Loose Ends and Inconsistencies in the First Quarto of Shakespeare's
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Description: Y. S. Bains rebuts G. R. Hibbard's general conclusions about the quality of the text of Q1.
Loose Ends and Inconsistencies in the First Quarto of Shakespeare's Hamlet? (Hamlet Studies 18 (1996): 94-104) by Y. S. Bains University of Cincinnati In their reprint of 1825, Payne and Foss treated Q1 as the "only known copy of this tragedy as originally written by Shakespeare, which he afterwards altered and enlarged" [H. H. Furness, ed., Hamlet, New Variorum (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1905), II, 14] . In the nineteenth century, Charles Knight was a prominent exponent of the revision theory and John Payne Collier that of the opposite view [See Furness, II, 5-36]. G. R. Hibbard and most other modern editors belong to Collier's camp. According to Hibbard, one of the problems with the First Quarto of Shakespeare's Hamlet is that it has many "loose ends and inconsistencies in the conduct of action and in the nomenclature of some of the characters" [G. R. Hibbard, ed., Hamlet, Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), p. 72. Page numbers of further references to this work will be inserted in the text]. While conceding that most of the Shakespeare scripts contain some unresolved contradictions and some incoherent passages, Hibbard and other editors contend that Q1 has unfortunately a large number of them. For Hibbard and other critics, Q1 is a corrupt text because it is a memorial reconstruction of Q2 which presumably had been performed in the theatre several years before the publication of Q1 in 1603. They try to explain the origin of the "loose ends and inconsistencies" by suggesting arbitrarily that a pirate reconstructed Q1 from memory after having acted in Q2. What Hibbard and other scholars have never provided is any reliable evidence for their dating of Q2 or for the theory of memorial reconstruction. This theory has prejudiced readers against the authenticity of Q1 and treated actors and publishers unjustly. Consequently, as Frank G. Hubbard has stressed, "Students of Hamlet literature have for so long seen the First Quarto through the Seco
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