Samuel Browne (judge)

Transcription

Thanks very much. I'm really delighted to be here and participate in this year's festival on journeys. Not least because it led me to find on the website this really lovely quote from Adrienne Rich that partly inspires this year's festival. That "every journey into the past is complicated by delusions false memories and false namings." And that certainly rings true to me as a literary historian and as a Shakespearean. We possess so few records of Shakespeare's life We have none of his own manuscripts no letters by him and so any attempt to reconstruct Shakespeare's biography is inevitably a mixture of truth, fiction and more or less informed speculation. Likewise, we can't know for certain the text of his plays. Many were published in his lifetime as quartos a small and vulnerable pamphlet format. And seven years after his death these same plays were collected in the monumental first folio edition of his complete works. These plays therefore exist in two distinct editions; the two texts are never identical, as you can see here in a famous line from /Romeo and Juliet./ And in numerous instances of variation, it's impossible to determine whether Shakespeare actually wrote one word or the other, or first one then the other, or perhaps neither. With no Shakespeare play is our journey into the past more difficult than with /Hamlet,/ which uniquely in the Shakespearean corpus exists in three quite different versions. What I want to talk about today is a twist on Adrienne Rich's comment: not our journey from the present into the past but rather the past's journey into our present. What happens when a book that seemed lost forever suddenly reappears among the living? There was a /Hamlet/ before /Hamlet/, a version of the most important piece of literature in the English language that is at times strikingly different from the version we all know. For nearly two centuries now, critics have debated exactly what to make of this other Hamlet, and how to reconcile it with the more familiar version of the play. Here, as so often, /Hamlet/ slips through our grasps, refusing our efforts, as he himself puts it to pluck out the heart of his mystery. The story of this other Hamlet begins 200 years after Shakespeare's death, in the small village of Great Barton in the southeast of England. The year is 1823, and Sir Henry Bunbury has recently inherited Barton Hall, the manor house of the village, from his father. While inventorying his new possessions, Bunbury found in one of the closets a book that he described as a small quarto barbarously cropped and very ill-bound. This was the first quarto of Hamlet, it's also known as Q1. Published a year prior to the earliest text of the play then known, and at that time the only copy thought to exist. The /Hamlet/ that we know from modern editions and performances and the only /Hamlet/ that anyone knew until the discovery of Q1, is a conflation of two other early texts: the second quarto, or Q2, published in 1604, and the text from the first folio of 1623. Since the 18th century, editors have combined these two texts even though each contains lines not in the other, and created our modern version of the play. While these two texts differ in a number of the lines, the second quarto may derive from Shakespeare's manuscript, while the folio text seems to have been lightly altered in getting the play ready for the stage, nonetheless they're fundamentally the same. The text contained in Q1, on the other hand, is far stranger. Even though the play is recognizably a version of /Hamlet/ as we know it. When Bunbury made his discovery in the closet of Barton Hall, readers suddenly had to confront this bizarre alternate version of the greatest English play, one claiming to be by William Shakespeare, but sounding at times rather unShakespearean. Here, for instance, as I'll show you in a moment the "to be or not to be" soliloquy is diametrically opposed to the famous and familiar one. And Hamlet's dying words are not the enigmatic "the rest is silence," instead, this Hamlet says devoutly, "Heaven receive my soul." In Q1, Gertude explicitly denies any knowledge of the murder and vows to help her son to revenge. She and Horatio then team up to conspire against Claudius. I'm going to talk more about what's in Q1 in a moment, but I want to linger a bit on the oddity of its discovery after it had hidden unknown for so many years in that closet. Bunbury's copy was missing the last page. The text therefore breaks off in a way that I think perfectly symbolizes this strangely recovered play. Hamlet speaks his final line, and then we get the stage direction, "Ham. dies," followed by an incongruous "enter" as what's called the "catch word," which gives the first word of the next page to help the printer assemble the sheets in the correct order. But we don't know who enters or what they do when they enter. This play about a haunting, which had itself just returned from oblivion, concludes on a mysterious, ghostly entrance. In 1856, a student at Trinity College Dublin sold to a local bookseller what turned out to be a second, and still the only other, surviving copy of Q1 Hamlet. The bookseller bought it for a single shilling, and promptly sold it to a collector for seventy pounds, 1400 times what he had paid. The student seems not to have realized that this was no ordinary /Hamlet,/ probably because while this version included the missing final page, it lacked the title page. So without the title page, he would have actually had to read the play to discover it was a copy of Q1. [laughter] And apparently he never did, thereby demonstrating in real financial terms the perils of not reading your Shakespeare. [laughter] It's an odd coincidence, then, that we have only two copies of this first edition of /Hamlet/ and neither is complete. Both are needed to make the whole, which only adds to the sense of happenstance and luck that we have this text at all. It might easily have been lost forever. For me this is a powerful and haunting reminder of the precariousness of the historical and literary record, and of the need to protect it for the future. We're in a good place to think about that. Our understanding of Shakespeare and indeed of most early authors depends on the vagaries of historical survival. For example, the records of Philip Henslowe who ran the Rose Theatre, while Shakespeare's troupe was performing nearby at the Globe, reveal that of all