Poel viewed the facsimile of the First Quarto to be of particular interest to actors, as it could have been constructed by a compositor who worked from an acting edition of the play, since the Second Quarto would have proven unwieldy in performance due to its length (Poel 32 and Speaight 49). Thus convinced that the First Quarto gave insight into the conditions of the performance of the play in the Renaissance, Poel endeavoured to explore the implications of this lesser-known version of the play (Poel 31-2 and Speaight 48).
The "Actor's Edition"
Poel hypothesised that Q1 was the product of an actor’s memory, due to its misplaced words and repeated lines, and the apparent mix-up of lines from one play to another (Poel 54 and ). The First Quarto has certain lines that Poel perceived to be the inadvertent interjections often made by actors into a text, such as “Ay, father” and “Oh, I have it,” and the repetition of “to a nunnery go, to a nunnery go” (Speaight 49). He also pinpointed a moment in which Corambis (Polonius) spoke the line “Such men often prove/ Great in their words, but little in their love,” which he asserted to be a mistake in which the actor recalled Viola’s line “For still we prove/ Much in our vows but little in our love” (Speaight 49-50).
Clues about Original Performance?
He also saw certain stage directions as indicators of how the play would have been performed. When the Ghost enters to stop Hamlet’s interview with Gertrude, the stage direction puts him “in his nightgown.” This direction, in Poel’s view, gave impetus for the actor playing Hamlet to show horror at seeing his father in such an unceremonious state (Poel 51). Claudius’s entrances are also accompanied by a flourish only in the “play within the play” scene, indicating that the text had “been produced as a domestic, rather than a historical, tragedy” (Speaight 50).
Reconsiderations of the Text
Later in life, Poel came to agree with the editorial view of Frederick James Furnivall, that the First Quarto of Hamlet represented, not a pirated printing of the play from the memorial reconstruction of an actor, but rather the first version of the play written by Shakespeare, with the Second Quarto being his revised version. With that knowledge, the value of the First Quarto lay in “its supposed proximity to the pen of William Shakespeare, rather than for its traces of Elizabethan stage practice” (O’Connor 21).
Sources
- O'Connor, Marion F. William Poel and the Elizabethan Stage Society. Theatre in Focus series. 1987.
- Poel, William. Some notes on Shakespeare's stage and plays. 1916.
- Speaight, Robert. William Poel and the Elizabethan revival. Society for Theatre Research Annual publications series. 1954.
