University of Virginia Library

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:

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.