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The first edition of Hamlet – often called ‘Q1’, shorthand for ‘first quarto’ – was published in 1603, in what we might regard as the early modern equivalent of a cheap paperback. Yet this early version of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy is becoming increasingly canonical, not because there is universal agreement about what it is or what it means, but because more and more Shakespearians agree that it is worth arguing about. The essays in this collected volume explore the ways in which we might approach Q1’s Hamlet, from performance to book history, from Shakespeare’s relationships with his contemporaries to the shape of his whole career.
Terri Bourus is Professor of Theatre and Professor of English at Florida State University. She is a General Editor of the four-part New Oxford Shakespeare (2016–2017), and the author of Young Shakespeare's Young Hamlet (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). She has written essays on stage directions, the performance of religious conversion, Shakespeare and Fletcher's Cardenio, the role of Alice in Arden of Faversham, and Middleton's female roles. Bourus is an Equity actor, and has directed and acted in, two very different productions of Hamlet, both based on Q1.
List of Figures
Introduction: Is Q1 Hamlet the First Hamlet?
Terri Bourus
Chapter 1. Shakespeare’s Early Gothic Hamlet
Gary Taylor
Chapter 2. The Hybrid Hamlet: Player Tested, Shakespeare Approved
Christopher Marino
Chapter 3. Ofelia’s Interruption of Ophelia in Hamlet
Michael M. Wagoner
Chapter 4. Beautified Q1 Hamlet
Douglas Bruster
Chapter 5. The Good Enough Quarto: Hamlet as a Material Object
Terri Bourus
Chapter 6. Harvey’s 1593 ‘To Be and Not To Be’: The Authorship and Date of the First Quarto of Hamlet
Dennis McCarthy
Chapter 7. ‘To Be, or Not To Be’: Hamlet Q1, Q2 and Montaigne
Saul Frampton
Chapter 8. Shakespeare, Virgil and the First Hamlet
John. V. Nance
Chapter 9. Unique Lines and the Ambient Heart of Q1 Hamlet
Laurie Johnson
Chapter 10. ‘Brief Let Me Be’: Telescoped Action and Characters in Q1 and Q2 Hamlet
Tommaso Continisio
Chapter 11. Q1 Hamlet: The Sequence of Creation and Implications for the ‘Allowed Booke’
Charles Adams Kelly and Dayna Leigh Plehn
Chapter 12. What Doesn’t Happen in Hamlet
Rory Loughnane
Afterword: Q1 Hamlet
Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey
Index