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.
This Gen X version of Hamlet's soliloquy comes from the so-called "Bad Quarto" of the play. It might be an early version of the speech later revised by Shakespeare, or a wall-eyed parody, or a bowdlerized cribbed copy, or...theories abound.
In the May 13, 2002 New Yorker, Ron Rosenbaum looks at a basic shift in editorial thinking about how to properly present a text like Hamlet. This has some bearing on recent blogging about Post Modernism, since in brief what's happening is this: the "cathedrals" of textual scholarship exemplified by modernist editions (e.g., Harold Jenkins' Arden Hamlet, the fruit of decades of study of the Quarto, the Folio, and the Bad Quarto) are being supplanted by "bazaar" editions,* such as the new Arden Hamlet currently in preparation under Ann Thompson, which will include all three versions of the text.
A couple of notes on this fascinating story:
1. Rosenbaum gives a splendid portrait of Jenkins at 90, a kindly, Dickensian Londoner who hopes to die before the new edition appears (he got his wish).
2. The editors of the ''bazaar'' Hamlets featured by Rosenbaum happen to be women who carefully embrace the dialogic, partial perspectives offered by multiple texts. Rosenbaum suggests, almost as an aside, that women appear more capable of tolerating dissonant versions of texts and of their authors. Shakespeare represents an aggravated case of authorial identity anyway.
3. The problematical choice between cathedral editions and bazaar editions was anticipated in extraordinary 19th-century editions like that of Teena Rochefort-Smith, whose effort to represent multiple Hamlets in multi-column, multi-typeface arrangements makes Derrida's Glas look like typographical child's play.
4. Rosenbaum's presentation of the difficulties of determining a "proper" Hamlet, let alone a proper interpretation of the play, or a proper understanding of a proper name like "William Shakespeare" is superb. It is all the more ironic then that the article appears nowhere online - the New Yorker's policy of locking down what it imagines to be its Intellectual Property denies all non-subscribers the felicity of sharing Rosenbaum's look into the complications that will always plague claims to determine - let alone to possess, control and traffic in - intellectual Real Estate.
5. Happy Mothers' Day.
Nature is fine in love, and where 'tis fine
It sends some precious instance of itself
After the thing it loves.
**On the opposition of cathedral to bazaar, see Eric Raymond's famous essay.
10:12:55 AM 
|
|
