In 1823, Sir Henry Bunbury discovered a badly bound volume of twelve Shakespeare plays in a closet of his manor house. Nearly all of the plays were first editions, but one stood out as extraordinary: a previously unknown text of Hamlet that predated all other versions. Suddenly, the world had to grapple with a radically new—or rather, old—Hamlet in which the characters, plot, and poetry of Shakespeare's most famous play were profoundly and strangely transformed. Q1, as the text is known, has been declared a rough draft, a shorthand piracy, a memorial reconstruction, and a pre-Shakespearean "ur-Hamlet," among other things. Flickering between two historical moments—its publication in Shakespeare's early seventeenth century and its rediscovery in Bunbury's early nineteenth—Q1 is both the first and last Hamlet. Because this text became widely known only after the familiar version of the play had reached the pinnacle of English literature, its reception has entirely depended on this uncanny temporal oscillation; so too has its ongoing influence on twentieth- and twenty-first-century ideas of the play. Zachary Lesser examines how the improbable discovery of Q1 has forced readers to reconsider accepted truths about Shakespeare as an author and about the nature of Shakespeare's texts. In telling the story of this mysterious quarto and tracing the debates in newspapers, London theaters, and scholarly journals that followed its discovery, Lesser offers brilliant new insights on what we think we mean by Hamlet.

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.

A study of the practices and politics of early modern publishers of plays.

This book reads like a cross between a literary detective novel and a personal conversation with a passionate Shakespeare scholar, unpacking the play that Roth calls the seminal text of the humanist religion. It unveils new realities about the playsome of which have have lain hidden since Shakespeares dayuntangles centuries of commentary and criticism, and delivers the punch lines for a whole raft of Shakespeares remarkably involved in-jokes. Roths scholarship tackles old arguments like Hamlets age (hes sixteen), lays out the intricate time structure thats embedded in the play, and unravels several of the plays endless allusions that so puzzle the will. He depicts a dense, ironic, and multivalent web of political and dramatic tension in Elsinore (plus a great deal of humor), and delivers one ahamoment after another for lovers of the Bards greatest tragedy.

'Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness' is a radical new interpretation of the most famous play in the English language. By exploring Shakespeare's engagements with the humanist traditions of early modern England and Europe, Rhodri Lewis reveals a 'Hamlet' unseen for centuries: an innovative, coherent, and exhilaratingly bleak tragedy in which the governing ideologies of Shakespeare's age are scrupulously upended.

Now available in paperback, this is the only modernised critical edition of the 1603 quarto of Shakespeare's Hamlet in print.

It is nearly two centuries since the first quarto of Hamlet was rediscovered, yet there is still no consensus about its relationship to the second quarto. Indeed, the first quarto, the least frequently read Hamlet, has been dismissed as "corrupt," "inferior" or like "a mutilated corpse," even though in performance it has been described as "the absolute dynamo behind the play." Currently one hypothesis dominates explanations about the quartos' interrelationship, supposing that the first quarto (published 1603) was reconstructed from memory by one or more actors who had performed minor roles in a version of the second quarto (published 1604-5). The present study reports on a detailed linguistic reassessment of the principal arguments for memorial reconstruction. The evidence--including a three way comparison between the underlying French source in Les Histoires Tragiques and the two quartos, and the informal features and specific grammatical aspects, and a documented memorial reconstruction in 1779--does not support the dominant hypothesis. The cumulative evidence suggests that the earliest scholars to examine the first quarto were right: the 1603 Hamlet came first, and the second quarto is a substantial, later revision.