Editing a Performance Text of "Hamlet"

Joe Falocco, Assistant Professor of Theatre at Arkansas State University, shares the fascinating process of preparing to direct an undergraduate production of Shakespeare's mammoth tragedy.

I have recently finished editing a performance text of Hamlet for an undergraduate production that I will be directing at Arkansas State University in the spring of 2002. I have been working on this project for six months and, if I did not force myself to stop, I could easily work on it for another six. I found that, the more editorial choices I made, the more I began to feel as if I was writing an original script rather than adapting an existing one. While this notion was clearly self-aggrandizing, I flattered myself even further by telling myself that Shakespeare must have experienced the same sensation when working over material from Belleforest and Saxo Grammaticus. My personal delusions of grandeur aside, the fact remains that editing a performance text of Hamlet suitable for an undergraduate production is a daunting task. My hope in this essay is to assist those who might attempt a similar endeavor.

The first step in editing a performance text of Hamlet is to acknowledge the fact that significant editing is required. The length of the unedited Second Quarto text of Hamlet is 3732 lines. Even if the actors were to speak at the brisk pace of 1000 lines an hour (and few undergraduate performers can speak this quickly and maintain intelligibility) an unexpurgated Second Quarto Hamlet would run nearly four hours without considering intermissions or time for scene changes. As Polonius so distinctly states, “This is too long” - particularly for an acting company and audience composed primarily of undergraduates. I personally am of the opinion that neither the Second Quarto nor the First Folio (approximately 3500 lines) Hamlets were ever intended as performance texts. I believe that the First Quarto text of Hamlet at 2160 lines is, in terms of length, a better model for a performance text. The problem with the First Quarto is that it is generally inferior in its language to either the Second Quarto or First Folio texts. Few playgoers would be prepared to listen to a soliloquy that begins (as it does in the First Quarto):

To be, or not to be, I there’s the point,
To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:
No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes,
For in that dreame of death, when wee awake,
And borne before an everlasting Judge,
From whence no passenger ever return’d,
The undiscovered country, at whose sight
The happy smile, and the accursed damn’d. (Foster 96)

Issues of excessive length, corrupted language, and illogical scene sequences have led me to conclude that a director seeking to assemble a performance text of Hamlet suitable for an undergraduate production cannot rely on any single published edition of the play. She must instead take what best serves from the three primary texts and the countless modern editions of Hamlet to create a Hamlet of her own. This is both the terror and the thrill of editing a performance text of Hamlet.

In editing my own performance text, I sought to generally preserve the scene sequence of the First Quarto while using the language of the Second Quarto and First Folio. In choosing the scene sequence of the First Quarto, I was heavily influenced by Max Foster who argued that the First Quarto’s placement of the “to be or not to be” soliloquy and the nunnery scene makes more dramatic sense than does the placement of this material in either the Second Quarto or the First Folio (Foster 29). In these later texts, “to be or not to be” and the nunnery scene follow Hamlet’s meeting with the players. This juxtaposition has never pleased me as an audience member. I have always wanted for Hamlet’s announcement that “the play’s the thing” to be followed by his instruction to the players and The Murder of Gonzago itself. I have always found the detour from the triumphant “the play’s the thing” to the despondent “to be or not to be” to be frustrating, even if it does come from a character who may be prone to mood swings. I therefore readily embraced the scene sequence of the First Quarto in which “to be or not to be” and the nunnery scene immediately follow Polonius’ (called Corambis in the First Quarto) diagnosis of Hamlet’s lunacy (II, ii ). Placed in this sequence, the nunnery scene (if you believe as I do that Hamlet suspects Polonius to have loosed his daughter on him) helps to explain Hamlet’s particularly nasty behavior towards Polonius in the “Fishmonger” scene which, in the First Quarto, follows the nunnery scene.

Besides using the First Quarto as an indication for the proper length of my performance text and as a guide for its sequence of scenes, I also found (again through the guidance of Max Foster) some specific lines of dialogue from the First Quarto text that I interpolated into the scene in Gertrude’s closet (III, iv). Much critical ink has been spilled as to the unspecified nature of Gertrude’s guilt. Does she share responsibility for Old Hamlet’s murder? Some directors may cherish the ambiguity of the closet scene as it appears in the Second Quarto and First Folio. I, however, have always been frustrated that neither Hamlet nor the audience ever gets a straight answer from her. I therefore eagerly seized on these lines of Gertrude from the closet scene of the First Quarto and incorporated them into my performance text:

But as I have a soule, I sweare by heaven,
I never know of this most horride murder: (Foster 55)

While the First Quarto was my guide in many ways while assembling my performance text, I also faced the agonizing decisions faced by every modern director of Hamlet. Which, of the characters and dialogue that I have loved so well over the years, can stay and which must go. I had the good fortune of working on a production of Tom Stoppard’s Fifteen Minute Hamlet many years ago and therefore know, from this experience, that there is very little in Hamlet that is not expendable. I readily jettisoned Fortinbras, Cornelius and Voltemand and did not hesitate to pare down many of the play’s most famous speeches (including “to be or not to be”). There were certain moments however that, while not indispensable to the plot, I could not bear to part with. The best example of this is my favorite joke in the play in which Polonius forgets what he is talking about while giving instructions to his spy Reynaldo (II, I). As much as I love this joke, I could not justify keeping the entire Polonius/Reynaldo scene just to make a place for it. I therefore, in my least defensible action as editor of a performance text, interpolated this joke into Polonius’ earlier “few precepts” speech to Laertes (I, iii). In my performance text, this moment reads:

POLONIUS
....Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses both self and friend,
and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: - what was I
about to say? By the mass, I was about to say
something: where did I leave?

LAERTES
At ‘this above all’.

POLONIUS
Ay, marry.
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow as the night the day
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell, my blessing season this is thee.

My colleagues in the English Department will likely no longer speak to me after they see my production of Hamlet. But, as I wrote at the outset, in a very real sense it in now my Hamlet and I stand behind all of the editorial choices I made in assembling my performance text.

Joe Falocco
Assistant Professor of Theatre
Arkansas State University

Works Cited
Foster, Maxwell E. The Play Behind the Play. Portsmouth, N.H. : Heinemann, 1998.
Jenkins, Harold ed. The Arden Shakespeare Hamlet. London: Methuen & co., 1982.