Ofel: Alas, what change is this?Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essayHam: But if you want to marry, marry a fool, for the wise know well enough, what monsters you make of them, at a convent goe.Ofel: Pray that God restores him.Ham: No, j 'have also heard of your painting, God has given you one face, and you make yourself another,--HAMLET, prince of Denmarke, the first quartoThe title page of The second quarto of Hamlet states that the text below is “newly printed and enlarged almost as much as it was, according to the true and perfect / Coppie”. Taking this literally, three facts necessarily follow: that there is at least one earlier edition (otherwise this one could not be "newly printed...again"); that the earlier edition was shorter (otherwise this one could not be “enlarged”); and that this quarto does not include a few lines from the “Perfect Coppie” (since it is “almost as many”). Indeed, there is a First Quarto dated a year earlier (1603); Q1 is about 1,600 lines shorter; and the Folio restores certain apparently authorial passages. It seems that “IR”, the printer, or “NL”, the publisher, are right on every possible point. We can't even condemn IR or NL for their self-serving advertising. They admit that their copy is “almost,” but not quite, “perfect.” Thus, we might want to take seriously another point that the title page attempts to demonstrate, namely that the preceding quarto was neither "true" nor "true." perfect", and is therefore corrupted not only in its brevity, but also in the presentation of the text it actually contains. This would mean that Q1 did not use the "true and perfect Coppie" as the copy text. It does not seem not absurd to rephrase: our new edition is bigger and truer than the other edition, because we had access to the piece as it was supposed to be, unlike the previous publication NL would certainly know, since it. was one of the printers of the first quarter The fact that such a reading is credible suggests that this is exactly what we are supposed to believe, because the title page is after all an advertisement Accepting the latter implication as true. , Q1 must be the product of a theatrical production in one sense or another Indeed, its title page boasts that the text is "As it was acted at various times" as opposed to it being "William Shake." -speare” had written. Nothing is confusing yet. The thesis of the day, namely that the actor who played Marcellus and Lucianus would have reconstructed the text of Q1 from memory, fits well with the two title pages. An actor would of course have access mainly, if not only, to the “played” game text or its memory; a shilling or two should provide the rest of the explanation. However, the thesis as it stands cannot satisfy all the curiosity that an attentive reader of the First Quarto is bound to experience. It's not just that an actor misremembered the "truer" text from Q2. Rather, he worked from what was "performed at various times", and therefore performed, and therefore probably cut to length and reshaped for the sake of entertainment (i.e. profit). Thus, there are necessarily other agencies involved whose work falls somewhere between Shakespeare and his more infamous memorizer. This poses two entirely separate problems regarding the origin of the quarto. The first is the memory problem. The text is certainly not exactly what was played. The simple fact that the lines spoken by or in the presence of Marcellus or Lucianus are much closer to thetext of the Second Quarto, almost indisputably, suggests that the rest of the text is even further removed from the play as it was produced, because it proves that the actor had a variable and imperfect memory. The second problem is, as mentioned above, that of production. Additionally, we have to assume thoughtful agency, because Q1 is such an effective solution, but fundamentally different game. If Q1 was simply the result of poor memorization of the basic text of Q2 or Folio Hamlet, then there is no conceivable explanation for how Q1, independent of these two texts, has such powerful dramatic logic, unless we regress and say that it was one of Shakespeare's first drafts, or perhaps his final version. This painful thought would pose many problems, but perhaps not insurmountable problems, in explaining the extraordinary similarity of Marcellus' Q1 lines to Marcellus' Q2 lines. Let's say then that there is both a "memorizer" and a "director" (who can, of course, be one of the many people who destroy and reshape the play). These two main mitigating factors that separate Q1 from Shakespeare's imagined pen often become confused in a reading. Any attempt to decipher one from the other, especially once composer issues are introduced into the mix, is undoubtedly guesswork. However, some hypotheses are better than others. And the analysis of this particular problem sheds interesting light on the play as we know it, as an essentially copy-and-paste masterpiece whose birth predates Shakespeare's death by about a century. literature (as it is learned by high school students) reveals how complex the textual situation is: To be or not to be, that's the goal, To die, to sleep, that's all? All of me: No, to sleep, to dream, I marry there, for in the dream of death, when we are awake, and brought before an eternal judge, from which no passenger ever returns, the country discovered, where viewThe happy smile and the cursed damned. Without this, the joyful hope of this, Who would bear the scorn and flattery of the world, Despised by the rich, the rich cursed by the poor? The widow being oppressed, the orphan is wrong, The taste of hunger, or a tie rabids, And a thousand other calamities besides, To grunt and sweat under the tired life, When he can make his full Quietus, With a naked body , who would bear this But for a hope of something after death? Which agitates the brain and confuses the senses, which makes us rather