the plays performed at the Rose, only about one in seven survive in print. More than eighty percent of the plays performed at this crucial moment in Shakespeare's development as a dramatist, the plays he saw, admired, or scorned, and may even have helped to write, are completely lost except for their suggestive titles, plays like "Strange News out of Poland," or "The Blind Man Eats Many a Fly," [laughter] or, "A Fool and her Maidenhead are Soon Parted." [laughter] In what I think is the greatest prose writing of the English Renaissance, Thomas Browne meditates on the discovery of some antique cremation urns that had been accidentally uncovered by a farmer. The strangeness of finding these urns a millennium after they were buried leads Browne to ponder both the destructive and the revelatory powers of time. "In a field of old Walsingham, [coincidentally quite near Bunbury's Barton Hall,] not many months past, were digged up between forty and fifty urns, deposited in a dry and sandy soil, not a yard deep, not far from one another... the treasures of time lie high in urns coins and monuments, scarce below the roots of some vegetables." His point here is that despite how accessible these ancient treasures seem once they're discovered, lying only a few feet underground, yet we never find most of them. "Time hath endless rarities, and shows of all varieties, which reveals old things in heaven, makes new discoveries in earth, and even earth itself a discovery. That great antiquity America lay buried for a thousand years, and a large part of the earth is still in the urn to us." A large part of the earth is still in the urn to us, hidden scarce below the roots of some vegetables, perhaps waiting for its moment to reappear, to challenge by its very existence what we already think we know. From this scattered record we create our narratives of history. Narratives that might be very different if chance had kept some things hidden and discovered some others. When Q1 emerged from the urn, and Henry Bunbury's closet, when that bit of the past made its journey into the present, people recognized immediately that it had the power to transform how we think about Shakespeare, about how he worked as a dramatist, and about the meaning of his most renowned play. For instance, in the diary of a member of parliament, printed in a literary newspaper of the time, the politician says, with a wonderfully over the top comment, that if this new /Hamlet/ was really written by Shakespeare it would be "the most interesting and instructive subject of philosophical inquiry in the annals of intellect." [laughter] To take one small example of why the question seemed so important, readers have long debated the extent to which Queen Gertrude was complicit in the murder of Hamlet's father. Had she been carrying on an affair with Claudius beforehand? Had she helped to plan the crime? Well, in Q1, the queen tells Hamlet explicitly that she knew nothing about the murder. She pledges to "conceal, consent, and do my best what strategem soe'er thou shalt devise." And she offers a "thousand mother's blessings to my son." In newspaper and magazine articles after the discovery of Q1, you can almost hear Victorian readers breathing a sigh of relief at this proof of womanly virtue. Q1 gave Victorians the Gertrude they wanted. But this only made it more important to discover exactly how this version of /Hamlet/ related to the version they already knew so well. Bunbury's timing was crucial. Had Q1 been discovered even 50 years earlier, things would have been very different. Because by the early 19th century, the Romantic movement had declared /Hamlet/ the pinnacle of literary achievement. In the 18th century, Samuel Johnson had seen plenty of problems with the play. "Hamlet is, through the whole play rather an instrument than an agent... The catastrophe is not very happily produced... The poet is accused of having shown little regard to poetic justice, and may be charged with equal neglect of poetical probability." Notice that Johnson is mainly concerned with the structure of the play as a whole: how the plot is built, whether it conforms to tragic principles. For Samuel Taylor Coleridge, by contrast, Hamlet the character was the center of attention. "We see a great, almost enormous, intellectual activity, and a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it... I have a smack of Hamlet myself if I may say so." For the Romantics, the play /Hamlet/ was almost entirely about the mind of Hamlet: the hypersensitive, self-reflective mind thinking almost obsessively about thinking, that has taken to characterize modernity. This is a powerful reading of /Hamlet,/ one that is still with us, and one that has as its centerpiece the "to be or not to be" soliloquy. But it's not at all the /Hamlet/ of Q1, as we'll see. And so it became crucial after 1823 to figure out exactly how this /Hamlet/ came into existence, and to determine whether it was really written by Shakespeare. In the Victorian period, two theories dominated. The first simply followed the conventional wisdom in the 18th century that Shakespeare habitually revised his plays, and that those other plays with two different texts, such as /Romeo and Juliet/ or /King Lear/ represented Shakespeare's first drafts and then his final revision. When Q1 was reprinted shortly after its discovery this was how the booksellers Payne and Foss introduced it to the public. "The present edition of Hamlet is an accurate reprint from the only known copy of the tragedy as originally written by Shakespeare, which he afterwards altered and enlarged." But precisely because of Q1's belated discovery, the rough draft theory soon began to be eclipsed by a novel and more radical theory. For the Romantics, great poetry, and therefore /Hamlet/ above all, resulted from a single inspired act of original creation, what Wordsworth called the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." Rather than from the patient and difficult labor of revision. And so an alternate theory was developed which would come to dominate Shakespeare studies until very recently. According to this theory, there was no other version of Shakespeare's Hamlet at all. Shakespeare wrote only the famous version of the play. Since it was popular, however, it was stolen and published without his knowledge, but in a garbled, deformed text. Perhaps someone tried to transcribe the play in shorthand as it was being performed, or perhaps