The Occasion: There will soon be a new Hamlet in the prestigious Arden Shakespeare Series. Arden's current edition of Hamlet, edited by Harold Jenkins, has a text and a lot of notes. The new Hamlet, edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, will have three texts, two volumes, and a lot of notes. The Approach: In explaining the reason for the difference between the new and old Arden editions of Hamlet, Rosenbaum serves up a mix of human interest and cultural history. Jenkins, who spent 28 years on his Hamlet, is presented as a courtly scholar who held to the traditional way of thinking about Shakespeare's texts; Ann Thompson is presented as the shy but agressive feminist with a new way of presenting Hamlet. Jenkins, of the old school, labored "to reconstruct a Lost Archetype, the 'Hamlet' closest to Shakespeare's 'original intentions'" (69-70). When Jenkins started work on Hamlet his approach was the only possible one; there was a scholarly consensus that an editor's work was to combine ("conflate" in the language of the learned) texts in order to produce a text that came as close as possible to Shakespeare's original intentions. However, That consensus has now been shattered. An influential faction of scholars has been arguing since the nineteen-eighties that the differing early editions of some of Shakespeare's major works -- there are earlier and later versions of "King Lear," "Othello," and "Richard IIII," among others -- represent not corruptions of a Lost Archetype but, rather, earlier and later drafts, reflecting Shakespeare's revisions and second thoughts as he prepared the plays for the stage. The Revisers, as they're sometimes called, argue that the drafts that have been mixed together need to be pulled apart, so that we can recover Shakespeare's "final intentions." (70)Nevertheless, the new Arden "will not endorse the Reviser hypothesis; it will, instead, suggest that Shakespeare's intentions, original or final, are probably beyond recovery, so the texts should be treated as separate works of art, each with its own integrity" (70). What difference will it make? That depends on how much of your life you're going to devote to Hamlet. It's hard to create just one satisfying mental image of the play; adding two more, "each with its own integrity," is going to be a rare feat. Many of us are likely, even if we read all three versions, to mentally combine them into one. Thus everyone could be his/her own editor, but it will take great deal of work -- work that Harold Jenkins has already done. Bottom Line: A very readable article on the doings of textual scholars. |
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Author: Philip Weller
Last Modified: 10 May 2002