ON READING HAMLET FOR THE FIRST TIME
Record: 1 Title: On reading Hamlet for the first time. Authors: Cohen, Michael Source: College Literature; Feb92, Vol. 19 Issue 1, p48, 12p
Document Type: Literary Criticism Subject Terms: *CRITICISM Reviews & Products: HAMLET (Book) Abstract: Presents the author's reflections regarding the difficulty of approaching `Hamlet,' without preconception and a kind of `prereading.' History of the first reading of `Hamlet'; Axiom taken by the body of `Hamlet' criticism; Proposal of the new sort of school text for `Hamlet.'
Full Text Word Count: 6063 ISSN: 00933139 Accession Number: 9603201693 Persistent link to this record (Permalink): http://libproxy2.usouthal.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=9603201693&login.asp&site=ehost-live&scope=site Cut and Paste: <A href="http://libproxy2.usouthal.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=9603201693&login.asp&site=ehost-live&scope=site">On reading Hamlet for the first time.</A> Database: Academic Search Premier ON READING HAMLET FOR THE FIRST TIME As a teacher I know how refreshing it would be to start from scratch when my students read a work whose reputation precedes it into the classroom. "How pleasant," I think to myself, "if these students had never heard anything about Oedipus Rex and were not convinced even before they open their books that Oedipus has a `tragic flaw' and that it is pride." The experience must be similar for art historians beginning to talk about the Mona Lisa. Conductors must have something of the same feeling when they start to rehearse Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.[1]
Teachers have always found that one of the biggest parts of the job is unteaching. Samuel Johnson talked about the difficulties of prying students loose from their misapprehensions. Francois Rabelais, who taught medicine, knew how frustrated one can become with the mind that cannot receive an idea without preconceptions, and in Gargantua and Pantagruel (1541) he describes a wonderful remedy. When the capable Renaissance scholar Ponocrates takes over the instruction of Gargantua, his young giant student has already learned some things -- badly --under his incompetent tutor, the old-fashioned pedant Tubal Holofernes. Ponocrates uses a kind of mental laxative to flush out Gargantua's brain. I quote from the LeClercq translation:
The scholar purged Gargantua canonically [I know this means according to the canons of law -- that is, in the approved way --but I cannot help thinking also of the image of the purging of the giant like a cannon. Boom!] with Anticyrian hellebore, an herb indicated for cerebral disorders and insanity, thus cleansing his brain of its unnatural, perverse condition. Ponocrates, by the same aperient means, made the lad forget all he had learned under his former teachers. (66)
Rabelais also reminds us that the legendary music teacher Timotheus charged twice his usual fee to instruct students who had already had another teacher.
I mention these examples by way of prelude to considering the desirability and the difficulty of approaching such a work as Hamlet without preconception, without a kind of "prereading." The first question I have to ask is whether a pristine approach is even possible. Can one read Hamlet for the first time?
1 An educational films flyer I recently received calls Hamlet "the world's greatest play." Incredibly enough, even after thinking about Hamlet for many years and devoting a year of my life to writing about it, I have never thought of the play in those terms. They seem to baldly ethnocentric. But I am far from immune to the power the play wields as cultural icon, and the power affected me even before I read the play --as it affects most literate people in the culture before they read it, after they read it, whether or not they read it.
The history of my own "first" reading of Hamlet is peculiar and not very flattering. In my freshman year at college I happened to mention the play in conversation with my roommate, whose intellectual pretensions were as anxious as my own. He was reading T.S. Eliot in an English class, and he had gotten hold of Eliot's essay about Hamlet. There Eliot presents J.M. Robertson's view that the play is a failed attempt to combine the elements from several previous versions with Shakespeare's own vision of character and motive. Robertson's arguments did not come through to me in this conversation; what shocked and angered me was my friend's smug repetition of Eliot's judgment that the play is "an artistic failure." I knew it was no such thing, and I argued as eloquently as I could for the conventional view that Hamlet is a masterpiece, if not "the world's greatest play." I was somewhat hampered by not having read it, and I wanted to conceal that fact at least as much as I wanted to win the argument. If my friend was unaware that I had not read the play it was only because he had not read it either, though his show was more convincing -- he had at least read Eliot.
The discussion was not really about Hamlet, after all, but about iconoclasm: we were arguing whether one cultural icon could be broken by another. It was a kind of rock-scissors-paper game in which he was trying to say that Shakespeare was scissors and Eliot was rock, and I was arguing that Shakespeare was above any of those categories, was not touchable by criticism. Eliot, through my friend, had challenged a received Hamlet, one in my mind rather than on the page. That extratextual Hamlet has a real, unquenchable, and even frightening existence, as Stephen Booth points out: "The Hamlet that emerges from a critical discussion of it by a critic in a book or a group of critics in a twelfth-grade classroom never survives longer than the discussion that gave it birth. By nightfall, the real Hamlet -- the monster for which the discussion provided a docile alternative -- is out of its coffin and stalking the culture as usual" (262).
When I did read the play, as soon as I could after this exchange with my roommate, I read it with an agenda. I read to find not only its appeal but its unity; I read to find in it a refutation of Eliot's judgment. While my experience can hardly by typical, what I do think is typical is carrying entirely too much baggage along on one's first trip to Elsinore. Travelers are likely to bring a heavy trunk marked "Cultural Icon -- Do Not Smash." They may have a small nostrum bag with remedies for anticipated ailments such as melancholy and Oedipal fixation. These days the luggage pile will also have a couple of trendy valises emblazoned with brand names like Kline and Gibson. It is clearly not the same baggage carried by a contemporary of Coleridge or Goethe, although that icon trunk is a pretty old item. Coleridge and Goethe were ready for a Hamlet who reflected their own sensibilities and those of their age. The found one averse to action, without "the strength of nerve which forms a hero" (Goethe 1:282). In this half-century there have been two generations of actors who have helped form a different cultural picture of Hamlet as resolute and butch. Richard Burton and Richard Chamberlain were the strong Hamlets of the sixties; Kevin Kline and Mel Gibson, of the beginning of the nineties. New readers of Hamlet five years from now will be as likely to know that Gibson played Hamlet --with whatever expectations that entails about a Mad-Max-cum-lethal-cop -- as they are to know the rough outlines of the plot before opening the book.
And how likely are they to know the plot outline? Susan Snyder thinks very likely. "Everyone knows the end of the story," she writes:
It is rare to find a student who is unfamiliar with the outlines of the plot, even if he has never read or seen the play. When, some years ago, I did come across one who had somehow escaped foreknowledge, I was intrigued when he reported that up to the moment in the prayer scene when Claudius's own words condemned him, he had thought the King might be innocent. My student was a little ashamed, thinking that his late enlightenment showed him unperceptive. But in fact his experience probably came closer to Shakespeare's intention than that of his knowing classmates. (104)
The exception here tests a rule about most readers, who come to the play informed with knowledge and convictions that prevent an "innocent" first reading. Snyder believes -- and I agree with her -- that Hamlet was not a Renaissance Oedipus Rex whose story everyone could have been expected to know. Moreover, she writes, Shakespeare did his best to make the plot of Hamlet less predictable, by obscuring such matters as the Queen's guilt and the ghost's reliability, so that "even a spectator who knew the old story could not be sure it would proceed in the usual way" (105n). Shakespeare, in other words, did his part toward making it possible to read or see Hamlet for the first time, a point I will return to when I talk about the texts of Hamlet later. But now the story is known by practically all new readers. They may not know all the details of plot, but they "know" the main character in a way that he can only be known without reading the play. And the play cannot be read without going through this spurious first knowledge. The foreknowledge seems to suggest, discouragingly, that a first reading of Hamlet is not really possible.