it was badly reconstructed from memory by a minor actor trying to earn a few extra pounds. And this minor actor is usually thought to be Marcellus, since his lines resemble those in the familiar text more than anyone else's. But while the rough draft and the memorial reconstruction theories were opposed throughout the 19th century, and still today, in fact they share a fundamental characteristic. Both allow us to forget a very inconvenient fact about Shakespeare's /Hamlet:/ it's a remake. There was a /Hamlet/ play on the London stages before Shakespeare even made his way from Stratford-on-Avon to the capital. Scholars call this earlier play the "Ur-Hamlet." "Ur" means original or primitive in German. The play is now lost, but we know it existed, because there are allusions to it as early as 1589, before Shakespeare was writing for the stage. One of these allusions gives us the only line that survives from this mysterious play. We're told that the ghost cries out, "Hamlet, revenge!" -- a line that does not appear in any text we have. If in fact this is a line from the play at all, after all the most famous line in /Casablanca,/ "play it again, Sam," is never actually spoken in the movie. Here we have another ghost of /Hamlet./ The idea that there was a /Hamlet/ before Shakespeare's has long haunted critics. If the play pre-dates Shakespeare, just how Shakespearean is it? What if this Ur-Hamlet looked more like Shakespeare's play than we've generally been wiling to admit? So long as there was no actual text that might be connected to any earlier version of the play, these doubts could be kept at bay, and earlier scholars largely agreed to forget about the pre-Shakespearean /Hamlet/ after a routine mention. But when Q1 made its ghostly journey from the past into the present, they suddenly had to confront the question of how Shakespeare's masterpiece related to its earlier versions. Each of the two opposed theories of Q1 -- rough draft or garbled reconstruction -- allowed 19th century readers to evade this question. According to both, Shakespeare's Hamlet is a fully original product of the author's genius, as Romantic theory held that it must be. Either Q1 was Shakespeare's own first version of the play, or there was only ever one version, mangled in Q1 by the unskilled stenographer or actor. Both theories effectively requarantined the Ur-Hamlet and Q1, so that they cannot contaminate Shakespeare's poetic genius. This attempt to distinguish Shakespeare's Hamlet from the mysterious version that appeared in Bunbury's closet, and to cut off Shakespeare's play from any predecessor, has had profound effects on our understanding of this most famous work of English literature. Some of what we simply take for granted about the play in fact derives from Bunbury's unexpected find. In my book /Hamlet After Q1/, I detail a number of these bits of common wisdom, which circulate in theatre programs, in high school and college classrooms, in scholarly journals, and on the internet. Indeed, I've passed along all of them to my own students at one time or another. But when we understand the history of how these conventional assumptions became conventional, only thanks to Bunbury's belated discovery, it turns out they aren't quite right. Sorry, I have to apologize to all my former students. The larger point is that even if you've never heard of Q1 Hamlet before, it has probably been quietly influencing your understanding of Hamlet. In the rest of my talk I want to look at one example of this, which involves the key line in the most famous passage in English literature, "to be or not to be." The line is, "Thus Conscience does make Cowards of us all." And the question is, "What does Hamlet mean by 'conscience'?" This soliloquy is so well known that it's lost some of its power to surprise us. But actually, it's very strange. Not least because it completely refuses to do what a soliloquy is supposed to do: tell us about the inner thoughts of a character. In this speech, there is no character. Hamlet never uses the first person pronoun, never says "I." The speech is entirely abstract. This abstraction is part of Hamlet's consistent refusal of self-hood, under the pressure of the task the ghost has laid on him. In his first soliloquy, he longs for his flesh to melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew. Later he wishes he were an actor, dissolving the self into a scripted role. And here, in "to be or not to be," he dissolves the self into intellectual abstraction. But this abstraction also results from the form of the speech. Hamlet, you'll remember, has recently come home from university, and this speech is in fact a school exercise, the kind of thesis Hamlet would have written to practice logic and rhetoric. Such theses explicitly had to be composed in the abstract, without reference to one's own life. In surviving university exams from Shakespeare's day, as in modern debate classes, students must argue first on the pro side of a question, and then on the con side. The most frequent question was: should a man take a wife? (It was only boys at the universities.) But another common one was, "is it better to be unhappy or not to be at all," a version of Hamlet's own question. In fact, one of the standard textbooks of rhetoric, which Shakespeare surely read in grammar school, was Cicero's Five Questions. The first question stages a debate between Marcus and an unnamed questioner, on a subject of whether death be an evil or not. The questioner sounds remarkably like Hamlet at times. For instance, when he says, "not to be, when you have been, I think is the greatest misery that may be." But Marcus responds, again like Hamlet, "if death resembles sleep, which often without any trouble of dreams doth bring a man most quiet rest, what pleasure death shall be to me." It's therefore not surprising that Hamlet's speech is organized according to a rigorous binary logic that mirrors university training in debate, pro and con, and that begins with a statement of the question: "to be OR not to be," "to suffer slings and arrows OR to take arms against a sea of troubles." But this binary logic consistently breaks down, because what Hamlet has seen and heard cannot be easily accommodated in an either/or approach. Either death is nothing else but sleeping, unconsciousness, or, death, like sleeping, may involve some other form of consciousness, dreaming. And here, uncertainty sets in. "Ay, there's the