Eliminating Hamlet’s soliloquy firmly shifted the play’s center of gravity. Far more weight now fell on what was now the play’s final soliloquy, immediately preceding Fortinbras’s entry. There, Claudius had declared that the only thing that can cure him is “the present death of Hamlet”: “Do it, England, / For like the hectic in my blood he rages, /And thou must cure me” (4.3.65–67). The elimination of Hamlet’s words in the following scene turns Claudius into a more formidable adversary as well as one who has the last word until act 5. Shakespeare retreated from locating the conflict within Hamlet’s consciousness and reverts at the end to a more conventional (and for the audience more viscerally satisfying) struggle between adversaries.
With Fortinbras’s role now diminished to the point where he could no longer serve as Hamlet’s opposite, Shakespeare had to go back and turn Laertes into a worthier antagonist and ultimately Hamlet’s double. In a clumsy but now necessary addition, Hamlet announces this by telling Horatio that “to Laertes I forgot myself, / For by the image of my cause I see / The portraiture of his” (5.2.76–78). And in the revised version, Hamlet voluntarily seeks a reconciliation with Laertes (where in the earlier version he had only done so at his mother’s urging).
Shakespeare still had to find both a new turning point and a rationale for why Hamlet had to kill Claudius. He managed to do both by adding a few key lines to one of Hamlet’s speeches in act 5, scene 2. In the earlier version of this scene, Hamlet had launched into another litany of Claudius’s crimes—
Does it not, think thee, stand me now upon?
He hath killed my king and whored my mother,
Popped in between th’ election and my hopes,
Thrown out his angle for my proper life,
And with such cozenage, is’t not perfect conscience?
(5.2.63–67)
—only to be interrupted in midspeech by the entrance of a courtier. You can see why Shakespeare cuts him off: in the aftermath of “How all occasions,” Hamlet’s complaint seems rhetorical and verges on self-pity. It may be “perfect conscience”—that is, conform to what is right—but in such a relative world, what difference does that make? When he rewrites this scene, Shakespeare delays the courtier’s entrance and extends Hamlet’s argument to allow him to build to a new conclusion:
Does it not, think’st thee, stand me now upon—
He that hath killed my king and whored my mother,
Popped in between th’ election and my hopes,
Thrown out his angle for my proper life,
And with such cozenage—is’t not perfect conscience
To quit him with this arm? And is’t not to be damned
To let this canker of our nature come
In further evil?
(5.2.63–70)
The additional lines counter Claudius’s desire for a “cure” and restore the metaphor that had been cut about the “impostume,” though it’s no longer an undetectable cancer that destroys the state. Now, a cure is possible: this canker, Claudius, can and must be removed. And to fail to do so is to invite damnation. Salvation, not honor, now justifies the killing of a king. Hamlet realizes that he no longer needs to dread being damned for “taking arms against the foe,” a fear so eloquently expressed in the “To be or not to be” soliloquy, where he was tormented by “the dread of something after death” (3.1.77). The Hamlet of the revised version is no longer adrift, no longer finds himself in a world where action feels arbitrary and meaningless. The change is so deft that it’s as if Shakespeare had activated something that had been dormant in the play. Other lines—“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends” (5.2.10) and “There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow” (5.2.219–220)—now fall neatly into place and reinforce the argument for salvation through revenge. And this new determination—with its emphasis on salvation—corresponds with Hamlet’s words in what is now his final soliloquy, back in act 3, where he commits himself to killing his uncle only when Claudius is “about some act / That has no relish of salvation in’t” (3.3.91–92). For most of the revised version, Hamlet is the same reflective, melancholy Dane as he is in the earlier one. It’s only near the end that the two Hamlets significantly diverge—each one achieving a different kind of clarity.
Shakespeare was also forced to change Hamlet’s unforgettable words as he prepares to fight Laertes. In the earlier version Hamlet’s speech served as a coda that echoes the resignation of his famous soliloquy, “To be or not to be”: “If it be, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all, since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is’t to leave betimes. Let be” (5.2.220–24). Hamlet’s emphasis here, as it has been all along in this first version, is on knowing, or rather, his acceptance of not knowing: you can’t regret what you don’t know. Samuel Johnson’s paraphrase of Hamlet’s philosophical resolve is helpful: “Since no man know aught of the state of life which he leaves, since he cannot judge what other years may produce, why should he be afraid of leaving life behind?”