Someone outside our culture does not necessarily have fewer barriers between himself and Shakespeare. A 1966 Natural History article entitled "Shakespeare in the Bush," written by the anthropologist Laura Bohannon, recounts with much humor a futile attempt to explain the plot of Hamlet to West African tribesmen. Though she and they were equally convinced at the outset that "people are the same everywhere" (33), the tribal elders interpreted the story according to their own sage knowledge of how a culture operates. In their interpretation Laertes must have killed his sister, and Hamlet is truly mad because no young man can ever use violence against his senior relatives, even to avenge a murder (32-33).[2]
The closest thing we could get to a pristine first reading, it might be conjectured, would be a reading by young people without literary backgrounds or ambitions. These exclusionary principles point to students who attend American public schools and plan careers outside the humanities. With this idea in mind I was naturally interested to read Martha Tuck Rozett's account, in the most recent Shakespeare Quarterly issue devoted to teaching Shakespeare, of some first readings of Hamlet by her SUNY Albany undergraduate class. Among the responses she discovered was a nearly unanimous admiration for Fortinbras; she summarizes the students' opinion of him as "the brisk pragmatist who succeeds" and who provides "an unambiguously positive example for Hamlet" (213).
Rozett is not arguing that these readings are "innocent." She thinks that some of these students are taking the pragmatic line on the play because they are confirming major is business and where English majors are often business majors who have changed their minds (213,216). She also suspects that these students "felt uncomfortable with Hamlet's tolerance for ambiguity because it seemed to threaten their own need for certainty and order" (214). Finally, she believes that there is a subcultural prereading going on here: "The language of these judgments strongly reflects frequently used verbal formulas in the readers' subculture" (215); these are students who are pressured to be practical, to think about the future, perhaps to stop dreaming, and they write about Hamlet in the same phrases others have used to exhort them to act.
All of this suggests that a reading of Hamlet is overdetermined from the beginning: in the mind of the person reading Hamlet for the "first" time, a culturally determined received extratextual interpretation of Hamlet joins a subculturally determined way or receiving any text. This conclusion agrees with one of the points New Historicists criticism has made most convincingly about the nature of all texts. "The artist's imagination," writes Stephen Greenblatt in the introduction to a collection of articles from the journal Representations, "is already a social construct" (vii). If Shakespeare's artistry cannot escape this determination, we can hardly expect a reader's reaction to do so. It is apparently not possible to read Hamlet for the first time. But where did I get the idea that it was desirable to try? Is there no argument that a first reading of Hamlet is desirable and possible?
2 A substantial part of the huge body of Hamlet criticism, it seems to me, takes as a axiom not only that an innocent first reading is possible, but that only through a recovery of that pristine experience, uncontaminated by our subsequent intellectualizings about the play, will we find the truth. This assumption informs many commentaries, even those exemplifying oppositional critical positions locked into the fiercest of dialectical struggles. To take just one school of critics, those who dismiss the idea that Hamlet delays, most profess to be believers in truth at first impression. Thus for example G. B. Harrison thinks that the problem of Hamlet's delay simply disappears if we are candid about what happens when we read or watch: "In the play which Shakespeare wrote," he states, "there is no delay" (109). Before Harrison, Thomas Kettle had made the same argument, saying that what strikes us on first reading or seeing Hamlet is the speed and determination of his action, impelled by destiny and punctuated by self-reproach only because those who are resolute, like Hamlet, are more likely to reproach themselves with not acting fast enough, just as a true saint is more likely to reproach himself with sin than one less holy (69). The members of this school, which also includes Karl Werder, the mid-nineteenth-century German critic, are always warning us about placing too much emphasis on a self-deprecating speech of Hamlet's that we can pick apart at our leisure, when such speeches actually occupy little time in the play, serving rather to punctuate longer periods of real activity.
However marginal these opinions about Hamlet's lack of delay may be, even the best critics frequently ask us to give ourselves up to our candid first impressions of the play, and they build from those impressions a coherent world or at least a self-supporting structure. when A. C. Bradley concentrates on character in Hamlet, he makes an implicit claim about the self-evident priority of the prince's character in a play which, after all, gives the longest speaking part in Shakespeare to that character; without thinking about it, we simply see more of Hamlet or read more of his words than we experience anything else in his play. G. Wilson Knight also makes an appeal based upon an unintellectualized reading, arguing that we must "refuse to be diverted from a clear vision...and watch only the actions and reactions of the persons as they appear" in the play (36). Knight's approach in The Wheel of Fire is an early example of reader-response criticism; he imagines readers at each point of a first encounter with Hamlet, and stands behind them drawing attention to particulars. "Notice [Claudiu's]...courteous yet dignified attitude to his subordinates," he prompts, or comments, again of Claudius, "The impression given by these speeches is one of quick efficiency" (37). He adds that "after the murder of Polonius we certainly feel that both the King and the Queen are sane and doing their level best to restrain that activities of a madman [that is, Hamlet]. That is the impression given by the play at this point, as we read" (41).
Similarly, C.S. Lewis, in his British Academy lecture "Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?" talks about his "immediate and spontaneous reaction" to this and other plays (11). Lewis argues that "our behavior when we are actually reading [is] wiser than our criticism in cold blood" (17). The reading he thinks not only possible, but the only valid one, is "naive and concrete":
I am trying to recall attention from the things an intellectual adult notices to the things a child or a peasant notes-night, ghosts, a castle, a lobby where a man can walk four hours together, a willow-fringed brook and a sad lady drowned, a graveyard and a terrible cliff above the sea, and amidst all these a pale man in black clothes (would that our producers would ever let him appear!) with his stockings coming down. (18)
The stockings coming down turn out to be an important part of the impression for Maynard Mack, too. In "The World of Hamlet," Mack writes that the play creates its own universe, composed of a general theatrical-cum-linguistic impression involving Hamlet's costume at any given point in the play and Hamlet's reiteration of words having to do with action, seeming, and assumption of appearances. Mack talks like the other critics I have been reviewing about the play's first impact: "The first attribute that impresses us, I think, is mysteriousness" (45), the remarks, and directs us away from Shakespeare's revisions of old plays and his psychological state: "We have still as critics to deal with effects, not causes" (46). He wants us to look at Hamlet as the play unfolds -- he is not necessarily talking about performance, but about Hamlet as he describes himself and as he is described by other. Thus Mack writes,
Hamlet's apparel now [at his first appearance in 1.2] is his inky cloak, mark of his grief for his father, mark also of his character as a man of melancholy, mark possibly too of his being one in whom appearance and reality are attuned. Later, in his madness, with his mind disordered, he will wear his costume in a corresponding disarray, the disarray that Ophelia describes so vividly to Polonius and that producers of the play rarely give sufficient heed to: "Lord Hamlet with his doublet all unbrac'd, No hat upon his head; his stockings foul'd, Ungarter'd, and down-gyved to his ankle." Here the only question will be, as with the madness itself, how much is studied, how much is real. Still later, by a third costume, the simple traveler's garb in which we find him new come from shipboard, Shakespeare will show us that we have a third aspect of the man.(51)
I am not recommending these critical views of Hamlet, though one can hardly ignore Bradley, Knight, Lewis, and Mack as significant readers of the play. Rather I am trying to highlight their common insistence that the play must be looked at as if with fresh eyes. They do not say that a look at it with a new critical approach can always be expected to yield the truth about the play; what is wanted is the eye and ear of a new reading and spectator. We have to be able to read Hamlet for the first time.
