Abstract
In any other passage, in any other play, the changes might go unnoticed, but in what has become the most famous speech in Shakespeare’s most famous work, the alterations, though subtle, are impossible to miss. The quotation remains instantly recognizable as the conclusion of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech; the “native hue” of Resolution so familiar to modern eyes and ears, however, has become “the healthful face,” and this face is no longer “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” but rather “Shews sick and pale with Thought.” The modifications, which are printed in a 1676 quarto of the play, were made by William Davenant, Restoration theater manager of the Duke’s Men, one of two companies supported by royal proclamation when the public theaters reopened in 1660. The title page to The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark declares the text representative of the play “As it is now Acted at his Highness the Duke of York’s Theatre,” and the Players’ Quarto, as it is frequently called, is understood to be a fairly accurate reflection of Hamlet as it was performed in the latter half of the seventeenth century.
Thus Conscience does make Cowards,
And thus the healthful face of Resolution
Shews sick and pale with Thought:
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
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Notes
For a more detailed list of the cuts, see Anthony Dawson, Hamlet, Shakespeare in Performance (Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1995), 23–4;
Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 167;
and Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), 46–51.
For a detailed look at Rowe’s use of the 1676 quarto, see Barbara Mowat’s “The Form of Hamlet’s Fortunes,” Renaissance Drama 19 (1988): 97–126, especially pages 98–107.
Rowe was selected to edit Shakespeare by the Tonson publishing cartel, who also published the editions of Pope, Theobald, Warburton, Johnson, Steevens, and Capell. Encouraging their editors to use a received (Tonson) text would have been a means for the Tonsons to perpetuate copyright privileges. See Peter Seary, Lewis Theobald and the Editing of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 133–5;
and Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 57–100.
See Barbara Mowat, “The Form of Hamlet’s Fortunes”; and Sonia Massai, “Working with the Texts: Differential Readings,” A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text. Ed. Andrew Murphy (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 190–2.
It is important to note that fictionalized localities and directions are not an invention of the eighteenth century. See Lukas Erne, Shakespeare’s Modern Collaborators (London and New York: Continuum, 2008), 81–3, for examples of fictionalized directions in Shakespeare’s original playtexts.
See Robert Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 201–7.
Many critics suggest that the Porter’s description of the “equivocator” is an allusion to the Jesuit Father Garnet, who claimed equivocation as a religious right when under examination for his involvement in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Steven Mullaney’s “Lying Like Truth: Riddle, Representation and Treason in Renaissance England,” English Literary History 47.1 (1980): 32–47, deftly weaves the play through the contemporary political atmosphere.
See George Winchester Stone, Jr., “Garrick’s Presentation of Antony and Cleopatra,” Review of English Studies 13 (1937): 20–38. Stone writes that “the plan, as it proved, was [for Capell] to render the play actable by excision and rearrangement only, not by the addition of scenes or the creation of new speeches” (25).
de Grazia’s argument that Malone’s edition instituted a practice that dictated subsequent Shakespeare scholarship’s concern with individuality and authenticity has been challenged on a number of fronts: see Michael Bristol, Big-time Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 79–87;
Simon Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearian Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–1765 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 9–10; 187–8;
Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 96–8;
and Thomas Postlewait, “The Criteria for Evidence: Anecdotes in Shakespearean Biography, 1709–2000,” Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History. Eds. W. B. Worthen and Peter Holland (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2003), 61–4.
For an influential assessment of many of the New Bibliography’s major conjectures and textual categories, see Paul Werstine, “Narratives About Printed Shakespeare Texts: ‘Foul Papers’ and ‘Bad’ Quartos,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41.1 (1990): 65–86. Giorgio Melchiori’s “The Continuing Importance of New Bibliography” offers a different, though equally important, retrospective.
For a thorough assessment of the rise, fall, and continuing legacy of the New Bibliography, see Gabriel Egan, The Struggle for Shakespeare’s Text (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010).
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© 2014 J. Gavin Paul
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Paul, J.G. (2014). Performance and the Editorial Tradition. In: Shakespeare and the Imprints of Performance. History of Text Technologies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137438447_3
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