When he revised these lines, Shakespeare made the last sentence less dispiriting. Hamlet finally has an answer to his persistent fears about the afterlife: “The readiness is all, since no man has aught of what he leaves. What is’t to leave betimes?” (5.2.222–24). Now that he is a more committed avenger, Hamlet’s calm insistence that there are no easy answers—“Let be”—must also be eliminated. And while the new Hamlet also acknowledges that death is both certain and inevitable and that it doesn’t matter if you die young, he shifts attention away from the impossibility of knowing (which has also dropped out) to the unimportance of having. In this revised version, Hamlet’s last piece of advice is that you can’t take it with you—“since no man has aught of what he leaves.” Samuel Johnson summarizes the difference and signals his preference: “It is more characteristic of Hamlet to think little of leaving because he cannot solve its many mysteries, than because he cannot carry with him his life’s goods.” Johnson prefers the Hamlet of the first draft here, the one characterized by a philosophical equanimity in the face of a disappointing world, rather than the one whose revenge is now tied to salvation and a renunciation of worldly things.
As Shakespeare saw (and as editors from the eighteenth century on who are reluctant to part with these and other profound lines that Shakespeare eliminated, confirm), the cuts come at a price. The radical argument for a sacred act of violence that underpins the lines “is’t not to be damned / To let this canker of our nature come / In further evil?” returns us to the self-justifying fantasy of the conspirators in Julius Caesar (“Let’s be sacrificers, but not butchers” [2.1.166]) and more broadly to the language of theologically sanctioned tyrannicide that permeated that play. But Shakespeare in Julius Caesar had also shown that while this argument can be justified intellectually, in the real world chaos and blood-letting invariably follow. It didn’t help, then, that the earlier version of Hamlet had included a long speech by Horatio reminding playgoers how “a little ere the mightiest Julius fell, / The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead / Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets” (1.1.114–17). In Julius Caesar, fresh in the minds of playgoers at the Globe, Cassius had also seen in these portents “instruments of fear and warning / Unto some monstrous state” (1.70–71). Gesturing toward the argument that Hamlet was damned if he didn’t kill Claudius was one thing; foregrounding its now disturbing political implications was another: ultimately, killing a bad ruler, though justified, fails to resolve anything. So Shakespeare went back and cut Horatio’s speech, too. The changes may have temporarily solved Hamlet’s problem but not the deeper one, which remains in the play, of what justifies—not just morally but pragmatically—the killing of a bad ruler: when Hamlet finally stabs Claudius, it’s easy to forget that in both versions everyone onstage cries out, “Treason, treason” (5.2.323). As Shakespeare’s plays from Henry the Sixth to Julius Caesar had already shown, removing the canker, however necessary, do
esn’t cure the state, because men who are even more ruthless than their predecessors fill the political vacuum, just as Fortinbras will.
The revised version still had to be shortened for the stage, cut to fewer than three thousand lines. Whether Shakespeare abridged it himself, left it to others, or collaborated in the effort, we don’t know, but this performance version of Hamlet was an immediate and unqualified success. Fellow playwrights, who quickly quoted, parodied, and shamelessly stole from it, were clearly dazzled. It must have had a great run that first year or two; demand was so great that the Chamberlain’s Men, or some part of the company, also took it on the road, performing it by early 1603 in Oxford, Cambridge, and probably elsewhere. Since the two universities were not ordinarily on the same touring route, it may have toured more than once at this time. For this itinerant production a new and further abridged version of Hamlet was made, though this script, too, is lost (so that the two most valuable scripts for understanding how Hamlet was actually performed no longer exist).
Scholars have been able to reconstruct much of this textual history because in 1603 one or more of those involved in the touring production, including the hired actor who played Marcellus (we know it was this actor because in putting the text together he remembered his own lines a lot better than he did anyone else’s) cobbled together from memory a 2,200-line version of the road production and sold it to publishers in London. In the course of three years the play had now gone through five versions, each one shorter than the last. Book buyers coming upon “The Tragical History of Hamlet Prince of Denmark, by William Shakespeare” in 1603 would have encountered a mangled version of what they had heard onstage, with some scenes transposed, some characters given names that probably derived from the old and lost Hamlet (Polonius is named Corambis and Reynaldo is Montano), and some of the most memorable speeches badly butchered. The opening lines of Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy offer a striking example. What audiences had once heard as:
To be, or not to be, that is the question,
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them; to die to sleep
No more, and by a sleep, to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to—’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished.
(3.1.55–63)
now appeared in print as:
To be, or not to be. Ay, that’s the point.
To die, to sleep, is that all? Aye, all.
No, to sleep, to dream, aye, marry, there it goes,
For in that dream of death, when we awake,
And borne again before an everlasting judge,
From whence no passenger ever returned,
The undiscovered country, at whose sight
The happy smile, and the accursed damned.
But for this, the joyful hope of this,
Who’d bear the scorns and flattery of the world
Scorned by the right rich, the rich cursed of the poor?
The pirated edition nonetheless proved to be enormously popular, so popular that it was read to shreds: only two copies of this First Quarto survive, each missing a page or two, and the first wasn’t rediscovered until 1823.
