regard as a misapprehension of its meaning), is rather the source. On this title-page the play is said to be 'Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect coppie,' which has been accepted on all hands as meaning that the play has been enlarged' by the author. But upon the very face of it, and especially under the circumstances, has it not clearly a very different purport? The previous edition is so corrupt, disconnected, and heterogeneous, that the least observant reader, even of that day when plays were printed so care. lessly, must have seen that as a whole it was but a maimed and mutilated version of the true text, and in some parts a mere travestie of it. It seems to be very plainly indicated that the enlargement announced on the title-page of Q, was the consequence of the procurement of a complete and authentic text, and was merely the work of the printer or publisher, and not of the author.

....

'A close examination of the text of Q, has convinced me that it is merely an imperfect, garbled, and interpolated version of the completed play, and that its comparative brevity is caused by sheer mutilation, consequent upon the haste and secrecy with which the copy for it was obtained and put in type. . . . . In III, i, the phrase, 'to a nunnery go,' is baldly repeated eight times within a few lines; showing that the reporter jotted down a memorandum of Hamlet's objurgation, but forgot to vary it as Shakespeare did,-a kind of evidence of the share that he had in the text of 1603, which he has left us on more than one occasion. The phrases for to,' 'when as,' and 'where as,' Shakespeare's avoidance of which has been noted in the Essay on the Authorship of King Henry the Sixth, occur in the earliest version several times; but in the Quarto of 1604 the two latter are not found at all, the former but once, and in the Folio it disappears entirely. [See III, i, 167.] .... It has been observed that many of the passages found in the later, but not in the earlier, version are distinguished by that blending of psychological insight with imagination and fancy, which is the highest manifestation of Shakespeare's genius, but we must remember that Q, was hastily printed to meet an urgent popular demand, and that the philosophical part of the play would be at once the most difficult to obtain by surreptitious means, and the least valued by the persons to supply whose cravings that edition was published. . . . . To minds undisciplined in thought, abstract truth is difficult of apprehension and of recollection; whereas, a mere child can remember a story. And in addition to this very important consideration, there is yet a more important fact, that some of the most profoundly thoughtful passages in the Play,passages most indicative of maturity of intellect and wide observation of life,-are found essentially complete, although grossly and almost ludicrously corrupted, in the first imperfect version of the tragedy. Two of the most celebrated and most reflective passages of the Play shall furnish us examples in point of the last remark, and also characteristic specimens of the kind of corruption to which the text of the Play was subjected in the preparation of Q,.

'A comparison of [lines 195-215 of Q,] with those of the perfect soliloquy [I, ii, 129] makes it apparent that these are but an imperfect representation of those. The latter are no expansion of the former. The thoughts are the same in both, with the exception of seven lines which were plainly omitted from the first version, not added to it in writing the second. The maimed and halting [lines 196, 197], which it is absurd to suppose that Shakespeare could have written at any period of his life, are the best that the person who furnished it could do to supply the place of the corresponding lines of the seven which follow them in the perfect soliloquy; the rest is all tangled and disordered, though but slightly defective, and shows in its very

confusion of parts that it represents the perfect speech. Notice the misplacement of lines, such as the one containing the comparison to Hercules, and that about the shoes', and the unrighteous tears;' and see that Why, she would hang on him' is not only misplaced, but that him' is without an antecedent, owing to the omission of the allusion to Hamlet's father and his love for the Queen; yet see in this very derangement and in these defects the proof that the earlier version is merely mutilated, not a sketch; the latter, merely perfect, not elaborated. The evidence of the same relation of the two texts is perhaps yet stronger in the case of the second and more important soliloquy, which is printed thus in the first Quarto: [see lines 815837]. This reads almost like intentional burlesque, so completely, yet absurdly, are all the thoughts of the genuine soliloquy represented in it. Like the shadow of a fair and stately building on the surface of a troubled river, it distorts outline, destroys symmetry, confuses parts, contracts some passages, expands others, robs color of its charm and light of its brilliancy, and presents but a dim, grotesque, and shapeless image of the beautiful original; while yet, with that original before us, we can see that it is a reflection of the whole structure, and not merely of its foundation, its framework, or its important parts. How ludicrously the well-known sentences, To sleep, perchance to dream,' and that, several lines below, about the dread of something after death,' are lumped together, and crushed into shapelessness in the lines [817-821]! That this soliloquy as it stands in Q, is merely a mutilated version of that which is found in Q, is as clear to my apprehension as that the latter was written by William Shakespeare.