bear the troubles we have, rather than flee to others whom we do not know. Me, oh this conscience makes cowards against all, (836-857)The first problem of the interpretation of this monologue in the context of Q1, and therefore of its interpretation in the context of the Hamlet corpus, is its total incomprehensibility at the beginning. The phrase “When we wake” never ends properly. We cannot wake up “the discovered land,” the land of the dead, as if that land were a person to be awakened. The expression "the accursed damned" also has no "objective correlative", to use TS Elliot's expression. If the “happy smile” at the “sight” of the “judge”, the cursed one certainly cannot “damn”. Grammar just doesn't allow it. Maxwell Foster, in his book The Play Behind the Play, therefore accuses the composer. Since a few words and a little rearrangement would make sense of the passage, he argues, the passage the composer was looking at and mocking must have been: For in this dream of death, when we are awake, In the unknown land Of d' where no passenger ever returned, and brought before an eternal judge, at the sight of whom the happy smile andthe cursed are damned, but for that... Indeed, we now know what Hamlet is aiming for. Foster is determined to claim that Q1 is a Shakespearean first draft; the passage must have made sense at some point. Of course, the argument is circular. Shakespeare wrote the passage, therefore the passage must make a logical contribution to the dramatic thrust of the play, therefore the play is "good", which is why Shakespeare wrote this passage. However, it is hard to believe that anyone paying attention would allow such a passage as it appears. The fact that the lines as we know them ("For in this sleep of death...") are themselves complicated serves as no excuse, for Q1 often simplifies with extraordinary clarity. For example, "Les Courtisans, souldiers, schollers, eye, Tongue, Sword, / Th'expectation, et Rose of the state" which ends with "quite depressed" in Q2 (1808-1810) is reduced to being "All dasht and burst from there" in Q1 (922). Moreover, the ease with which Foster rearranged the passage suggests that the memorizer, who defaults to the role of editor, could easily have done exactly the same thing. So it makes sense that the passage once made sense. The fault may well lie with the composer's amendments, although perhaps ill-advised. their purpose, serves to place sentences that would otherwise make no sense into a familiar pattern. What the confusion ultimately reveals is how difficult it is to determine who, if anyone, made a mistake. placing the monologue into a larger pattern can continue. “But for the joyful hope” of our everlasting (“eternal”) salvation, let us avoid making our “Quietus.” Hamlet insinuates that if he were to commit suicide, he would be "cursed" and, therefore, "damned." He decides to live because he might eventually attain the rank of "happy." In Q2, however, it is the simple "fear of something after death" as opposed to a "hope full of joy" is the supposed reason why Hamlet did not kill himself The second quarto is more depressing in this sense, because it. There is no explicit reference here to the possibility of heaven, only to Hamlet's "fear" of punishment. Another key distinction between the two monologues, besides what appears to be distinctly superior poetry. , are the final lines not found in Q1: Thus conscience makes cowards, and thus the natural point of view of resolution is a sickle ore with the pale dominant of thought, and undertakings of great height and of great moment, as far as their currents go awry, and lose the name of the action. (1737-1742) In the second quarter, Hamlet therefore associates his inability to commit suicide with a deeper cowardice. The word “enterprises” encompasses both suicide and homicide, self-mutilation and massacre. By ending Hamlet's inner conversation with “O this conscience makes us all cowards,” Q1 barely leaves open the possibility of this connection. If we see it, it is probably because we are projecting our knowledge of Hamlet onto the passage. An independent reading reveals that Hamlet is simply extending his understanding of himself to others. Not only am I, Prince of Denmark, incapable of committing suicide because of my "conscience", but so is everyone else. In the Second Quarto, Hamlet implies that we are all incapable of action, period. The Folio adds the words “of all of us” to cement this point. This reading makes the projection of Hamlet absurd. After the play within the play, Hamlet will have definitive proof that we are not all cowards: Claudius managed to muster enough courage to send Hamlet Sr. to the same unknown land he is so afraid of. .Each version corresponds to the room in whichshe finds herself. Hamlet's ridiculous assumption that the "name of action" is universally lost serves as his rationalization in the second trimester to explain his delay, whereas in the first trimester no such rationalization is necessary. Hamlet kills the king as soon as he deems it possible, provided the king reaps his just punishment. Even in a detail like this, Q1 is consistent in a way that a sloppy rebuild of another piece wouldn't necessarily be. In that case, we would expect a cliffhanger ending here. So it looks like someone knowingly cut a few lines. However, the following line from the first quarter seems to be a prime example of faulty memory. The difference between "Lady in thy orizons, remember all my sins" and "Nimph in thy orizons / Remember all my sins" is not insignificant in terms of what it can tell us about the former quarter. “Nimph” is a loaded word. He expresses in a single breath Hamlet's ambivalence towards Ophelia, who is here a sexualized divinity, a woman who is simultaneously the two dichotomous Marys of the New Testament. Perhaps more interestingly, a nymph also denotes a stream or river. This allows us a much more