We are very privileged to be able to take our place in the long line of those who have been involved in the transmission of the texts of Hamlet for over 400 years. Our debts to our predecessors are apparent on every page, and it has given us great pleasure to enter into a kind of dialogue (a virtual one, in most cases) with so many people who have been this way before. Our immediate predecessor in the Arden Shakespeare series, Harold Jenkins, did his job so well that we felt there was no need to do it again in the same way – one of the many reasons why we are offering a totally different approach to the play. Other editors of the 1980s, notably Philip Edwards and George Hibbard, have been important influences, as have the editorial team (Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett and William Montgomery) that produced the Oxford Complete Works and its Textual Companion. We have been working on our edition at the same time as the Variorum team (Hardin Aasand, Nick Clary, Bernice Kliman and Eric Rasmussen) and have enjoyed many conversations with them as our work progressed; Bernice’s ‘Enfolded Hamlet’, generously given away with the Shakespeare Newsletter in 1996, has been an excellent quick-reference tool. Outside the Anglo-American tradition of editing, fully annotated editions of Hamlet have recently appeared in Germany (edited by Holger M. Klein), Italy (Il primo Amleto and Amleto, edited by Alessandro Serpieri) and Spain (A Synoptic ‘Hamlet’, edited by Jesús Tronch-Pérez), and we have valued these perspectives.
We owe an enormous debt to our colleagues on the Arden team, especially to Richard Proudfoot and David Scott Kastan, first for sanctioning this three-text edition from the start (despite some understandable misgivings), and then for helping us through every stage. They have read and reread with unfailing patience and have been overwhelmingly generous in making constructive suggestions and saving us from egregious errors. We must mention support from the publishers during changing and challenging times, especially Jane Armstrong and Talia Rodgers at Routledge, in the early days of the project; Jessica Hodge, first at Thomas Nelson and then at Thomson Learning, who guided it through the next stage; and finally Margaret Bartley at Thomson Learning, who saw it through to completion. We would also like to thank Fiona Freel, Giulia Vincenzi and Philippa Gallagher at Thomson Learning. We were intimidated to learn that our copy-editor, Linden Stafford, was also the copy-editor for Harold Jenkins’s edition of Hamlet in the second series of the Arden Shakespeare in 1982, but we have been hugely impressed with her positive attitude to our own enterprise and with her detailed and careful work; she certainly deserves a PhD in Shakespeare studies in general and Arden house style in particular. Our professional proofreader, Annette Clifford-Vaughan, was also most helpful, especially in suggesting numerous minor changes to commentary notes to get the page layout right.
We have benefited from informal consultations with fellow Arden editors at regular meetings in London and Stratford-upon-Avon and at the conferences of the Shakespeare Association of America. Many friends and colleagues have invited us to give papers on our work as it has progressed, and we have learnt a lot from the feedback on these occasions. Students taking Ann’s course on ‘Hamlet and its afterlife’ in the ‘Shakespeare Studies: Text and Playhouse’ MA programme (jointly taught by King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe theatre) have been a valued source of input and encouragement. It could be invidious to name individuals, but Peter Donaldson, Akiko Kusunoki, Gordon McMullan, Reiko Oya, Peter Reynolds and Ron Rosenbaum deserve special mention for specific contributions.
We began this project when we were both working at Roehampton Institute (now Roehampton University), and we are grateful for support from colleagues, especially Bryan Loughrey, and for institutional support, including sabbatical leave. Roehampton also employed Sasha Roberts as a research assistant, and her hard work and enthusiasm were particularly valued in the first years of the project. Since 1999 Ann has received institutional support from King’s College London. The Arts and Humanities Research Board (now Council), the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust have all provided financial support, as have the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Huntington Library, in terms of residential fellowships. Librarians have been very helpful, especially Georgianna Ziegler at the Folger, who alerted us to their wide range of illustrative materials.
We have been able to benefit from a great deal of recent research on Elizabethan theatres and acting companies, and from the experience of seeing several of Shakespeare’s plays (including Hamlet) performed at the reconstructed Globe theatre in London. New reference works have greatly facilitated our editorial labours: we might instance Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson’s A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama 1580–1642, Naseeb Shaheen’s Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays, and B.J. Sokol and Mary Sokol’s Shakespeare’s Legal Language: A Dictionary. And at last two works on Shakespeare’s language have replaced E.A. Abbott’s venerable A Shakespeare Grammar of 1869, namely Norman F. Blake’s A Grammar of Shakespeare’s Language and Jonathan Hope’s Shakespeare’s Grammar. These have played their part in our work, along with extensive documentation and discussion of UK and overseas performance and criticism. Just as our edition goes to press, we are grateful to Tony Howard for letting us read the typescript of his book on Women as Hamlet.
And finally there are the people to whom we are dedicating this edition, who have lived with it patiently for far too long and who will share our profound relief at seeing it in print.
This volume contains an edited and annotated text of the 1604–5 (Second Quarto) printed version of Hamlet, with passages that are found only in the 1623 text (the First Folio) printed as Appendix 1. It is a fully self-contained, free-standing edition which includes in its Introduction and appendices all the supporting materials that a reader would expect to find in an Arden edition. Uniquely, however, we are also offering readers a second volume, Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623, which contains edited and annotated texts of the other two early versions. This second volume is an entirely optional supplement: the present volume does not depend upon it in any way, and we imagine the majority of readers will be content with just one Hamlet. We explain in our Introduction and Appendix 2 our rationale for offering all three texts in this way, and the headnotes to each scene in the commentary contain brief summaries of the principal differences in the handling of the material in the three texts.
Quotations from the three texts, as well as act, scene and line numbers, are taken from these two volumes unless otherwise stated. Of course we hope that some readers will want to study all three texts, since we feel that making them all available in the Arden format is our main justification for adding to the long list of existing editions of Hamlet.
Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor
London