Another proof that Q, is but an accidentally imperfect representation of the completed Play is found in the fragment which it gives of the Fourth Scene of Act IV, in which Fortinbras enters at the head of the Norwegian forces. This consists only of the speech of Fortinbras. [See Q,, lines 1614-1619.] This has the same distorted likeness to the genuine speech that the soliloquies just cited have to their prototypes in the true text. But, to look farther, with this speech the scene ends we have 'exeunt all,' and immediately, ‘enter King and Queene? Now, will any one believe that Shakespeare brought Fortinbras at the head of an army upon the stage merely to speak these half dozen lines of commonplace? Plainly, the only object was to give Hamlet the opportunity for that great introspective soliloquy in which, with a psychological insight profounder than that which is exhibited in any other passage of the tragedy, the poet makes the Prince confess in whisper to himself the subtle modes and hidden causes of his vacillation. Consid ering the motive of the Play, the introduction of Fortinbras and his army without the subsequent dialogue and soliloquy is a moral impossibility which overrides all other arguments. Yet this one is not unsupported. For the speech of Fortinbras in the first version itself furnishes evidence that it was written out for the press by a person who had heard the dialogue which it introduces. The latter part of the line Tell him that Fortinbras, nephew to old Norway,'-has no counterpart in the genuine speech; but we detect in it an unmistakeable reminiscence of the following passage of the subsequent dialogue which is found in Q2: Ham. Who commands them, sir? Cap. The Nephew to old Norway, Fortenbrasse.' It is to be noted, too, that the absence of this dialogue and soliloquy from Q, is no proof whatever that they were not written when the copy for that edition was prepared; and this for the all-sufficient reason that they are also wanting in the Folio itself, which was printed twenty years afterwards. It seems almost certain that these passages were omitted in the representation, and struck out of the stage-copy from which the Folio was

printed, owing to the great length of the Play and a lack of popular interest consequent upon their speculative character. And it is also safe to conclude that the same considerations led the procurer of the copy for the surreptitious edition to withhold even a garbled version of them, if, indeed, they were not already omitted in the performance at the time when he did his work.

6

And this brings us to another branch of the evidence in the case. There are many important passages of the completed Play of which there is no vestige in the Quarto of 1603, which would seem to favor the conclusion that that edition represents but an early sketch of Shakespeare's work, especially as some of them are reflective in character, and all indicate maturity of power. Of these I will mention the lines about the ominous appearances in Rome ere the mightiest Julius fell,' I, i, 114; all that part of Hamlet's censure of Danish drunkenness, beginning, 'This heavy-headed revel,' I, iv, 17; the reflection upon That monster custom,' III, iv, 161; the soliloquy just above alluded to, IV, iv, 32; the euphuistic passage between Osric and Hamlet, beginning, Sir, here is newly come to court Laertes,' V, ii, 106; and the Prince's brief colloquy with a Lord in the same scene. But the absence of these passages from Q, is deprived of all bearing upon the question of the state of the Play which that edition professed to represent by the fact that they are likewise lacking in the Folio. On the other hand, there are passages in the Folio which are not found in Q2, enlarged though it was to almost as much againe' as the Play had been before, according to the true and perfect coppie;' and of these passages there are traces at least in Q. Such is the passage about the company of child actors,'How comes it? Do they grow rusty?' and seven speeches afterwards, II, ii, 325, -which, although entirely lacking in the Second Quarto, is thus represented in the First: [See Q,, 971-977].