rub." Again, Hamlet divides the question into two options: should we bear those ills we have here on earth, or fly to others that we know not of after death? This is an either/or Hamlet cannot resolve, because of the impossibility of knowing what happens after death. And it leads to its conclusion. It's this dread of something after death, the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns, that puzzles the will, and prevents us from acting at all." In this constantly bifurcating speech, Hamlet ends up stuck, in the wonderful image that Claudius uses to describe his own inability to choose, like a "man to double business bound, I stand in pause where I shall first begin and both neglect." But notice that Hamlet's conclusion is a very strange thing for him to say, something he could only say if he abstracts himself in this paradoxically impersonal soliloquy. No traveller returns from the undiscovered country? Hamlet has just seen this first hand. And we have seen him see it, right there on stage. His father has come back from the dead as a ghost. Hamlet should know that death is not mere unconsciousness. His university logic is not serving him very well here. The famous existential skepticism of this speech comes at the expense of Hamlet's personal history, his identity. And it also comes at the expense of his faith. Hamlet is a Christian, after all, who at one point swears by Saint Patrick, not coincidentally the saint who, in a cave in Ireland, found the entrance to Purgatory, from whose bourn Hamlet's father has returned. He ought to know therefore that there's another man who famously returned from the undiscovered country. Hamlet's entire soliloquy is premised on his forgetting of Christ. The radical skepticism of this speech overthrows all authority, whether that of Hamlet's own father or of God the father. An important part of this skepticism has been the recurrent critical interpretation of the key line, "Thus Conscience does make Cowards of us all." We're usually told that here "conscience" does not have its common, moral religious meaning, but rather means something like "consciousness" or "self-reflection." Thought itself -- self-conscious reflection on the possible results of action -- prevents us from acting at all. This idea is ubiquitous around the internet -- I just found this last night -- as well as in editorial glossing in editions, in classroom lectures, and in recent popular critical works, like Stephen Greenblatt's /Hamlet in Purgatory,/ and Jonathan Bate's /The Genius of Shakespeare./ But in fact this version of Hamlet's conscience belongs far more to the 19th century of Bunbury's discovery than to Shakespeare's 17th century. As soon as Q1 was reprinted in 1825, its rendering of "to be or not to be" provided an easy target for ridicule. "The passage reads like a re-translation from the French," according to one reviewer. "It's filled with unconnected, unintelligible jargon. Its absurdity surpasses that of intentional burlesque." And yet the speech is not such a monstrosity of nonsense. With some creative editing and punctuating, the sort of work that had already been done on all other Shakespeare texts, the soliloquy makes good enough sense. Like the familiar version, Q1 "to be or not to be" follows a powerful binary logic. But this same form leads to a precisely opposite understanding of the relationship between this world and the next. Now I'm not an actor, so forgive me, but I'll read it. "To be or not to be: ay there's the point. To die, to sleep, is that all? Ay, all. No: to sleep, to dream - Ay marry, there it goes, For in that dream of death, when we awake and, bourne before an Everlasting Judge from whence no passenger ever returned -- the undiscovered country, at whose sight the happy smile, and the accursed damned -- but for this, the joyful hope of this, who'd bear the scorns and flatt'ry of the world, Scorned by the right rich, the rich cursed of the poor, The widow being oppressed, the orphan wronged, the taste of hunger, or a tyrant's reign, and thousand more calamities besides, to grunt and sweat under this weary life, when that he may his full quietus make with a bare bodkin? Who would this endure, but for a hope of something after death? Which puzzles the brain and doth confound the sense, whic makes us rather bear those evils we have, than fly to others that we know not of. Ay that -- O, this conscience makes cowards of us all." Here too Hamlet begins with the question of being and non-being. He imagines death as a kind of sleep before correcting himself by positing the existence of dreams after death. But now the two version diverge. It's not the fear of bad dreams that worries this Hamlet, rather death itself is the dream, from which we will surely awaken, when we awake, Hamlet says. And that "when" signals his certain faith. This is not the theology of the familiar "to be or not to be," but rather of John Donne's great poem, "Death be not proud," which concludes "One short sleep past, we wake eternally, and death shall be no more. Death thou shalt die." Death is merely temporary, a short sleep or a dream, for Christ has conquered death, and returned to tell us the good news. Hamlet's faith leads him naturally to the scene of divine judgment. Here it's the joyful hope, not the dread of something after death, that gives us the strength to endure this life of suffering. In Q1, what puzzles the brain and makes us rather bear those evils we have than fly to others that we know not of, is the fear of the Last Judgment, when we may be among the accursed, who are damned. Suicide condemns us to an eternity of incomprehensible torment in hell, & so we bear those evils we have in a joyful hope of being among the happy who will smile at Doomsday. Thus Christian conscience stays our hands. Q1's "to be or not to be" presents a powerfully coherent Protestant vision, focused on what were often called the four final things: death, judgment, heaven and hell. Its binary structure fits perfectly with the binary logic of the Last Judgment: heaven or hell. Had Q1 never been lost, would its soliloquy have seemed like "unconnected unintelligible jargon"? It was not any inherent obscurity in the Q1 speech that made it seem like parody or burlesque, I think, but rather its reemergence only after the more familiar text had long been entrenched at the peak of the literary canon. And despite the scorn heaped upon Q1's version, its sudden appearance completely