Some scholars have looked at the question of reading Hamlet for the first time as a historical problem. they try to recapture what it must have been like for Shakespeare's contemporaries to see Hamlet when it was new. These historical retrievals very often either confirm our own readings or offer a view of the play so odd as to seem irrelevant, even if its historical faithfulness could be vindicated.
Roland Mushat Frye sets out to look at Hamlet "in the light of the audiences for which it was initially written," using "vigorous historical scholarship" to recover the reactions of those audiences (3). In the Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600, he examines a whole series of lugubrious topics, from burial and mourning rituals and incest to tyrannicide and suicide. He offers an iconographic guide, with many contemporary illustrations, to much of the play's language. Frye is convinced that Elizabeth audience reactions were very different from those of modern audiences (3), yet he concludes that Shakespeare's contemporaries would have encountered the play with just as much doubt about such matters as the ghost, and just as much divided feeling about such question as the moral place of the revenge Hamlet is asked to perform (13-14).
Others find Shakespeare's contemporaries' first reactions to Hamlet so different from ours that we can hardly find in them any relevance to our own encounter with the play. The "contemporary reaction" that Arthur McGee recovers in The Elizabethan Hamlet, for example, finds the play full of sectarian conflict and anti-Catholicism. Likewise, Eleanor Prosser looks at revenge and finds Hamlet's task not only unjustifiable but diabolical, his every move toward it another step toward villainy. In Prosser's Hamlet and Revenge the ghost is a devil (102-03), Hamlet is far more like the villainous avengers of the revenge-tragedy tradition than like the ambiguous ones and far less like a hero, and the audience knows they are seeing an action in violation of all Christian precept (34).
What the "first impression" critics and the "historical retrieval" scholars are offering, finally, is a virtual or ideal first reading of the delay. Of course the "first impression" critics wish to approach the text unencumbered because they wish to approach is formalistically. As in the case of the Mona Lisa, some defamiliarization has to take place before formal relations can be seen in a work that seems already known. for a large number of American college teachers (a number much larger than the trendiest published criticism would lead one to expect), formalism is still important among the critical approaches we take to texts in the classroom. As one of these teacher, I do not argue with the insights of recent criticism concerning the historical and social construction that affects the production and the reception of such works as Hamlet. I believe that new readers need to know that they look at the play through a mist created by its 400-year percolation into the culture, that even without the mist they could not help reading it with twentieth-century eyes and minds, and that Shakespeare, for all his power to connect with their experience, was a person who though and spoke very differently from them. Hamlet is different and strange; we cannot help reading it with some preconceptions, but we need also to find the experience new.
How is the novelty to be fostered, the difference to be highlighted, and the preconception to be minimized? I do not see these questions as merely theoretical. They present themselves, first and most importantly, as questions bearing on the text the student reads. The text, after all, is that part of the student's experience of Hamlet over which we have the most control. But with current editions of the play, what a student encounters is a social construction in the most blatant sense; it is not Hamlet but a modern-type, modern-spelling conflation of early printed texts that reflects that individual editor's whim and outdated, unexamined assumptions and prejudices about the early printed texts.
School editions of Hamlet present the student with a text that looks "modern": its typeface and spelling are familiar, and the annotations suggest that all the jokes have been understood and catalogued. Such a text gets in the way of an encounter with Hamlet as something strange and different; it suggest that there are no mysteries about the play. At the same time it creates mysteries that were not there before, as I explain below. The pretense of modern conflated editions is that there is no problem about Hamlet's texts. Ignored or denied by such editions is the strangest editorial fact about the play: it is not one play but three, and its three early printed editions are not compatible. The present differences in the main characters and, in the case of the first version of the play, significant differences in the plot. As long as students have nothing but these school editions, they will not have a chance to read Hamlet for the first time, because they will not be reading Hamlet at all.
3 What I am proposing is a new sort of school text for Hamlet, the kind first suggested by Michael Warren in 1985, when he recommended a text providing "the earliest versions in photographic reproduction with their original confusions and corruptions unobscured by the interferences of later sophistication." Words could be glossed and textual emendations could be suggested, but Warren believes that beyond the original printed versions, "all further scholarship belongs in a commentary" (35). In such a reproductions of Shakespeare's works, some plays, such as Macbeth and The Tempest, would have a single text; Hamlet would have three: the First Quarto of 1603, the Second Quarto of 1604-05, and the First Folio text from the collected plays of Shakespeare published in 1623, seven years after his death. these texts are by no means considered of equal authority. The First Quarto is often called the "bad" quarto; many critics consider that is derives neither from a Shakespeare manuscript nor from one belonging to the playhouse but from the memories of those who played minor roles in a production of the play. Others deem the First Quarto an error-ridden copy of Shakespeare's first version of Hamlet, a version he later expanded and revised extensively.
Warren's argument for such a text is not technical. He believes that editions get "between the student or the scholar and the peculiar originals from which they derive" (27); they present as Shakespeare's text what is in fact conjecture, arbitrary choice among competing alternative readings, or simply inserted material not in any original. To construct such a text, he says, is "in many cases to create the play anew. Even the most sparing editor of Shakespear is an alterer" (27). With a play such as Hamlet a text that presents itself to the student as authoritative is specially misleading; as Warren points out, "there is not general agreement that the textual problems in Shakespear are of such complexity that no text can be established that will command the general assent that constitutes `definitiveness'" (26). Shakespearean scholars have agreed to disagree, but this fact is concealed whenever one looks at a conflated modern edition of Hamlet.
One small example of the complexity is Hamlet's "What a piece of worke is a man!" speech to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The Second Quarto has Hamlet say in wonder at a human being, "how expresse and admirable in action, how like and Angell in apprehension, how like a God." The Folio has it, "in forme and mouing how expresse and admirable? in Action, how like an Angell? in apprehension, how like a God." I have tried to point out in Hamlet in My Mind's Eye how this passage is handled by modern editors not according to their own editorial principles, which almost always privilege the Second Quarto text, but according to the editor's literary "feeling" about the passage, so that half choose the Second Quarto version and half choose the Folio version (the First Quarto does not contain this speech). Editors say that the Second Quarto is the authoritative copy text, but then they adopt readings from both other texts, emend readings, and end up with a mixture that is different from any original text and different from any other modern editor's text. Given this situation, it is not exaggerating to say that no student reading only a modern edition of Hamlet has read the play yet.