There are other vestiges in Q, of passages which do not appear in Q2, but which are found in the Folio; and, although they are of minor importance, they go to show none the less that the surreptitious text of 1603 and the authentic text of twenty years later had a common origin.

In some parts of Q, the arrangement of the scenes is not the same as in that of the subsequent editions, which might seem to favor the supposition that the Play was re-cast after its first production. But the order of the earliest edition in these cases is mere disorder, resulting from the inability of the person, who superintended the preparation of the copy for the press, to arrange even the materials at hand in their proper sequence. As evidence of this, it is only necessary to state that the soliloquy, To be, or not to be,' III, i, is introduced in Q, immediately after the proposal of Polonius, II, ii, that Ophelia shall lure Hamlet into an exhibition of his madness. It is immediately preceded by the command of her father: And here Ofelia, reade you on this booke, And walke aloofe, the King shal be vnseene;' and, as in the true and perfect copy, it closes with the entreaty, Lady in thy orizons be all my sinnes remembred;' and yet, according to the imperfect, as well as the perfect, text, Ophelia is not upon the stage! The circumstance that in two scenes Hamlet enters just as the same personages (the King, the Queen, and Ophelia's father) leave the stage, misled the purloiner of the text for the first edition into the supposition that the old courtier's suggestion in the earlier scene was immediately followed.

But the text of the First Quarto presents two features of difference from that of any subsequent edition, which cannot be attributed to accident or haste. These are the names of Ophelia's father and of his servant, and the existence of a scene which (in form though not in substance) has no counterpart in the authentic text. The

scene in question is a brief one between Horatio and the Queen. It succeeds that of Ophelia's insanity; and in it Horatio informs Hamlet's mother of the manner in which her son escaped the plot laid by the King to have him put to death in England. [See Q,, lines 1747-1782.] Here, at last, is no confusion or mutilation; all is coherent and complete; but, on the other hand, there is heaviness of form, empti ness of matter. Plainly Shakespeare never wrote this feeble stuff: it is an interpolation. What he did write. having the same purpose, the reader will find in the beginning of the Second Scene of Act V, and he will notice that the occurrences which Hamlet in that version relates to Horatio are exactly the same as those,-of which in this Horatio informs the Queen, even to the use of the dead king's seal,— to which there is no allusion in the old history. But it is to be observed that neither in Hamlet's letter to Horatio, nor in any other part of the authentic text, is there a hint of an appointed meeting between them on the east side of the city to morrow morning.' From these circumstances it appears that the scene in the first edition does not represent a counterpart in Shakespeare's Hamlet, which the procurer of the copy for that edition had failed to obtain. It seems rather a remnant of a previous play on the same subject.

name

Such I believe it and the names Corambis and Montano to be. We have seen, by Henslowe's Diary, that there was a Hamlet performed on the 9th of June, 1594. Henslowe heads the leaves upon which this memorandum is entered, ‘In the name of God, Amen, beginning at newington, my lord admirell men and my lord chamberlem men as followeth, 1594.' Here we have a Hamlet played, 1594, at a theatre where the company to which Shakespeare belonged was performing; in 1602 the same company still perform a Hamlet; and we know of no play of the same na performed at any other theatre. It seems at least most probable, then, that this tragedy belonged from the first to that cry of players; and I believe that when they shortened it (for the pruning was plainly their work, and not the poet's, as the case of the scene which opens with the entry of Fortinbras and his army makes manifest) they omitted Hamlet's long, discursive relation to Horatio of his stratagem against Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and, as the story must be told, introduced the short scene between Horatio and the Queen from the old play, which, according to the stage practice of that time (and perhaps even of our day), they had a perfect right to do. As to two names from an older play, nothing is more probable than that Shakespeare himself should have retained them. But when in the height of his reputation as a poet and a dramatist, 1603, he saw a mutilated, and in some parts caricatured, version of his most thoughtful work surreptitiously published, nothing, also, is more probable than that he, and his fellow-players with him, should send immediately the true and perfect copy' to the press, and that from this, in case it had not been done before, he should eliminate even the slightest traces of the previous drama, if they were but two names. I have hardly a doubt that this was done, and that the Quarto of 1604 was printed from a copy of the tragedy obtained with the consent of its author and the company to which it belonged.

