Hamlet and the Player Who Could NOT Keep Counsel

Summary

It is well known, not only to scholars, that besides the good texts of Hamlet preserved in the Quarto printed in 1604 and in the Folio of 1623 there is a strange version of Shakespeare’s tragedy which has come down to us in a quarto dated 1603. This quarto boldly proclaims that it represents the play “as it hath beene diuerse times acted by his Highnesse servants in the Cittie of London: as also in the two Vniuersities of Cambridge and Oxford, and else-where”. Few, if any, of the other Shakespeare quartos can boast a title-page quite as impressive as this one, and few are more pretentious or misleading in their claims. It is possible that Hamlet was played at both the Universities and in the city of London, though the Globe Theatre, the normal habitat of the King’s Players, was in Southwark. What appears manifestly impossible is that the version preserved in this particular quarto was performed in any of these places. There is virtue, however, in the ‘else-where’, which we may take to be the operative word. Modern research has rendered it highly probable that the 1603 Quarto perpetuates the attempt to portray something resembling Shakespeare’s Hamlet before provincial audiences.