Warren worries that an edited text misrepresents itself as definitive, and thereby "dulls the attitude of the potential questioner" (33). In effect it answers questions before they can be asked. With the original texts a reader is immediately jolted out of the ease that spelling regularity and twentieth-century printing consistency bring to reading; ambiguities have to be confronted at each moment in an original text, because punctuation does not help and spelling may point in two or even three directions at once. The Hamlet in these texts is a stranger, is "defamiliarized," in Victor Shklovsky's term, making the habitual and known into the unfamiliar and strange (12). He is not our contemporary, our easily recognized cultural icon, but a figure suddenly distanced by centuries just through the medium of ink on the page.
For too long textual scholars have adopted the idea "that the task of a modern editor," as Steven Urkowitz puts it, is to "present, in a single text of a play, `what Shakespeare wrote,' with the (often unspoken) assumption . . . that Shakespeare wrote only one and never went back" (41). But throughout the eighties, textual scholars such as Warren, Urkowitz, and Paul Werstine reexamined the old assumptions and the old categories of texts, and Urkowitz for one is convinced that the relationship among the three early texts of Hamlet is one of successive revisions. Perhaps his most telling example concerns Hamlet's mother The First Quarto Queen, when she is told by young Hamlet of her new husband's murder of old Hamlet, categorically denies any knowledge of it and agrees to help in the revenge. She also discovers from Horatio that her present husband has plotted to have young Hamlet killed in England, giving her another motive to assist her son. In both the Second Quarto and the Folio texts, the Queen's complicity or knowledge of old Hamlet's murder is left an open question (Hamlet mentions killing a king but never accuses Claudius of murder), and left open also is her willingness to follow Hamlet's advice to separate herself from the King. As Urkowitz comments:
It should be noted that the Queen's actions in the First Quarto --her acknowledgment of guilt, and her allying herself with Hamlet against the King -- resemble the actions of the equivalent character in the play's sources, and that the Queen's ignorance of her husband's guilt in the Second Quarto and the Folio is a departure from those sources. If, as the conventional explanation has it, theatrical pirates indeed produced the First Quarto text, they worked most peculiarly, accidentally reinventing details of a plot Shakespeare had abandoned from his sources. (48)
Werstine "tentatively suggest" that many of the mysterious or ambiguous features of Hamlet and its main character are caused by conflating the Second Quarto and the Folio texts, each less mysterious and more consistent taken by itself (2). He gives as one example the case of Hamlet's apology to Laertes and its motivation. The two original texts each suggest a separate motive for Hamlet's apology to Laertes before the duel in the last scene. In the Second Quarto a lord comes in after Osric has proposed the match, Hamlet has accepted, and Osric has exited. This lord tells Hamlet, "The Queene desires you to vse some gentle entertainment to Laertes, before you fall to play." Hamlet replies. "Shee well instructs me," and thus Hamlet's apology is prepared for. Neither the character of the lord nor the dialogue appears in the Folio, which has another explanation for Hamlet's apology. In the Folio, Hamlet says to Horatio before Osric's entry:
but I am very sorry good Horatio, That to Laertes I forgot my selfe; For by the image of may Cause, I see The Portraiture of his; Ile count his favours: But sure the brauery of his griefe did put me Into a Towring passion.
The Second Quarto does not have this speech. When a modern editor conflates the two texts, Hamlet suddenly acquires two motives for his apology. Thus as Werstine suggests, "it could well seem that Hamlet began to empathize, remembered his rage, and finally needed a push form Gertrude to apologize" (4). In each original text we have a single, straightforward Hamlet with no wavering and one motive for his apology.
As Werstine also points out, the Hamlet of the Second Quarto is more consistently suspicious, "identifying his schoolfellow as Claudius's informers before they have an opportunity to expose themselves" (17) and later telling his mother than neither they nor Claudius can be up to any good in the enforced trip to England. The Folio Hamlet relies a little more on chance and opportunity, waiting for his friends to betray themselves by their talk of ambition, later justifying his destruction of them by his observation that "they did make loue to this imployment" -- a remark occurring only in the Folio.
The point consistently made by Warren, Urkowitz, and Werstine is that modern editors give us reading that do not exist in any of the three original Hamlet editions. And these conflated readings will differ from editor to editor. The principle that each original text is flawed in itself, but all point to an ideal, single Hamlet, is a principle that can never get us to that ideal text, which is only a conjecture. At the same time, this editorial principle also keeps us from ever looking at any of the real, extant texts of Hamlet whole and entire. The solution to this problem, and it is far from a perfect one, is a school edition of Hamlet that presents all three texts in photographic facsimile.
What student, assigned the task of reading al already long play, is going to lengthen the work by reading three versions, you may ask. Perhaps none. But perhaps many. There is an undeniable appeal in looking at "the world's greatest play" as something Shakespeare was not satisfied with in its first incarnation. There is an appeal in imaging oneself inside Shakespeare's head, watching him change language and sharpen dramatic effect. And if Snyder is right in her conjecture that Shakespeare worked hard to make the plot of Hamlet less predictable and less like the old story that was its source, there is an appeal in seeing those changes as well. But even if all three versions were not read they would be there for comparison. The worst result one can imagine is that of a student reading only the First Quarto; after all, it is considerably shorter than the other texts. This is, I know, going to shock all those whose teachers or editors have convinced them about the heinous "memorial reconstruction" of the "bad" quarto, but I am convinced that a student who read only the First Quarto text of Hamlet, in its unedited state, would have a better idea of one of Shakespeare's plays of Hamlet than a student who has read only a modern edition conflating readings from the three substantive texts. In any case, we would have offered the student the best chance we could of being able to read Hamlet for the first time.
NOTES [1] An earlier version of this paper was presented as a Senior Humanities Series lecture at Willamette University on 6 March 1991.
[2] Within our own culture, too, linguistic changes and obsoleteness of words can make barriers to any attentive reading. My older son tells me he could never picture the ghost o old Hamlet without laughing after Horatio had said to Hamlet of the apparition, "O yes, my Lord, he wore his Beauer vp."
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Rabelais, Francois. The Five Books of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Trans. Jacques LeClercq. Norwalk: Heritage, 1942.
Rozett, Martha Tuck. "Holding Mirrors Up to Nature: First Readers as Moralists." Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 211-21.
Shklovsky, Victor. "Art as Technique." Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965.
Snyder, Susan. The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare's Tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet Othello, and King Lear. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979.
Urkowitz, Steven. "Well-sayd olde Mole': Burying Three Hamlets in Modern Editions." Shakespeare Study Today. Ed. Georgianna Ziegler, New York: AMS, 1986. 37-10.