transformed how "to be or not to be" was understood in its famous version. Before Bunbury's discovery, no one seems to have imagined that conscience might mean anything other than our innate ability, given by God, to discern good from evil. Afterward, however, numerous editors and critics began to insist that conscience must be construed not in this familiar sense, but rather, as the great Shakespearen E.K. Chambers wrote, as "the exercise of conscious thought. Speculation on the future." Around the turn of the century, this idea proliferated across virtually every edition of the play. Many were even more emphatic, like the Pitt Press Shakespeare for Schools edition, which told high schoolers that conscience meant "speculative reflection; from the sense 'consciousness'; not the moral sense,' as at 5, 2, 58 and 67." The added cross references here to Hamlet's remarks about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern -- "they're not near my conscience," after he kills them -- and Claudius -- "is't not perfect conscience to quit him with this arm?" -- are striking. Even though Shakespeare uses the word elsewhere in this very play in the moral sense, this edition is adamant that it cannot have this meaning in "to be or not to be." But why not? What led to this scholarly insistence? The choice of meaning has major implications. If conscience means "the divinely implanted moral judge," then the soliloquy, at least at this moment, carries a strongly religious message. But if conscience means "consciousness," or "speculation," then the soliloquy lacks any overt religious discourse, and will be more easily understood as a skeptical interrogation of the nature and even the existence of the afterlife. The adoption of this reading, this new reading, of the line thus involves the largest issues of "to be or not to be" and of /Hamlet/ as a whole. This new reading was driven by the discovery of Q1, and by a new theory of its origins. They key moment came in 1872, in an Oxford Shakespeare edition of Hamlet. The editors presented their solution tentatively, but it was ultimately to transform understandings of /Hamlet/ and Shakespeare for generations. "Q1 offers us a glimpse of the mysterious Ur-Hamlet," they wrote, "in a transition state while it was undergoing a remodeling, but had not yet received more than the first rough touches of the great master's hand." The editors thus rejected the quarantining of the earlier non-Shakespearean play, that both sides in the debate over the rough draft and the short-hand theories had rigorously enforced. With Q1 now seen as a transition state between the Ur-Hamlet and Shakespeare's Hamlet, that lost earlier play became the white whale of Shakespeare studies, with more and more scholarly Ahabs hunting it. Q1 was the missing link that would help us to understand Shakespeare's art by revealing how he'd transformed the Ur-Hamlet into his masterpiece. The term, "missing link," was widely popularized after the discovery of Picanthropus Erectus in 1891, and not only this term, but numerous other references to evolution pop up in discussions of the play around this time. The solution to all the problems of Hamlet, we're told, is to be found only in the study of the evolution of the play. In comments like these, Shakespeare's /Hamlet/ becomes an evolved organism, a higher life form than the Ur-Hamlet and Q1, but nonetheless derived from them, and therefore displaying certain vestigial traits that would remain inexplicable unless properly located in the descent of the play. And the key difference that critics now saw in /Hamlet,/ compared to the less evolved Q1, was the meditative, philosophical character of Shakespeare's prints, not surprisingly since Romantic critics had made that character practically the sole focus of interest. While the Ur-Hamlet was a crude play, a primitive tale of lust, blood feuds, and revenge, filled with blood and horror -- you have to remember, the text of this play does not exist, so critics are busy writing it and making it up [laughter] -- so the Ur-Hamlet was a crude, primitive play. Shakespeare's revision, we're told purified the play, and its main character of that taint of their barbaric birth. One critic pithily summed it up, "The old Hamlet does most of the deeds of the play, and Shakespeare's Hamlet thinks most of the thoughts..." According to this evolutionary framework, Shakespeare's /Hamlet/ surpasses the Ur-Hamlet, just as the civilized surpasses the barbaric, the Renaissance surpasses the medieval, and the modern skeptical attitude towards religion surpasses an older blind faith. Hence the more traditionally religious sentiments that Hamlet professes in the Q1 version of "to be or not to be" were mirrored by his exemplary Christian death, "Heaven receive my soul," he says piously. Whereas, "the rest is silence," returns us to the puzzling unknowns of the famous version of the soliloquy. On this reading, the brilliance of Shakespeare's /Hamlet/ lay not in its plot, which after all he had inherited, but rather in its philosophy. The point of view of a new age is expressed with cautious skepticism in "to be or not to be," with a unique mixture of sober, rational, almost scientific thought. The skeptical agnosticism of the soliloquy became a hallmark of scholarly criticism, distinguishing Shakespeare's work from the more pious Q1. Readers now had a new way to assimilate the uncomfortable fact that Shakespeare's masterpiece was not an original work of art. As the great scholar C. H. Herford put it in his 1899 edition of the play, "If /Hamlet/ is the most individual of all Shakespeare's works, if it is penetrated with the personal accent beyond any other dramatic utterance of man, it probably owes even less than usual to inventive construction of plot. But Shakespeare's supreme power of wholly transforming the spiritual complexion of a tale, while leaving its material form almost intact is nowhere so wonderfully seen." If the new view of Q1 as the missing link meant that Shakespeare's Hamlet was a bit less original, his genius could still be found in the spiritual complexion of the play, the questioning philosophy of a new age. The new reading of conscience as self-reflection rather than God-given moral guide perfectly captures this desire for a modern Shakespeare, a Hamlet that heralds the dawn of modernity in the Renaissance. This has been a very powerful reading, but as I hope I've shown, its power comes from its ability