightenment works, which I have found to be a wise mantra for anyone who performs Shakespeare's plays. Shakespeare's misogyny, in particular, can be appalling, and early modern rape culture is on full display in Henry V, or at least in the Folio version of it.

In versions of Henry V based on the Folio text, audiences are familiar with Henry's threat to the Governor of Harfleur:

If I begin the batt'rie once againe,
I will not leaue the halfe-atchieued Harflew,
Till in her ashes she lye buryed.
The Gates of Mercy shall be all shut vp,
And the flesh'd Souldier, rough and hard of heart,
In libertie of bloody hand, shall raunge
With Conscience wide as Hell, mowing like Grasse
Your fresh faire Virgins, and your flowring Infants. (TLN 1266 - 1273)

The quarto text implies more than it actually says:

if we begin the battery once againe
I will not leaue the halfe atchieued Harflew,
Till in her ashes she be buried,
The gates of mercie are all shut vp.
What say you, will you yeeld and this auoyd,
Or guiltie in defence be thus destroyd? (TLN 1265 - 1270)

Who knows why, but it's not hard to imagine either Burbage, Shakespare, or even the printer not wanting the epitome of Christian Kings threatening to order his men to rape the women and children of the first town in France he conquers.

By the time the play was printed, the gory specifics of Harry's threat were a bridge too far, and though the coarser verse in the quarto text may be a result of cutting and re-assembly, there are also possible performance implications of King Harry, who has previously declared that his passions are restrained by his reason, is uncomfortable with the idea of having to threaten (and follow through) this kind of destruction. Notably, the Folio-text verse, including the lines specifically threatening rape, is much more regular.

That all said, sexual violence was and is a part of war; it's not the part they put on the recruitment posters, and it's the part they want you to forget when they tell you to support the troops, but if the national embarrassment that was Abu Ghraib teaches us nothing else, it's that even female soldiers are not necessarily free from the lure of sexual violence in military conflict. This is all to say that Shakespeare, in the Folio text, may simply be acknowledging the reality of his (and Henry V's) time.

Still, the Folio text, the version regarded as solely the work of Shakespeare's hand, goes further:

     Dolphin. By Faith and Honor,
Our Madames mock at vs, and plainely say,
Our Mettell is bred out, and they will giue
Their bodyes to the Lust of English Youth,
To new-store France with Bastard Warriors.
     Brit. They bid vs to the English Dancing-Schooles,
And teach Lauolta's high, and swift Carranto's,
Saying, our Grace is onely in our Heeles,
And that we are most loftie Run-awayes. (TLN 1406 - 1414)

Rape is here not regarded as a crime of violence against women, it is adultery, and the petty treason of wives conspiring against their husbands is elevated to a higher form. French women are not being raped, they are throwing themselves at their conquerers to breed superior children. In performance, it generally comes off as a joke about the comparative weakness of the French, but Shakespeare is indicting female sexuality in general here.These lines, like Harry's explicit threats to Harfleur (Harflew) cited above, are notably absent in the quarto text.

This, it seems to me, is another great reason for exploring the quartos of Shakespeare's plays. While previous generations of scholars and editors disparaged the quartos as being the products of the play house, and thereby tainted by other hands and minds, they present us with a picture of early modern philosophy that we might rather regard as "less misogynist."

It's worth saying again that we don't know exactly who or why these changes were made to the text, and that we should be careful about applying our own post-Enlightenment philosophies to pre-Enlightenment works. Still, when the quarto texts speak better to our post-Enlightenment sensibilities, Shakespearean companies who ignore them because of the judgments of Victorian minds are passing up the opportunity to give their audiences a Shakespeare that, among other things, is more inclusive and accessible to the modern world.

Two Household friends...

I was trying to decide how to start talking about the "bad quarto" of Romeo and Juliet, when I finally decided that (like in Sound of Music) the beginning is a very good place to start.  The prologue of the "bad quarto" is a microcosm of the textual variances in the rest of the play.

So, instead of talking a bunch first, I'll get straight to the text. 
Here is the text from the quarto (edited only for spelling):

Two household Friends alike in dignity,

(In fair Verona, where we lay our Scene)

From civil broils broke into enmity,

Whose civil war makes civil hands unclean.

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes,

A pair of star-crossed Lovers took their life:

Whose misadventures, piteous overthrows,

(Through the continuing of their Fathers strife,

And death-marked passage of their Parents rage)

Is now the two hours traffic of our Stage.

The which if you with patient ears attend,

What here we want we'll study to amend.

It's close, right?  So close.  And yet so far from the words of the prologue that we all know:

Two households both alike in dignity,

(In fair Verona where we lay our Scene)

From ancient grudge, break to new mutiny,

Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean:

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes,

A pair of star-crossed lovers, take their life:

Whose misadventured piteous overthrows,

Doth with their death bury their Parents strife.

The fearful passage of their death-marked love,

And the continuance of their Parents rage:

Which but their children's end naught could remove:

Is now the two hours traffic of our Stage.

The which if you with patient ears attend,

What hear shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

 

 

 With these two passages, one can start to see how Shakespeare's re-write process may have taken place.  In fact, the second version of the prologue is from the second quarto of Romeo and Juliet published only two years after the "first draft".  Based on these two passages, I like to think of the first quarto as a rough draft for everything that was to come.  In reading that first prologue out loud, it's very easy for me to see Shakespeare in a rehearsal for this new play listening to the actors speak the lines and taking notes on all the rewrites.  That first quarto prologue looks pretty great on the page, but once you begin to say it out loud (even without the second one in your head), the language is clunky.  It doesn't flow off the tongue the way most Shakespeare does.

To be very specific, let's look at just the first line: "Two household friends alike in dignity" versus "Two households both alike in dignity".  Why the word "friends"?  Shakespeare needed a word there to make the iambic pentameter work.  But the word "friends" seems like an odd choice.  He's about to write a play about two bitter enemies, but begins with the word "friends".  Is it possible that as the beginning of the sonnet, Shakespeare wasn't sure what sort of play he was writing and, once he figured it out at the end, didn't go back to revise before handing the script to the actors?  This question, and thousands of others like it, are the reason I love textual variance.  In changing a word, Shakespeare can change a whole character, or a whole play.

To sum up, the first quarto simply hasn't cooked enough.  Shakespeare, it seems, hadn't taken quite enough time to pick out all the right words yet, so what you've got with the entire text of the first quarto is a play that is so close to perfect and yet not quite there.

-Shannon