Warren Michael J. "Textual Problems, Editorial Assertions in Editions of Shakespeare." Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation. Ed. Jerome J. McGann. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. 23-37.
Werstine, Paul. "The Textual Mystery of Hamlet." Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 1-26.
~~~~~~~~
By Michael Cohen
Cohen is the author of Hamlet in My Mind's Eye (Georgia, 1989), which won the SAMLA Studies Award. He has also written Engaging English Art: Entering the Work in Two Centuries of English Painting and Poetry (Alabama, 1987).
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Document Type: Literary Criticism Subject Terms: *CRITICISM Reviews & Products: HAMLET (Book) Abstract: Presents the author's reflections regarding the difficulty of approaching `Hamlet,' without preconception and a kind of `prereading.' History of the first reading of `Hamlet'; Axiom taken by the body of `Hamlet' criticism; Proposal of the new sort of school text for `Hamlet.'
Full Text Word Count: 6063 ISSN: 00933139 Accession Number: 9603201693 Persistent link to this record (Permalink): http://libproxy2.usouthal.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=9603201693&login.asp&site=ehost-live&scope=site Cut and Paste: <A href="http://libproxy2.usouthal.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=9603201693&login.asp&site=ehost-live&scope=site">On reading Hamlet for the first time.</A> Database: Academic Search Premier ON READING HAMLET FOR THE FIRST TIME As a teacher I know how refreshing it would be to start from scratch when my students read a work whose reputation precedes it into the classroom. "How pleasant," I think to myself, "if these students had never heard anything about Oedipus Rex and were not convinced even before they open their books that Oedipus has a `tragic flaw' and that it is pride." The experience must be similar for art historians beginning to talk about the Mona Lisa. Conductors must have something of the same feeling when they start to rehearse Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.[1]
Teachers have always found that one of the biggest parts of the job is unteaching. Samuel Johnson talked about the difficulties of prying students loose from their misapprehensions. Francois Rabelais, who taught medicine, knew how frustrated one can become with the mind that cannot receive an idea without preconceptions, and in Gargantua and Pantagruel (1541) he describes a wonderful remedy. When the capable Renaissance scholar Ponocrates takes over the instruction of Gargantua, his young giant student has already learned some things -- badly --under his incompetent tutor, the old-fashioned pedant Tubal Holofernes. Ponocrates uses a kind of mental laxative to flush out Gargantua's brain. I quote from the LeClercq translation:
The scholar purged Gargantua canonically [I know this means according to the canons of law -- that is, in the approved way --but I cannot help thinking also of the image of the purging of the giant like a cannon. Boom!] with Anticyrian hellebore, an herb indicated for cerebral disorders and insanity, thus cleansing his brain of its unnatural, perverse condition. Ponocrates, by the same aperient means, made the lad forget all he had learned under his former teachers. (66)
Rabelais also reminds us that the legendary music teacher Timotheus charged twice his usual fee to instruct students who had already had another teacher.
I mention these examples by way of prelude to considering the desirability and the difficulty of approaching such a work as Hamlet without preconception, without a kind of "prereading." The first question I have to ask is whether a pristine approach is even possible. Can one read Hamlet for the first time?
1 An educational films flyer I recently received calls Hamlet "the world's greatest play." Incredibly enough, even after thinking about Hamlet for many years and devoting a year of my life to writing about it, I have never thought of the play in those terms. They seem to baldly ethnocentric. But I am far from immune to the power the play wields as cultural icon, and the power affected me even before I read the play --as it affects most literate people in the culture before they read it, after they read it, whether or not they read it.
The history of my own "first" reading of Hamlet is peculiar and not very flattering. In my freshman year at college I happened to mention the play in conversation with my roommate, whose intellectual pretensions were as anxious as my own. He was reading T.S. Eliot in an English class, and he had gotten hold of Eliot's essay about Hamlet. There Eliot presents J.M. Robertson's view that the play is a failed attempt to combine the elements from several previous versions with Shakespeare's own vision of character and motive. Robertson's arguments did not come through to me in this conversation; what shocked and angered me was my friend's smug repetition of Eliot's judgment that the play is "an artistic failure." I knew it was no such thing, and I argued as eloquently as I could for the conventional view that Hamlet is a masterpiece, if not "the world's greatest play." I was somewhat hampered by not having read it, and I wanted to conceal that fact at least as much as I wanted to win the argument. If my friend was unaware that I had not read the play it was only because he had not read it either, though his show was more convincing -- he had at least read Eliot.
The discussion was not really about Hamlet, after all, but about iconoclasm: we were arguing whether one cultural icon could be broken by another. It was a kind of rock-scissors-paper game in which he was trying to say that Shakespeare was scissors and Eliot was rock, and I was arguing that Shakespeare was above any of those categories, was not touchable by criticism. Eliot, through my friend, had challenged a received Hamlet, one in my mind rather than on the page. That extratextual Hamlet has a real, unquenchable, and even frightening existence, as Stephen Booth points out: "The Hamlet that emerges from a critical discussion of it by a critic in a book or a group of critics in a twelfth-grade classroom never survives longer than the discussion that gave it birth. By nightfall, the real Hamlet -- the monster for which the discussion provided a docile alternative -- is out of its coffin and stalking the culture as usual" (262).
When I did read the play, as soon as I could after this exchange with my roommate, I read it with an agenda. I read to find not only its appeal but its unity; I read to find in it a refutation of Eliot's judgment. While my experience can hardly by typical, what I do think is typical is carrying entirely too much baggage along on one's first trip to Elsinore. Travelers are likely to bring a heavy trunk marked "Cultural Icon -- Do Not Smash." They may have a small nostrum bag with remedies for anticipated ailments such as melancholy and Oedipal fixation. These days the luggage pile will also have a couple of trendy valises emblazoned with brand names like Kline and Gibson. It is clearly not the same baggage carried by a contemporary of Coleridge or Goethe, although that icon trunk is a pretty old item. Coleridge and Goethe were ready for a Hamlet who reflected their own sensibilities and those of their age. The found one averse to action, without "the strength of nerve which forms a hero" (Goethe 1:282). In this half-century there have been two generations of actors who have helped form a different cultural picture of Hamlet as resolute and butch. Richard Burton and Richard Chamberlain were the strong Hamlets of the sixties; Kevin Kline and Mel Gibson, of the beginning of the nineties. New readers of Hamlet five years from now will be as likely to know that Gibson played Hamlet --with whatever expectations that entails about a Mad-Max-cum-lethal-cop -- as they are to know the rough outlines of the plot before opening the book.