to resolve problems about /Hamlet/ that could only be seen after Bunbury's discovery of Q1. It's a reading that tells us less about Shakespeare and his spectators at the Globe than it does about the meaning of Shakespeare for his readers in the 19th century. And this reading has in fact obscured a fundamental problem with Hamlet's line about conscience as it appears in the famous version of the soliloquy. Put simply, the line doesn't make much sense. In both Q1 and the more familiar text of /Hamlet,/ conscience is decidedly unlikely to carry any meaning other than the religious one. Yet, in its famous version, "to be or not to be" includes no religious language aside from this word, leaving conscience curiously unanchored. The word "conscience" appears seven other times in the familiar text of the play, and in each case there's no doubt that it carries its usual religious meaning. From Hamlet's desire to "catch the conscience of the King," to Laertes' admission that killing Hamlet is "almost against my conscience." There's no warrant anywhere else in /Hamlet,/ in other words, for reading "conscience" in any other way. Even more importantly, the idea that conscience makes us cowards is a Renaissance proverb that appears in many other texts. And in this proverbial usage, too, conscience always has its familiar religious meaning. We're told that "an ill conscience enfeebles us, makes very cowards of us," "an evil conscience makes us dastards and cowards," "the conscience, wherein remains the memory of former violence and injustice makes men cowards, and afraid to grapple with death." These are just a few of dozens of the examples that I could show you. We're "cowards," in other words, because sinners that we all are, we fear God's judgment and damnation. So in the fully Christian version of Q1's "to be or not to be," the phrase "conscience makes cowards of us all" represents a perfect application of this proverb. Hamlet makes the traditional point that people with a bad conscience, who are contemplating suicide, bear those evils we have out of the fear of evils we know not of, the hellish torments awaiting the damned. But the familiar version of "to be or not to be" is difficult to reconcile with this tradition. Here we have no mention of eternal judgment, the basic precondition for the proverb in every other text in which it is used in the period. Without this Christian vision of the Last Judgment, the soliloquy lacks the foundation necessary to the meaning of "conscience makes cowards." Precisely because the line therefore appears out of place, by comparison with the fully Christian Q1 version, after the discovery of that text, Hamlet's conscience generated a large commentary tradition dedicated to explaining that its true meaning carried no religious significance at all. Before Bunbury's discovery, reader's simply assumed that "conscience makes cowards" had its usual religious meaning. So how did those earlier readers reconcile this explicitly Christian proverb with the complete absence of Christian theology from "to be or not to be"? An intriguing clue emerges from the earliest evidence we have of someone actually reading the soliloquy. The most remarkable surviving copy of the first folio is currently housed at Meisei University in Tokyo. And here we can see an early seventeenth century reader, roughly contemporary with Shakespeare, annotating the plays in detail. This reader made notes of key plot points, here at the top of the first page of the play, for instance we see "conditions of single combat between Hamlet and Fortinbras." But like many contemporary readers, he or she was more interested in extracting usable sayings and beautiful passages from the text for transcription into a commonplace book. A commonplace book archived passages for later repurposing in the reader's own writing. Hence we find the Meisei reader making generalized and abstract glosses on the text, such as "madness by love," when Polonius diagnoses Hamlet. "Mercy blots away offense," when Claudius is trying to pray. Or, "dissuasion to a woman from marriage," which is his gloss on the nunnery scene. These notes are the reader's first pass through the text. The lines will then be transcribed later under appropriate headings in his commonplace book. Since a commonplace book was meant as a general aid to rhetoric, these notes therefore ignore the plot, disregarding that Polonius is completely wrong in his diagnosis of Hamlet's madness and that Claudius is utterly unable to find the mercy that might blot away his offense. The Meisei reader's glossing of "to be or not to be" is entirely in this "commonplacing" mode. For this near-contemporary of Shakespeare, the speech was a rhetorical set piece, filled with good, extractable lines, not, as for most later critics, a turning point in the plot, or the development of Hamlet's character. In the top margin of the page, he or she has noted that the speech is particularly rich in discussions of "doubt what befalls after death" and "miseries and disgraces where to we are subject." But one line, in particular, one line in particular stood out. The only line actually quoted or nearly quoted: "conscience makes us cowards." To this early reader, interested in proverbs, Hamlet's line about conscience was the centerpiece of the speech, no doubt because it was already proverbial. Unlike modern critics, the Meisei annotator makes no attempt at a holistic reading that can account for "to be or not to be" as a coherent statement on conscience, the afterlife, suicide. Indeed, he or she typically does not read holistically at all, because commonplacing deliberately takes lines out of context. Alongside Polonius' speeches of advice to Laertes and Ophelia, for instance, the Meisei reader notes, "wise precepts of a father to a son going to travel in foreign countries." Or, "a father's wise counsel to his daughter not to believe the promises and oaths of a young professed lover." But when Hamlet later mocks Polonius for his plentiful lack of wit, the Meisei reader glosses, "defects of old men." So the longstanding debate about whether Polonius should be portrayed as a wise counselor or a buffoonish pedant, and he's often portrayed either way in productions, that whole debate is simply irrelevant to this reader. Polonius' speeches are understood as instances of rhetoric rather than insight into a unified character. For the Meisei reader, and I suspect many others in the period, "to