Riddling q1: Hamlet’s mill and the trickster

Summary

ENTER q1

When the First Quarto of Shakespeare’s Hamlet was rediscovered in Henry Bunbury’s closet two hundred years after the publication of the First Folio, it came in such a questionable shape that it has haunted critics ever since. The First Quarto of Hamlet (q1) was printed in 1603, a year or so before the Second Quarto (q2) of 1604–5 and twenty years before the First Folio (f) version of 1623. Though they contain notable differences, q2 and f are close, sharing some of Shakespeare’s most celebrated verse, characters who behave similarly and a comparable chronology of scenes. However, q1, or the ‘bad’ quarto, is an oddity. Barely more than half the length of the other two variants, it comprises characters who differ in name and action from their q2 and f counterparts, a radically divergent chronology of scenes and verse that is often patchy, ‘To die, to sleep: is that all? Ay all. / No, to sleep, to dream; ay marry, there it goes.’ Indeed, the first quarto is so erratic that it seems doubtful that Shakespeare could possibly have written it as it stands. Thomas Clayton’s opinion that the printed text is a memorial reconstruction recalled by a player who had been in a version of Hamlet is widely held: ‘In my view, much of the dialogue of q1 is very much inferior to that of q2 and f, and memorial reconstruction seems the most eligible explanation for it as such.’ The question then arises, what lies behind the text of q1? Almost invariably critics have sought the answer by textual comparison, particularly concentrating on the order in which the plays behind the published texts of q1, q2 and f may have been conceived.