And how likely are they to know the plot outline? Susan Snyder thinks very likely. "Everyone knows the end of the story," she writes:
It is rare to find a student who is unfamiliar with the outlines of the plot, even if he has never read or seen the play. When, some years ago, I did come across one who had somehow escaped foreknowledge, I was intrigued when he reported that up to the moment in the prayer scene when Claudius's own words condemned him, he had thought the King might be innocent. My student was a little ashamed, thinking that his late enlightenment showed him unperceptive. But in fact his experience probably came closer to Shakespeare's intention than that of his knowing classmates. (104)
The exception here tests a rule about most readers, who come to the play informed with knowledge and convictions that prevent an "innocent" first reading. Snyder believes -- and I agree with her -- that Hamlet was not a Renaissance Oedipus Rex whose story everyone could have been expected to know. Moreover, she writes, Shakespeare did his best to make the plot of Hamlet less predictable, by obscuring such matters as the Queen's guilt and the ghost's reliability, so that "even a spectator who knew the old story could not be sure it would proceed in the usual way" (105n). Shakespeare, in other words, did his part toward making it possible to read or see Hamlet for the first time, a point I will return to when I talk about the texts of Hamlet later. But now the story is known by practically all new readers. They may not know all the details of plot, but they "know" the main character in a way that he can only be known without reading the play. And the play cannot be read without going through this spurious first knowledge. The foreknowledge seems to suggest, discouragingly, that a first reading of Hamlet is not really possible.
Someone outside our culture does not necessarily have fewer barriers between himself and Shakespeare. A 1966 Natural History article entitled "Shakespeare in the Bush," written by the anthropologist Laura Bohannon, recounts with much humor a futile attempt to explain the plot of Hamlet to West African tribesmen. Though she and they were equally convinced at the outset that "people are the same everywhere" (33), the tribal elders interpreted the story according to their own sage knowledge of how a culture operates. In their interpretation Laertes must have killed his sister, and Hamlet is truly mad because no young man can ever use violence against his senior relatives, even to avenge a murder (32-33).[2]
The closest thing we could get to a pristine first reading, it might be conjectured, would be a reading by young people without literary backgrounds or ambitions. These exclusionary principles point to students who attend American public schools and plan careers outside the humanities. With this idea in mind I was naturally interested to read Martha Tuck Rozett's account, in the most recent Shakespeare Quarterly issue devoted to teaching Shakespeare, of some first readings of Hamlet by her SUNY Albany undergraduate class. Among the responses she discovered was a nearly unanimous admiration for Fortinbras; she summarizes the students' opinion of him as "the brisk pragmatist who succeeds" and who provides "an unambiguously positive example for Hamlet" (213).
Rozett is not arguing that these readings are "innocent." She thinks that some of these students are taking the pragmatic line on the play because they are confirming major is business and where English majors are often business majors who have changed their minds (213,216). She also suspects that these students "felt uncomfortable with Hamlet's tolerance for ambiguity because it seemed to threaten their own need for certainty and order" (214). Finally, she believes that there is a subcultural prereading going on here: "The language of these judgments strongly reflects frequently used verbal formulas in the readers' subculture" (215); these are students who are pressured to be practical, to think about the future, perhaps to stop dreaming, and they write about Hamlet in the same phrases others have used to exhort them to act.
All of this suggests that a reading of Hamlet is overdetermined from the beginning: in the mind of the person reading Hamlet for the "first" time, a culturally determined received extratextual interpretation of Hamlet joins a subculturally determined way or receiving any text. This conclusion agrees with one of the points New Historicists criticism has made most convincingly about the nature of all texts. "The artist's imagination," writes Stephen Greenblatt in the introduction to a collection of articles from the journal Representations, "is already a social construct" (vii). If Shakespeare's artistry cannot escape this determination, we can hardly expect a reader's reaction to do so. It is apparently not possible to read Hamlet for the first time. But where did I get the idea that it was desirable to try? Is there no argument that a first reading of Hamlet is desirable and possible?
2 A substantial part of the huge body of Hamlet criticism, it seems to me, takes as a axiom not only that an innocent first reading is possible, but that only through a recovery of that pristine experience, uncontaminated by our subsequent intellectualizings about the play, will we find the truth. This assumption informs many commentaries, even those exemplifying oppositional critical positions locked into the fiercest of dialectical struggles. To take just one school of critics, those who dismiss the idea that Hamlet delays, most profess to be believers in truth at first impression. Thus for example G. B. Harrison thinks that the problem of Hamlet's delay simply disappears if we are candid about what happens when we read or watch: "In the play which Shakespeare wrote," he states, "there is no delay" (109). Before Harrison, Thomas Kettle had made the same argument, saying that what strikes us on first reading or seeing Hamlet is the speed and determination of his action, impelled by destiny and punctuated by self-reproach only because those who are resolute, like Hamlet, are more likely to reproach themselves with not acting fast enough, just as a true saint is more likely to reproach himself with sin than one less holy (69). The members of this school, which also includes Karl Werder, the mid-nineteenth-century German critic, are always warning us about placing too much emphasis on a self-deprecating speech of Hamlet's that we can pick apart at our leisure, when such speeches actually occupy little time in the play, serving rather to punctuate longer periods of real activity.
However marginal these opinions about Hamlet's lack of delay may be, even the best critics frequently ask us to give ourselves up to our candid first impressions of the play, and they build from those impressions a coherent world or at least a self-supporting structure. when A. C. Bradley concentrates on character in Hamlet, he makes an implicit claim about the self-evident priority of the prince's character in a play which, after all, gives the longest speaking part in Shakespeare to that character; without thinking about it, we simply see more of Hamlet or read more of his words than we experience anything else in his play. G. Wilson Knight also makes an appeal based upon an unintellectualized reading, arguing that we must "refuse to be diverted from a clear vision...and watch only the actions and reactions of the persons as they appear" in the play (36). Knight's approach in The Wheel of Fire is an early example of reader-response criticism; he imagines readers at each point of a first encounter with Hamlet, and stands behind them drawing attention to particulars. "Notice [Claudiu's]...courteous yet dignified attitude to his subordinates," he prompts, or comments, again of Claudius, "The impression given by these speeches is one of quick efficiency" (37). He adds that "after the murder of Polonius we certainly feel that both the King and the Queen are sane and doing their level best to restrain that activities of a madman [that is, Hamlet]. That is the impression given by the play at this point, as we read" (41).