'Shakespeare's tragedy was surely written between 1598, the date of Meres's Palladis Tamia, and June, 1602, when Roberts made his entry in the Registers of the Stationers' Company; and yet a closer approximation to the exact date is afforded by the allusion to the inhibition' of the Players. We may, therefore, with some certainty attribute the production of Shakespeare's version of Hamlet to the year 1600.'

The CAMBRIDGE EDITORS (Preface, vol. viii, p. viii): The manuscript for Q,

may have been compiled in the first instance from short-hand notes taken during the representation, but there are many errors in the printed text which seem like errors of a copyist rather than of a hearer. Compare [lines 365, 366, of Q,] with the corresponding lines of Q, [see I, iii, 73, 74, and notes, in this edition]. A few lines above, both Quartos give courage for comrade,' a mistake due undoubtedly to the eye, and not to the ear. We believe, then, that the defects of the manuscript from which Q, was printed had been in part at least supplemented by a reference to the authentic copy in the library of the theatre. Very probably the man employed for this purpose was some inferior actor or servant, who would necessarily work in haste and by stealth, and in any case would not be likely to work very conscientiously for the printer or bookseller, who was paying him to deceive his masters. . . . . The chief differences between Q, and Q, are only such as might be expected between a bona fide and a mala fide transcription.'

The Cambridge Editors modified their views of the origin of Q, before they published their next edition in the Clarendon Press Series, and suggested a solution of the mystery which will, I think, commend itself the more thoroughly it is understood, and the more closely the play is studied. HALLIWELL, in his folio edition of 1865, suggests what partly covers the same ground when he says, in the Introduction to Hamlet, there are small fragments peculiar to [Q,], some of which may be attributed to the pen of the great dramatist.'

W. G. CLARK and W. A. WRIGHT (Preface to Hamlet. Clarendon Press Series, p. viii): It is clear, upon a very slight examination, that Q, is printed from a copy which was hastily taken down and perhaps surreptitiously obtained, either from short-hand notes made during the representation, or privately from the actors themselves. These notes, when transcribed, would form the written copy which the printers had before them, and would account for the existence of errors which are errors of the copyist rather than of the hearer. But granting all this, we have yet to account for differences between the earlier and later forms of the Play which cannot be explained by the carelessness of short-hand writer, copyist, or printer. Knight, with great ingenuity, maintains that the Quarto of 1603 represents the original sketch of the Play, and that this was an early work of the poet. We differ from him in respect to this last conclusion, because we can see no evidence for Shakespeare's connection with the Play before 1602.

• First, there is the complete absence of any positive evidence on the point, and next, there is the very strong negative evidence that in the enumeration of Shakepeare's works by one who was an ardent admirer of his genius, Francis Meres, there is no mention whatever of Hamlet. That Hamlet should be omitted and Titus Andronicus inserted is utterly unintelligible, except upon the supposition that in 1598 the play bearing the former name had not in any way been connected with Shakespeare. Elze appeals to the omission of Pericles and Henry VI from the list as a parallel instance, but we submit that there is no reason at all for associating Shakespeare with Pericles at this period, and that his connection with the Three Parts of Henry VI is doubtful. In any case, the last-mentioned play would hardly be quoted by an admirer as a proof of his genius; whereas, if Hamlet had existed, even in the imperfect form in which it appears in Q,, it would have supplied at least as good an instance of his tragic power as Titus Andronicus or Richard III. At some time, therefore, between 1598 and 1602 Hamlet, as retouched by Shakespeare, was put upon the stage. We are inclined to think that it was acted not very long before the date of Roberts's entry in the Stationers' Registers, namely, 26 July, 1602. Our