Introducing Shakespeare: A Graphic Guide - Nick Groom, Piero 2013

Comparing the Bad Quarto of Hamlet

In all, six or seven of Shakespeare’s Quartos (Henry VI Parts Two and Three, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Hamlet and possibly Love’s Labour’s Lost) originally appeared as “bad” Quartos: the texts being based on actors’ memories or even shorthand notes taken during a performance. The Shakespeare scholar E.K. Chambers notes of the “reporter” who cribbed the “bad” Quarto of Hamlet (1603) …

HE MAKES OMISSIONS, CAUSING LACUNAE OF SENSE AND GRAMMAR. HE GIVES THE BEGINNINGS AND ENDS OF SPEECHES WITHOUT THEIR MIDDLES. HE PARAPHRASES. HE MERGES DISTINCT SPEECHES. HE MAKES A MOSAIC OF RECOLLECTED FRAGMENTS. HE CATCHES VIGOROUS WORDS WITHOUT THEIR CONTEXT. HE MAKES DOUBLE USE OF PHRASES. HE SHIFTS THE ORDER OF BITS OF DIALOGUE WITHIN THEIR SCENES …

And he comes out with speeches such as this …

To be, or not to be, I there’s the point,

To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:

No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes,

For in that dreame of death, when wee awake,

And borne before an euerlasting ludge,

From whence no passenger euer retur’ned,

The vndiscouered country, at whose sight

The happy smile, and the accursed damn’d.

But for this, the ioyfull hope of this,

Who’ld beare the scorns and flattery of the world,

Scorned by the right rich, the rich curssed of the poore?

Very different from the now commonly accepted speech …

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;

No more; and, by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause. […]

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover’d country from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have,

Than fly to others that we know not of […]