poykiwi.blogg.se

For that, editors have long looked to Q2, which was published by Nicholas Ling and a different partner, James Roberts. In fact, Q1 works so well on stage that, despite overwhelming evidence for its being a memorial reconstruction, some people believe it was performed this way originally, as a touring version of the play.Įven those who argue for this scenario don't believe Q1 is much like what was performed in the Globe. Part of the fun of a Q1 performance is hearing unfamiliar versions of familiar passages-the fourth soliloquy, for example, begins, "To be, or not to be ay, there's the point"-but Q1 also succeeds on its own terms, gripping the audience as it moves toward a satisfying climax. Q1 works well on stage, as I saw myself several years ago when the Blue Room Theater put on a superb performance over a hardware store in Chico, California (the Paris of Butte County). (If you'd like to see for yourself, Cambridge has a modern-spelling edition with good notes.) Nor does it mean that this Hamlet doesn't work in performance. The fourth and fifth acts are scrawnier, but this doesn't mean Q1 is an unsatisfying read. Perhaps he and the actor who played Cornelius, the other ambassador, helped each other change, since the Cornelius actor might also have played Bernardo, the other soldier who has seen the Ghost.īecause the Q1 actor was onstage so much, his Hamlet has a robust first act it also has hearty second and third acts since in the second he returned as Voltemand, delivering news of the ambassadors' visit to Norway, and in the third he played Lucianus, the Mousetrap murderer who pours poison-"mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected (3.2.235)-into the Player King's ear. Doubling Marcellus and Voltemand necessitated a quick costume change since in the second scene the actor had to exit as Voltemand and return as Marcellus. The Q1 actor also played Voltemand, one of the ambassadors Claudius sends to the Norwegian king.

Marcellus accompanies Horatio to see the Ghost, helps tell the tale to Hamlet, tries to stop Hamlet from speaking to the Ghost, says "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark" (1.4.67), and swears not to reveal what he has seen.

He first appeared as Marcellus, one of the two soldiers who have seen the Ghost before the play begins.

Naturally the better Q1 lines are ones the actor spoke on stage. During copying, lines got screwed up or left out, so Q1 lines are sometimes better-and thus considered more authoritative-than the parallel ones in Q2 and F. You might think these origins mean that Q1 lines are always inferior to Q2 and F lines, but it isn't so. This is why Q1 is shorter than Q2, which was copied from Shakespeare's manuscript, and F, which was copied from the company's promptbook. We don't know which actor sold them the play, but we can guess which characters he played since in Q1 the scenes in which those characters appear are well rendered, while other scenes are sketchy or non-existent. The first Hamlet was printed and sold by Nicholas Ling and John Trundell. Be very afraid"-Elizabethan printers and booksellers were often the same people. Just as Amazon now both sells and publishes books-to authors and publishers who don't think this is a big deal, like Geena Davis in The Fly, I say, "Be afraid. The only Elizabethans who made money from published plays were the people who sold them initially, the printers, and the booksellers. Copyright laws protected printers but-until the 1710 Statute of Anne-not authors. Paul's and sell a play without giving the playwright tuppence. In Shakespeare's day, any actor who could do this could trot down to the printers' shops near St. Q1's brevity results from its being a "memorial reconstruction," a play recreated by an actor from memory. Folio pages were made from folding sheets in half.) The earliest published Hamlet, the 1603 First Quarto (Q1), is far shorter, with just over 17,000 words. Pages in a quarto were made from folding sheets of paper in quarters. ("Quarto" and "folio" are printers' terms designating how a book was made. The versions of Hamlet most people read today are about 2,000 words longer than the longest early versions: the 1604 Second Quarto (Q2) has just over 30,000 words, while the version in the 1623 First Folio (F) has just under 30,000. Why is Kenneth Branagh's 1996 Hamlet so long? The seemingly obvious answer-it's long because, as Wikipedia says, it contains "every word of Shakespeare's play"-doesn't cut it because we don't know how long Shakespeare's play is.