be or not to be" thus becomes a speech about, that is able to be transcribed into a commonplace book under headings associated with, "doubt what befalls after death." And it's also a speech that includes the proverb, "conscience makes us cowards." What it does not have to be is a speech in which this saying forms part of a single, coherently logical statement. At one moment, Hamlet can voice a clearly non- Christian, skeptical and almost atheistical perspective on the after life -- "doubt what befalls after death" -- at another, he speaks a commonplace about conscience that requires the audience to maintain precisely the Christian viewpoint that the rest of the speech utterly denies. If we want a unified discussion of the question or the point, we will find it only in Q1. Only there does the entire speech hang together, only there does Hamlet's comment that "conscience makes cowards" participate in a seamless Christian analysis of death, judgment and the afterlife. In other words, the relationship between the two versions of "to be or not to be" is precisely the opposite of how it's been understood since virtually the moment that Bunbury discovered Q1 in his closet. Instead of being unconnected, unintelligible jargon, Q1 is the far more coherent version of the speech. In fact, although no one seems to have noticed it at the time, Q1's powerfully coherent Christian message entrenched the notion that the famous version was a cry of modernist existential anguish, in which thinking itself, conscience, makes us unable to act in the world. Rather than being the true and original meaning of Hamlet's conscience, that idea is a residue of Hamlet after Q1. Thank you very much. [applause] Yes? Questions? Audience member: you use the terms, "Christian," and "Protestant;" is there anything for sort of going one level below that in detail. I mean this is a time, if my memory is correct, of ferment in the area of Protestant religion. Whether it's the Church of England or Puritans, and conscience and what happens after death, and how it happens, seem to figure largely in those world views. Is there anything from that that might inform this? Lesser: I think so. I call the "to be or not to be" version -- that speech in Q1 -- Protestant. I wouldn't call the play as a whole Protestant, which is why I use the more vague word, "Christian," because, remember, Hamlet's father says quite clearly that he's coming back from purgatory. Purgatory is one of the first things that the reformers abolished. It was the basis of the whole superstructure of indulgences, and everything that Luther and Calvin rejected about the Catholic church. The idea that you could give the church a bit of money and your relatives would get some time off their stay in purgatory. So the fact that Hamlet's father comes from purgatory is a strange thing for a play written in a Protestant country. But the reason I say that Q1 "to be or not to be" really is a Protestant speech has to do with what I was talking about its binary character. Because Protestant afterlife is binary: you either go to heaven or you go to hell. There's no middle ground. There's no room for that third option of purgatory. That may be part of why Hamlet is unable to figure out how to relate the afterlife to what he's seen of his own father, because his own father comes from a place that should not really exist, at least in the theology of Shakespeare's day. Medieval Denmark's another question. Audience member: With respect to my neighbor, I would argue that England at that time was not necessarily a Protestant country culturally, and particularly Shakespeare. If you remember at the very end, he has choirs of angels greeting him, which is very much part of the Catholic burial service. Sure, the hierarchy was Protestant, but culturally the country was pretty ambivalent still. Lesser: Yeah, there's certainly a debate that historians are still having about the extent to which the Reformation was successful in England or not, and that Shakespeareans are having about Shakespeare himself since there was discovered in the 18th century in Shakespeare's old house in Stratford a document that appears to be his father writing a written confession of the Catholic faith. The document itself we don't know if we're 100% sure whether it's genuine. The interesting thing about the line you quote of Horatio's at the end is not in the Q1 version. So in the famous version, Hamlet dies saying "the rest is silence," which is a kind of skeptical take on what "the rest" is after death. And Horatio sort of steps in, as he's always doing, to try to make things clear, rational, understandable, and says, "flights of angels, sing thee to thy rest," that is, you're going to heaven, even if Hamlet's not so sure. Interestingly in Q1, Hamlet's sure; he says, "heaven receive my soul," and Horatio doesn't say anything about flights of angels. Which perhaps gives it again a slightly less Catholic tint. But I think it's also that if Hamlet's saying it himself, there's no reason for Horatio to step in and say it. So that bit is actually kind of reversed as well. Moderator: any more questions? Audience member: I'm thinking of the play and I'm trying to remember -- his speeches or soliloquy -- is it more a contemplation of his own suicide, or is it about his inaction, or taking action and murdering Claudius? Lesser: That is something that we don't -- what I would say is we don't know, because the history of reading that passage shows some people very much think it's about Hamlet debating whether to seek revenge, and others about Hamlet debating whether to kill himself. So, clearly, it's ambiguous. At a certain point, it's definitely about suicide when Hamlet says, "who would bear all these terrible things when you could make your quietus with a bare bodkin?" He's talking about your own quietus -- killing yourself with a dagger, I think. But that's not necessarily him contemplating his own suicide, since he's talking generally there about who would bear the terrible things of the world. The reason I think that we can't actually decide whether it's about revenge against Claudius or Hamlet killing himself is that, really, as I suggested, it's not about either. The speech is not about Hamlet. Typically, a soliloquy in a play -- Claudius has a perfect one in /Hamlet/ -- why does a dramatist write a soliloquy? A soliloquy is part of his arsenal of tools; it's the one that's designed to get out information that