I
Although the older editors of Hamlet preferred to base
their texts
on the Folio rather than the Second Quarto, it is now twenty years since
Professor Dover Wilson demonstrated the superiority of Q2 His view,
elaborated
in The Manuscript of Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' (1934), was
that we have in
this, the first good quarto, a text of the play deriving from Shakespeare's
foul papers. It is a view that now needs modifying to allow for some use
of
the bad Q1 by the printers of Q2, but otherwise it has generally been
accepted.[1] The present-day editor of
Hamlet, therefore, is in no doubt
about what his chief authority is to be.[2]
But he has the major problems of
what use he is to make of Q1 and F. Q1 in this article I propose to leave
aside. F, though farther from Shakespeare's autograph than Q2, has
somewhere
behind it a good manuscript and it can serve to correct some of Q2's many
errors. If it could be taken to rest entirely on a manuscript which was
independent of Q2: F would also serve to corroborate Q2 where they agree
and
the editor would know that readings which occur in both could not be
rejected
unless they could be explained convincingly as common errors. The
question of
the relation between Q2 and F is therefore a matter of first editorial
importance. Professor Dover Wilson, of course, maintained that F
was
independent of Q2: "It is clear that the 1605 Hamlet
or its
reprints, the Smethwick quartos, do not at any point come into the pedigree
of
the F1 text."[3] The opposite
theory, namely that F derived, with modifications, from Q2? had
occasionally
been put forward, notably by Hendrik de Groot, who held that a copy of
Q2
became the promptbook at the Globe and that this promptbook, altered,
corrected, and augmented, served as copy for F.
[4] But Professor Dover Wilson's
skillful analysis convinced all the leading authorities, from whom the
following are some representative opinions:
The idea that [F] was printed from a play-house copy of [Q2] corrected
by reference to the prompt-book must be abandoned. There are so few
bibliographical resemblances and so slight a community of error between
the texts of Q2 and F that it seems impossible that the latter should have been
printed from the former, however much modified. (Hamlet,
ed. T. M. Parrott and Hardin Craig, p. 25).
The folio text of Hamlet is certainly . . . substantive in
its own right. (Sir Walter Greg, The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare,
p. xix note). The folio was printed from a manuscript and not from a quarto.
(Ibid., p. 64).
This is the view that has now been challenged by Dr. Alice Walker,[5] who
maintains that Hamlet, like five other plays in which the
Folio text
diverges very considerably from the quartos that preceded, was nevertheless
set up in the Folio from a quarto that had been corrected on collation with
a
manuscript. Her argument as to Hamlet rests on erroneous
readings found
in both F and Q2; anomalous spellings common to both; and mistakes of
punctuation in which F is thought to have been misled by Q2.
If Dr. Walker is right, then the whole editorial position is changed.
Agreement between Q2 and F in any particular reading need not constitute
a
dual authority but may arise from an error in Q2 which the collator failed
to
notice or at any rate to correct.
The object of the present article is, then, to review the evidence for
the
theory that F was printed from a corrected copy of Q2.
Two explanations are in order at the beginning. In theory of course
F could
derive from Q2 indirectly by way of one of the reprints Q3 and Q4; but in
fact
some of the crucial spellings disappear from Q3. My own inspection
confirms
Dr. Walker's judgment[6] that any
significant resemblances F has with the
quartos are greatest with Q2 itself. It is therefore to a comparison between
F
and Q2 that I here confine myself. For F I have used the Devonshire copy
in
the Oxford facsimile: the possibility of variant readings in other copies has
of course to be allowed for, but this margin of error, when the evidence is
considered as a whole, is certainly a small one.
