Multiple-text Hamlet: ignorance is no longer bliss.(Essay)

Audiences generally attend productions of Hamlet based on a conflation of the 1604/05 quarto edition (Q2) and the 1623 folio edition (F1), most often abbreviated in one way or another. For well over a century students have also studied Hamlet in a conflated edition. Some students of Shakespeare may have been told by their teachers that there are divergences between Q2 and F1, perhaps even about the more radical deviations from these two editions in Q1. The interpretive implications of the play's multiple-text condition, however, may have been largely ignored. The American Shakespeare Center's traveling players included Hamlet among the repertoire of plays in their 2008 fall tour. Over the past several years the company has performed Hamlet several times, at least once in a version based on Q1, even though this text had long been regarded as a "bad quarto." In the 2008 production, however, there was a coin toss at the end of the company's warm-up entertainment prior to the show. Unlike the coin toss at the beginning of Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which was also in the ASC's repertoire this season, the coin toss before the Hamlet performance does not always come down heads. Depending on the outcome on any given day, the play will follow either the sequence of scenes in the 1603 quarto edition (Q1) or the sequence of scenes common to the 1604/05 …