cannot be spoken when there are other characters on stage. It's very frequently used for villains. Claudius makes very clear in soliloquy, "I did kill him," just in case the audience had any doubt. So what Shakespeare does with Hamlet's soliloquy is unusual. He makes it abstract. Nowhere does Hamlet say the word "I." It has nothing to do with his personal situation. Therefore it's hard to say whether it has to do with killing Claudius or himself, because it's not about the characters in the play. It's a kind of abstract philosophy. Audience member: do you think we should change the famous versions that we're used to hearing the actors say all the time? Lesser: You'll have a hard time convincing a theatre company to do it! But you know the Q1 version has been -- if you ever get a chance, it's worth going to see it. It's performed every so often. I've seen a version of it. Occasionally... it wouldn't surprise me if in the next, say, five years, if you keep your eye out, there'll be a version of it performed somewhere in Chicago. Most likely by a student group, not a professional group. And it's worth seeing. There have been a number of performances. They tend to do very well; the audience tends to find it an exciting play. It's significantly shorter, so it's an hour and a half, a good length for a play. Llaughter]. /Hamlet/ is way too long. And it is more of an action play. One way that people have described it is that Q1 /Hamlet/ is a revenge tragedy, and the famous version is sort of Shakespeare's twist on a revenge tragedy. It's really a tragedy of thinking about revenge, but never actually carrying it out. Q1 is short, action-packed. It's a pretty good play. Audience member: So I'm not sure that Shakespeare's actual intent is either relevant or discoverable, but let's play the game anyway. Is this Romantic and modern reading of the word "conscience" at least credible as a sort of historical, psychological matter. That is to say, is it possible, or plausible, that Shakespeare was consciously subverting the conventional meaning of the word "conscience"? Lesser: It's possible. The word, we do know, for instance, "conscience" if you look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, "consciousness" is one of the definitions. It's a little tricky, because the Oxford English Dictionary is written by people who are very familiar with Shakespeare, so he's one of the main citations for that. But there are other instances in text that we can find in the period that certainly do look like they're using it in terms of "consciousness." And that is a meaning that goes back to the root etymological meanings of "conscience," which comes from Latin for "knowing together;" "con" and "science." So it's not a totally unknown meaning in the period. Linguists still debate whether it's primary, secondary... The interesting thing to me, of course, is that Shakespeare never uses it that way in /Hamlet./ I don't think any of the other instances of "conscience" in Shakespeare are really ones you could even debate if you were looking for one. All the other uses in /Hamlet/ are very clearly what was called the "internal law giver," the moral guide. So I think, that combined with the fact that I scoured for people before the 19th century who were making this argument, and you just can't find them. No one even talks about the line, I think because they just assume it meant what everyone thought it meant, which was conscience the way we know it. Audience member: Up to now, I did not know about that Q1. I assume that it has been inspected and is not a forgery. Lesser: Yeah, there's absolutely no reason to think that the paper and all that is a forgery. That doesn't mean it's by Shakespeare. It says it's by William Shakespeare on the title page, but many people have doubted that. But we do now have two copies of it; they are identical in the ways that copies of the same... found at two different places -- yeah, the paper's been examined. They're both normal copies of Renaissance editions of plays. So they're genuine artifacts. No reason to doubt it was printed in 1603, the year it says on the title page, a year before the famous version is first printed, but many people have doubted whether the "by William Shakespeare" is genuine, whether it might be itself the "Ur-Hamlet" written by someone else, whether it might be a bootleg copy of Shakespeare's /Hamlet./ Shakespeare was already becoming pretty famous, there are other cases where plays we no longer think were written by him have his name added to the title page in a marketing attempt to sell more copies. So, the fact that the object is genuine doesn't tell us much about the text it contains. By the way, if you haven't heard of this version, you're not alone. It is possible now to read in a good modern edition, you can read the whole text. The Arden Shakespeare has put out an edition of Q1 Hamlet on its own, modernizing the spelling and everything so that you can get ahold of it and read it if you want. Audience member: Just for interest, who does enter on the missing last page? [laughter] Lesser: Well, it's not very exciting, and 30 years later everyone could see that when the second copy was found. It's a character who, in the famous version, is called Voltemand, who in this version is called Voltemar, and he comes with the English ambassadors at the end, and they reveal that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, if you remember the end. And again it's a funny coincidence that Hamlet dies right at the last bit that we have. And actually no one cared that the last page wasn't there. The publishers who re-printed it said, "We don't have the last page, but since it's okay until Hamlet dies, it doesn't really matter." [Laughter] And in the 19th century, actually, almost every single performance in the 18th and the 19th centuries, almost every single performance ended with Hamlet's death, and the curtain came down on either "the rest is silence" or on "flights of angels sing thee to thy rest." And Fortinbras was cut entirely from the play. This is, again, part of making the play about Hamlet the character, Hamlet's mind. And excising things that were thought to be extraneous to that. So in a way, the missing last page just conformed with what stage tradition already was telling people about the play at that time. Moderator: Anymore questions? Alrighty. Thank you. [applause] Lesser: Thank you very much. Subtitles by the Amara.org community