Similarly, C.S. Lewis, in his British Academy lecture "Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?" talks about his "immediate and spontaneous reaction" to this and other plays (11). Lewis argues that "our behavior when we are actually reading [is] wiser than our criticism in cold blood" (17). The reading he thinks not only possible, but the only valid one, is "naive and concrete":
I am trying to recall attention from the things an intellectual adult notices to the things a child or a peasant notes-night, ghosts, a castle, a lobby where a man can walk four hours together, a willow-fringed brook and a sad lady drowned, a graveyard and a terrible cliff above the sea, and amidst all these a pale man in black clothes (would that our producers would ever let him appear!) with his stockings coming down. (18)
The stockings coming down turn out to be an important part of the impression for Maynard Mack, too. In "The World of Hamlet," Mack writes that the play creates its own universe, composed of a general theatrical-cum-linguistic impression involving Hamlet's costume at any given point in the play and Hamlet's reiteration of words having to do with action, seeming, and assumption of appearances. Mack talks like the other critics I have been reviewing about the play's first impact: "The first attribute that impresses us, I think, is mysteriousness" (45), the remarks, and directs us away from Shakespeare's revisions of old plays and his psychological state: "We have still as critics to deal with effects, not causes" (46). He wants us to look at Hamlet as the play unfolds -- he is not necessarily talking about performance, but about Hamlet as he describes himself and as he is described by other. Thus Mack writes,
Hamlet's apparel now [at his first appearance in 1.2] is his inky cloak, mark of his grief for his father, mark also of his character as a man of melancholy, mark possibly too of his being one in whom appearance and reality are attuned. Later, in his madness, with his mind disordered, he will wear his costume in a corresponding disarray, the disarray that Ophelia describes so vividly to Polonius and that producers of the play rarely give sufficient heed to: "Lord Hamlet with his doublet all unbrac'd, No hat upon his head; his stockings foul'd, Ungarter'd, and down-gyved to his ankle." Here the only question will be, as with the madness itself, how much is studied, how much is real. Still later, by a third costume, the simple traveler's garb in which we find him new come from shipboard, Shakespeare will show us that we have a third aspect of the man.(51)
I am not recommending these critical views of Hamlet, though one can hardly ignore Bradley, Knight, Lewis, and Mack as significant readers of the play. Rather I am trying to highlight their common insistence that the play must be looked at as if with fresh eyes. They do not say that a look at it with a new critical approach can always be expected to yield the truth about the play; what is wanted is the eye and ear of a new reading and spectator. We have to be able to read Hamlet for the first time.
Some scholars have looked at the question of reading Hamlet for the first time as a historical problem. they try to recapture what it must have been like for Shakespeare's contemporaries to see Hamlet when it was new. These historical retrievals very often either confirm our own readings or offer a view of the play so odd as to seem irrelevant, even if its historical faithfulness could be vindicated.
Roland Mushat Frye sets out to look at Hamlet "in the light of the audiences for which it was initially written," using "vigorous historical scholarship" to recover the reactions of those audiences (3). In the Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600, he examines a whole series of lugubrious topics, from burial and mourning rituals and incest to tyrannicide and suicide. He offers an iconographic guide, with many contemporary illustrations, to much of the play's language. Frye is convinced that Elizabeth audience reactions were very different from those of modern audiences (3), yet he concludes that Shakespeare's contemporaries would have encountered the play with just as much doubt about such matters as the ghost, and just as much divided feeling about such question as the moral place of the revenge Hamlet is asked to perform (13-14).
Others find Shakespeare's contemporaries' first reactions to Hamlet so different from ours that we can hardly find in them any relevance to our own encounter with the play. The "contemporary reaction" that Arthur McGee recovers in The Elizabethan Hamlet, for example, finds the play full of sectarian conflict and anti-Catholicism. Likewise, Eleanor Prosser looks at revenge and finds Hamlet's task not only unjustifiable but diabolical, his every move toward it another step toward villainy. In Prosser's Hamlet and Revenge the ghost is a devil (102-03), Hamlet is far more like the villainous avengers of the revenge-tragedy tradition than like the ambiguous ones and far less like a hero, and the audience knows they are seeing an action in violation of all Christian precept (34).
What the "first impression" critics and the "historical retrieval" scholars are offering, finally, is a virtual or ideal first reading of the delay. Of course the "first impression" critics wish to approach the text unencumbered because they wish to approach is formalistically. As in the case of the Mona Lisa, some defamiliarization has to take place before formal relations can be seen in a work that seems already known. for a large number of American college teachers (a number much larger than the trendiest published criticism would lead one to expect), formalism is still important among the critical approaches we take to texts in the classroom. As one of these teacher, I do not argue with the insights of recent criticism concerning the historical and social construction that affects the production and the reception of such works as Hamlet. I believe that new readers need to know that they look at the play through a mist created by its 400-year percolation into the culture, that even without the mist they could not help reading it with twentieth-century eyes and minds, and that Shakespeare, for all his power to connect with their experience, was a person who though and spoke very differently from them. Hamlet is different and strange; we cannot help reading it with some preconceptions, but we need also to find the experience new.
How is the novelty to be fostered, the difference to be highlighted, and the preconception to be minimized? I do not see these questions as merely theoretical. They present themselves, first and most importantly, as questions bearing on the text the student reads. The text, after all, is that part of the student's experience of Hamlet over which we have the most control. But with current editions of the play, what a student encounters is a social construction in the most blatant sense; it is not Hamlet but a modern-type, modern-spelling conflation of early printed texts that reflects that individual editor's whim and outdated, unexamined assumptions and prejudices about the early printed texts.
School editions of Hamlet present the student with a text that looks "modern": its typeface and spelling are familiar, and the annotations suggest that all the jokes have been understood and catalogued. Such a text gets in the way of an encounter with Hamlet as something strange and different; it suggest that there are no mysteries about the play. At the same time it creates mysteries that were not there before, as I explain below. The pretense of modern conflated editions is that there is no problem about Hamlet's texts. Ignored or denied by such editions is the strangest editorial fact about the play: it is not one play but three, and its three early printed editions are not compatible. The present differences in the main characters and, in the case of the first version of the play, significant differences in the plot. As long as students have nothing but these school editions, they will not have a chance to read Hamlet for the first time, because they will not be reading Hamlet at all.
3 What I am proposing is a new sort of school text for Hamlet, the kind first suggested by Michael Warren in 1985, when he recommended a text providing "the earliest versions in photographic reproduction with their original confusions and corruptions unobscured by the interferences of later sophistication." Words could be glossed and textual emendations could be suggested, but Warren believes that beyond the original printed versions, "all further scholarship belongs in a commentary" (35). In such a reproductions of Shakespeare's works, some plays, such as Macbeth and The Tempest, would have a single text; Hamlet would have three: the First Quarto of 1603, the Second Quarto of 1604-05, and the First Folio text from the collected plays of Shakespeare published in 1623, seven years after his death. these texts are by no means considered of equal authority. The First Quarto is often called the "bad" quarto; many critics consider that is derives neither from a Shakespeare manuscript nor from one belonging to the playhouse but from the memories of those who played minor roles in a production of the play. Others deem the First Quarto an error-ridden copy of Shakespeare's first version of Hamlet, a version he later expanded and revised extensively.
Warren's argument for such a text is not technical. He believes that editions get "between the student or the scholar and the peculiar originals from which they derive" (27); they present as Shakespeare's text what is in fact conjecture, arbitrary choice among competing alternative readings, or simply inserted material not in any original. To construct such a text, he says, is "in many cases to create the play anew. Even the most sparing editor of Shakespear is an alterer" (27). With a play such as Hamlet a text that presents itself to the student as authoritative is specially misleading; as Warren points out, "there is not general agreement that the textual problems in Shakespear are of such complexity that no text can be established that will command the general assent that constitutes `definitiveness'" (26). Shakespearean scholars have agreed to disagree, but this fact is concealed whenever one looks at a conflated modern edition of Hamlet.