in-depth reading of the “orizons”; they are no longer just prayers. An “orizon” is also a “horizon”. Hamlet therefore betrays an explicit desire to cast his sins to the confines of a river. This clearly foreshadows Ophelia's death. And since Ophelia drowns in both Q1 and Q2 after taking Hamlet's sins upon herself, there is no logical explanation as to why one would dutifully replace "Lady" with "Nimph." If ever a word in a work of literature was objectively superior to another, then "Nimph" is better than "Lady." Of course, it could never be proven that, to anyone's ear, "Lady" didn't ring truer. However, according to the preponderance of evidence, "Lady" is the result of a bad memory. Another clear example that illustrates the same point is Hamlet's condemnation of his mother's lust in the first trimester: "as if the increase of appetite had increased according to what she observed" (214- 215). The appetite is nourished in T2 (328-329), much more evocative. The first draft of the thesis could not account for these differences particularly well, because “Fed” expresses what actually happens in both plays. A writer would probably be familiar enough with his own work to describe the situation correctly: Hamlet sees Gertrude as having already succumbed to Claudius's temptations. “Watching” Claudius no longer “feeds” her, because she is already sleeping between “incestuous sheets” (Q1, 217). The placement of the monologue “To be or not to be” and the ensuing convent scene with Ophelia/Ofelia reveal the same consistency of structure and the same problems of memorization. In the first quarter, the scene would be the first scene of the second act, if scene and act numbers were assigned to a play that did not originally carry them. This occurs immediately after Corambis and the king trace it, which could reflect a memorizer's associative chain. However, it also establishes a multitude of back-to-back spy scenes. Corambis himself then attempts to attack the cause of Hamlet's madness. Then Rossencraft and Gilderstone try to play it like a flute. Finally, Hamlet orchestrates the play within the play so that he can “seize the conscience of the king” (1163). The cumulative effect is the feeling that the reader (who is a fan of fantasy play) has a powerful build-up, which appropriately culminates in the deadly game of cat and mouse (or "rat" and mouse game ) that the king and Hamlet playeach against the other. others, in which the delay is - with one theological exception - the result of circumstances. In the second quarter, the convent scene takes place between scenes with the players, separating Polonious and the king's plot from their actual espionage by a few scenes. And yet, despite the skill of the first quarter's structure, the pacing of its convent scene lacks much of the strength of Q2. A small example that demonstrates this difference is Hamlet's explicit condemnation of Ophelia to the convent. Hamlet says each time: "Go to a convent" (893, 904, 908, 919), while in the second quarter he formulates the same idea in various ways, which better reflects his real or pretended madness. So what story could we construct about how Q1 is both remarkably consistent and in some ways notably inferior, once we assume that it is not a Shakespearean sketch? Steven Urkowitz rightly pointed out that “if the differences between Q1 and Q2 are indeed a result of the “hackers,” then “these hackers should merit further study, because their theatrical acuity is impressive.” But we can't overlook the issue of 'Nimph' versus 'Lady'. Once these narrow limits are set, there remains only one possible solution. The First Quarto must be a commemoratively reconstructed version of a piece intelligently cut up and remodeled. Otherwise, we must attribute cancellation motivation to a character actor, who would have little reason to spend his time carefully rearranging Shakespeare's scenes himself. Another plausible possibility presents itself. The above doesn't begin to explain how Polonious transforms into Corambis. This is not a mistake, especially since Corambis is not an arbitrary name for Polonious: Corambus was probably the name of the same character in an earlier, non-existent play called Hamlet, now titled Ur-Hamlet, se -said by the London playwright Thomas Kyd, who appeared around fifteen years before the Hamlet in question. This fact was mainly inferred from a 1710 German play which deals with the same subject, Der Bestrafte Brudermord. If Shakespeare had only published one manuscript of Hamlet, then the regression to an earlier name must have been a creative decision on the part of a “director,” actor, or “editor.” The question of why any of these hypothetical people would want to alter the play in this way is at best problematic and at worst unanswered, leading us to the tentative conclusion that Shakespeare did in fact write a first draft and that Q1 is a reconstruction of this project. In addition, a first version should stay closer to its sources. Revision is exactly what the word implies: seeing again. This explanation would explain the undeniable power of the first trimester, just as Maxwell Foster argues. This also allows for the “precision” of the scenes of Marcellus and Lucianus. To escape this conclusion, we might hope that Shakespeare's first version only differed in that Polonious was Corambis, which would mean that the textual situation might still be the one I postulated in the previous paragraph. Deciding whether to read Q1 as an earlier or later (adapted) Q1 of Q2 has interesting ramifications for our reading of Hamlet today. If Q1 represents a sketch, even a battered one, then, as Urkowitz says, placing it next to Q2 is "a bit like [browsing] a museum or gallery showing variations of Rembrandt's great prints...Each can stand alone . , but seen side by side they show how the work developed and changed, and we can better appreciate the particular virtues of.