no more; the text is foolish
I am informed, via SHAKSPER, that the already-infamous third-series Arden edition of Hamlet, a multivolume thing that presents the 1603 "bad quarto" text (henceforth, Q1), the 1604 "good quarto" text (Q2), and the 1623 First Folio text (F) separately, is now available at long last, or will be very soon. The Arden website's pages on it are here and here, and you can see some of each edition here.
For those of you unfamiliar with the textual situation of Hamlet, the important thing to know is that the Hamlet we know and love is actually a conflation of Q2 and F. Both of them contain passages which are not in the other version, but are acknowledged to be genuinely Shakespearean. The new Arden Hamlet is coming out in three volumes: one with Q2, and one with Q1 and F. The Q2 edition is the only one (thus far) being released in paperback as a standard Arden edition; it's putting the stuff found only in F into an appendix. As a wannabe future editor and recovering Hamlet junkie, I'm not entirely certain how I feel about this. It opens up interesting questions about the status of the Shakespearean text, since on the one hand, basing the primary edition on one particular version of Hamlet acknowledges that the text we usually study is a construction -- but then, isn't any edited text a construction? Especially if it's Hamlet and has megatons of cultural baggage attached to it anyway?
I suppose it will be interesting to see how it's received especially in educational contexts...
For those of you unfamiliar with the textual situation of Hamlet, the important thing to know is that the Hamlet we know and love is actually a conflation of Q2 and F. Both of them contain passages which are not in the other version, but are acknowledged to be genuinely Shakespearean. The new Arden Hamlet is coming out in three volumes: one with Q2, and one with Q1 and F. The Q2 edition is the only one (thus far) being released in paperback as a standard Arden edition; it's putting the stuff found only in F into an appendix. As a wannabe future editor and recovering Hamlet junkie, I'm not entirely certain how I feel about this. It opens up interesting questions about the status of the Shakespearean text, since on the one hand, basing the primary edition on one particular version of Hamlet acknowledges that the text we usually study is a construction -- but then, isn't any edited text a construction? Especially if it's Hamlet and has megatons of cultural baggage attached to it anyway?
I suppose it will be interesting to see how it's received especially in educational contexts...