One small example of the complexity is Hamlet's "What a piece of worke is a man!" speech to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The Second Quarto has Hamlet say in wonder at a human being, "how expresse and admirable in action, how like and Angell in apprehension, how like a God." The Folio has it, "in forme and mouing how expresse and admirable? in Action, how like an Angell? in apprehension, how like a God." I have tried to point out in Hamlet in My Mind's Eye how this passage is handled by modern editors not according to their own editorial principles, which almost always privilege the Second Quarto text, but according to the editor's literary "feeling" about the passage, so that half choose the Second Quarto version and half choose the Folio version (the First Quarto does not contain this speech). Editors say that the Second Quarto is the authoritative copy text, but then they adopt readings from both other texts, emend readings, and end up with a mixture that is different from any original text and different from any other modern editor's text. Given this situation, it is not exaggerating to say that no student reading only a modern edition of Hamlet has read the play yet.
Warren worries that an edited text misrepresents itself as definitive, and thereby "dulls the attitude of the potential questioner" (33). In effect it answers questions before they can be asked. With the original texts a reader is immediately jolted out of the ease that spelling regularity and twentieth-century printing consistency bring to reading; ambiguities have to be confronted at each moment in an original text, because punctuation does not help and spelling may point in two or even three directions at once. The Hamlet in these texts is a stranger, is "defamiliarized," in Victor Shklovsky's term, making the habitual and known into the unfamiliar and strange (12). He is not our contemporary, our easily recognized cultural icon, but a figure suddenly distanced by centuries just through the medium of ink on the page.
For too long textual scholars have adopted the idea "that the task of a modern editor," as Steven Urkowitz puts it, is to "present, in a single text of a play, `what Shakespeare wrote,' with the (often unspoken) assumption . . . that Shakespeare wrote only one and never went back" (41). But throughout the eighties, textual scholars such as Warren, Urkowitz, and Paul Werstine reexamined the old assumptions and the old categories of texts, and Urkowitz for one is convinced that the relationship among the three early texts of Hamlet is one of successive revisions. Perhaps his most telling example concerns Hamlet's mother The First Quarto Queen, when she is told by young Hamlet of her new husband's murder of old Hamlet, categorically denies any knowledge of it and agrees to help in the revenge. She also discovers from Horatio that her present husband has plotted to have young Hamlet killed in England, giving her another motive to assist her son. In both the Second Quarto and the Folio texts, the Queen's complicity or knowledge of old Hamlet's murder is left an open question (Hamlet mentions killing a king but never accuses Claudius of murder), and left open also is her willingness to follow Hamlet's advice to separate herself from the King. As Urkowitz comments:
It should be noted that the Queen's actions in the First Quarto --her acknowledgment of guilt, and her allying herself with Hamlet against the King -- resemble the actions of the equivalent character in the play's sources, and that the Queen's ignorance of her husband's guilt in the Second Quarto and the Folio is a departure from those sources. If, as the conventional explanation has it, theatrical pirates indeed produced the First Quarto text, they worked most peculiarly, accidentally reinventing details of a plot Shakespeare had abandoned from his sources. (48)
Werstine "tentatively suggest" that many of the mysterious or ambiguous features of Hamlet and its main character are caused by conflating the Second Quarto and the Folio texts, each less mysterious and more consistent taken by itself (2). He gives as one example the case of Hamlet's apology to Laertes and its motivation. The two original texts each suggest a separate motive for Hamlet's apology to Laertes before the duel in the last scene. In the Second Quarto a lord comes in after Osric has proposed the match, Hamlet has accepted, and Osric has exited. This lord tells Hamlet, "The Queene desires you to vse some gentle entertainment to Laertes, before you fall to play." Hamlet replies. "Shee well instructs me," and thus Hamlet's apology is prepared for. Neither the character of the lord nor the dialogue appears in the Folio, which has another explanation for Hamlet's apology. In the Folio, Hamlet says to Horatio before Osric's entry:
but I am very sorry good Horatio, That to Laertes I forgot my selfe; For by the image of may Cause, I see The Portraiture of his; Ile count his favours: But sure the brauery of his griefe did put me Into a Towring passion.
The Second Quarto does not have this speech. When a modern editor conflates the two texts, Hamlet suddenly acquires two motives for his apology. Thus as Werstine suggests, "it could well seem that Hamlet began to empathize, remembered his rage, and finally needed a push form Gertrude to apologize" (4). In each original text we have a single, straightforward Hamlet with no wavering and one motive for his apology.
As Werstine also points out, the Hamlet of the Second Quarto is more consistently suspicious, "identifying his schoolfellow as Claudius's informers before they have an opportunity to expose themselves" (17) and later telling his mother than neither they nor Claudius can be up to any good in the enforced trip to England. The Folio Hamlet relies a little more on chance and opportunity, waiting for his friends to betray themselves by their talk of ambition, later justifying his destruction of them by his observation that "they did make loue to this imployment" -- a remark occurring only in the Folio.
The point consistently made by Warren, Urkowitz, and Werstine is that modern editors give us reading that do not exist in any of the three original Hamlet editions. And these conflated readings will differ from editor to editor. The principle that each original text is flawed in itself, but all point to an ideal, single Hamlet, is a principle that can never get us to that ideal text, which is only a conjecture. At the same time, this editorial principle also keeps us from ever looking at any of the real, extant texts of Hamlet whole and entire. The solution to this problem, and it is far from a perfect one, is a school edition of Hamlet that presents all three texts in photographic facsimile.
What student, assigned the task of reading al already long play, is going to lengthen the work by reading three versions, you may ask. Perhaps none. But perhaps many. There is an undeniable appeal in looking at "the world's greatest play" as something Shakespeare was not satisfied with in its first incarnation. There is an appeal in imaging oneself inside Shakespeare's head, watching him change language and sharpen dramatic effect. And if Snyder is right in her conjecture that Shakespeare worked hard to make the plot of Hamlet less predictable and less like the old story that was its source, there is an appeal in seeing those changes as well. But even if all three versions were not read they would be there for comparison. The worst result one can imagine is that of a student reading only the First Quarto; after all, it is considerably shorter than the other texts. This is, I know, going to shock all those whose teachers or editors have convinced them about the heinous "memorial reconstruction" of the "bad" quarto, but I am convinced that a student who read only the First Quarto text of Hamlet, in its unedited state, would have a better idea of one of Shakespeare's plays of Hamlet than a student who has read only a modern edition conflating readings from the three substantive texts. In any case, we would have offered the student the best chance we could of being able to read Hamlet for the first time.
NOTES [1] An earlier version of this paper was presented as a Senior Humanities Series lecture at Willamette University on 6 March 1991.
[2] Within our own culture, too, linguistic changes and obsoleteness of words can make barriers to any attentive reading. My older son tells me he could never picture the ghost o old Hamlet without laughing after Horatio had said to Hamlet of the apparition, "O yes, my Lord, he wore his Beauer vp."
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By Michael Cohen
Cohen is the author of Hamlet in My Mind's Eye (Georgia, 1989), which won the SAMLA Studies Award. He has also written Engaging English Art: Entering the Work in Two Centuries of English Painting and Poetry (Alabama, 1987).
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