The signs are clear throughout that the translator's first interest is to abridge a play he finds much too long. He will not be the last scribe (or audience member) to think so. The scenes in which Hamlet is informed of the ghost and in which the sentinels display the ghost to Horatio are, to him, extraneous and must go. By all indications, quite a number of others are also removed or truncated for the same reason. The play must move at speed.
What may not have come to mind is that in the 1603 first quarto of the play the sentinels are merely designated 1 and 2. There ensues a bit of confusion and 2 is once briefly referred to by name — “Barnardo” — while still designated throughout the scene by the number 2. Horatio is now accompanied by the character Marcellus.
In the 1604 second quarto, the sentinels on watch are given names: Barnardo and Francisco. They are being relieved by Horatio and Marcellus. The names in the first two versions have been gathered together for the new rendition of the scene.
The various editions of Shakespeare's Hamlet tell us a great deal. The German translator of Brudermord gained no time for having left the sentinels without a name. Being minor characters, they did not need one, true. But according to Stratfordian orthodoxy the 1603 quarto is supposed to be a poorly transcribed pirate edition of the 1604 quarto. The sentinels lack names because the stenographer was copying the dialogue as it was being delivered on stage.
And this is just the first of many inconsistencies with that orthodoxy. Only one of two possibilities keep it intact: 1) It is a mere coincidence however improbable; 2) The translator did his work from the pirated text. The fact that Brudermord names the royal councilor Corambus and the 1603 quarto Corambis might seem to confirm the latter conjecture.
But the councilor's name proves to weigh even more powerfully toward the German and the first quarto being legitimate evidence of separate earlier versions of the play. Corambis, also coincidentally, is a hit at William Cecil's motto “Cor unum, via una”. It is more than a little difficult to believe that a stenographer pirating a play could be sufficiently knowledgeable to create such a detail about a character all along called Polonius.2 Even if pirated, the text is a record of a genuine earlier version of the play.
Each of the three texts will prove, upon closer inspection, to be three versions of Shakespeare's Hamlet — progressive revisions by the same author. Together the coincidences are too improbable to be the result inadvertent slip of the pen or on-the-fly revision of an acting company scribe.
As I have pointed out in my “A Few Character Names in the Early Versions of Hamlet”3, Ophelia's name was taken from Jacopo Sanizzaro’s highly popular poem Arcadia (1504) as evidenced by the name of her interlocutor, Montano. Montano's part is cut out of the Brudermord version as being extraneous. He appears only in the 1603 first quarto. By the 1604 quarto he has been renamed Reynaldo.
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| Edward de Vere's Ulysses & Agamemnon (1584)! |
It is important to add that the 1603 version was not written in 1603. It was only published then. In terms of style and maturity, it would appear to have been written in the first half of the 1590s. The Brudermord version does not mention a comet. The characters that would become Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, in later versions, were only identified as Ruffian 1 and Ruffian 2. The comet seems unlikely to have been deemed extraneous and might not to have been included in the 1589 source text for the Brudermord translation. However, leaving out the names would gain no time.
Tycho Brahe's Astronomiae instauratae progymnasmata and De mundi aetherei recentioribus, about the famous 1577 comet, first having appeared in print in 1588, were certainly in the libraries of the Englishmen John Dee and Thomas Digges, who were featured in the texts, and almost as certainly arriving in the libraries of such avid amateurs as William Cecil and Thomas Smith, perhaps even in time to revive Shakespeare's memories of the event for his 1589 version. The names of Brahe's cousins Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, however, do not come before the general public's eye until the publication of Tychonis Brahe Dani epistolarum astronomicarum (1596) which includes their names and coats-of-arms in the frontispiece engraving.
Numerous other factors in the Brudermord manuscript together suggest the year 1589. These I have pointed out in my Back When Ophelia Jumped Off a Cliff: the Hamlet of 15894 The year 1596 seems a little late, maturity-wise, for the first quarto, and the engraving is thought to have been distributed as early as 1586. Still, the evidence suggests the second quarto was written in 1596 or shortly after.
That the 1623 first folio version of Hamlet takes unique material from both the first and second quartos has been recognized in scholarly circles for some 200 years. Again, a coincidence of cosmic proportions that Shakespeare adapted some details from a pirated addition of his own play. In the same vein, Ophelia mentions her “little coach,” in a moment of distraction, during the Brudermord version of the play. While it does not appear in the first quarto it did reappear in the second quarto.5 The coincidences only begin with these.
1Cohn, Albert. Shakespeare in Germany in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1865) 237-304. “Der bestrafte oder Prinz Hamlet aus Dānnemars.” (with English translation).
2Cor unum, via una = a single heart, a single path; Cor ambis = double hearted, ambitious heart
3Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “Shakespeare’s Character Names: Shylock, Ophelia, etc.” https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2021/07/shakespeares-character-names-shylock.html
4Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Back When Ophelia Jumped Off a Cliff: the Hamlet of 1589 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09WC94FGW/
5 The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet (1604). “Come / my Coach, God night Ladies, god night.”
Also at Virtual Grub Street:
Invention in a Noted Weed: the Poetry of William Shakespeare. September 21, 2024. “The coward conquest of a wretches knife,...”
The Sonnets of Shakespeare: Sonnet 108. Edward de Vere to his son, Henry. “That may expresse my love, or thy deare merit?”
- Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
- Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”
Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
- Check out the V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page for many poems by Shakespeare together with historical context.
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