In response to this unauthorized quarto, in late 1604 the Chamberlain’s Men decided to turn over a better version of the play to be published. They could have supplied any one of a number of manuscript versions: a copy of their playhouse promptbook; the longer revised script that was behind it; a better version of the touring text that was behind the First Quarto; or Shakespeare’s dark first draft. They chose this first draft—“newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much again as it was, according to the true and perfect copy.” Why this draft was chosen is another of the play’s mysteries. The company may simply have decided not to release a version of the play that other companies could easily stage. As a sharer, Shakespeare would have had a say in the decision, though we don’t know which version he preferred. Even if Shakespeare wanted to see his early draft in print, he made no effort to touch it up before it was handed over to the printer—and it was so difficult to decipher that the confused compositors had to check the opening scene against a copy of the bad First Quarto is was intended to replace. There’s one more twist: when it came time to publish Hamlet in the 1623 Folio, Heminges and Condell broke with their usual practice of printing play texts that were based on good extant quartos: they decided to reject the early version found in the Second Quarto of 1604/5 in favor of the (unpublished) revised one, perhaps because it more closely resembled the acting version with which they were familiar.
Their decision to do so opened up a Pandora’s box: editors who could now choose between two good but quite different texts of Hamlet were sorely tempted to combine the best of both, and few could resist the urge to do so. As a result, since the eighteenth century the play has existed in multiple, hybrid versions—some editors relying more heavily on the Second Quarto, others on the Folio text, and still others promiscuously drawing on both as well as on lines from the First Quarto. One reason why no two readers’ or actors’ Hamlets are alike is that no two modern versions of Hamlet are either. Combining different parts of these texts, editors have cobbled together an incoherent Hamlet that Shakespeare neither wrote nor imagined. It’s not the excision of motive but its duplication that makes the conflated versions of Hamlet that are now taught and staged so puzzling: Hamlet is both resigned and determined, caught between knowing and having, damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t kill Claudius. We’re left with a Hamlet who is confused—but not the confusion Shakespeare intended.
Some recent editors have come to regret their decision to fall into line and produce a conflated Hamlet they didn’t believe in; others have dug in their heels, preferring what’s familiar. The only major edition to break with tradition and choose an unconflated text is the Oxford Shakespeare—though its editors went with Shakespeare’s revised version rather than his first draft, basing their edition on the Folio text. The long-awaited publication of the new Arden edition of Hamlet promises to change this situation. In offering each of the three surviving early versions of Hamlet separately, its editors will encourage others to follow their lead. In a generation or two, I suspect, soon, only scholars interested in the history of the play’s reception will still be reading a conflated Hamlet.
Changing how we think about Shakespeare’s greatest play means revising how we think about Shakespeare. The Romantic myth of literary genius, which has long promoted an effortless and unfathomable Shakespeare, cannot easily accommodate a model of a Shakespeare whose greatness was a product of labor as much as talent. The humbler portrait of Shakespeare presented here is of a writer who knew himself, knew his audience, and knew what worked. When Shakespeare saw that he had to wrest his play from where Hamlet had led him, he did so unflinchingly. He didn’t write Hamlet to please himself. If he had, he would have rested content with the more complicated hero of his first draft. Only an extraordinary writer of the first order could have produced that first draft; and only a greater writer than that could have sacrificed part of that creation to better show “the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (3.2.23–24). Shakespeare didn’t write “as if from another planet,” as Coleridge put it: he wrote for the Globe; it wasn’t in his mind’s eye, or even on the page, but in the aptly named theater where his plays came to life and mattered.
Ben Jonson, who knew Shakespeare well enough not to underestimate him as a writer, also knew that part of his greatness was bound up in his gift for second thoughts. Jonson’s praise of Shakespeare’s craft in the First Folio, largely overlooked today, is worth recalling:
he
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat,
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the Muses’ anvil; turn the same,
(And himself with it) that he thinks to frame;
Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn,
For a good poet’s made as well as born.
And such wert thou.
Like every great writer before or since, Jonson understood that the best poets are both made and born: that all great writing had to be hammered out and all great poets stand or fall by that “second heat,” their labored revision. In these knotty lines Jonson also hints at the physical toll this process exacts, for when Shakespeare would “turn” his writing, he would turn “himself with it.” Writing, even for Shakespeare, was a battering experience. Shakespeare’s greatness, Jonson tells us, was a result not just of exceptional talent but also of a quarter century of relentless, driving effort. If we want to see Shakespeare’s greatness and his personality illuminated, we need only look at the trail of sparks—still visible in the surviving versions—that flew in the heat of revising Hamlet. To see this is also to acknowledge that the Hamlet Shakespeare left us was, in the play’s own words, “a thing a little soiled with working” (2.1.40). This trace of grit and sweat, more than anything else, may help explain why “Prince Hamlet,” in the words of the Elizabethan playgoer Anthony Scoloker, managed then, as it manages now, “to please all.”
A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare Page 37