Hamlet Further Afield!

We are venturing out of the Faithful City to our closest metropolis!  We are delighted to announce that we are taking Hamlet to the Lamp Tavern in Digbeth (157 Barford Street, Digbeth, Birmingham, B5 6AH) on Saturday 28th and Sunday 29th April at 7.30pm.  Tickets are available on the door or to reserve on 07903 339669.  We are so happy to take the Melting Pot magic as far afield as possible.  We want to spread the love!

Shakespeare – Folios, Quartos and conspiracies

One of our company is fascinated by the original text sources for Hamlet. The text as we know it – from the Penguin edition or whatever – comes down to us from three printed editions, two printed during Shakespeare’s lifetime and one from very shortly after. The two from during his life are called quartos, and the one from shortly after is known as the “first folio”. Quarto and folio are just paper sizes – quarto is a small pocket size and folio is like a big hardback. If it was now we would probably call them the A5 version and the A4 version. The “first folio” is effectively the first edition of what we now know as the Complete Works of Shakespeare.

There are only 8 or 9 copies of the quarto editions still around, but not a page survives of Shakespeare’s hand-written originals – that’s if you ignore a single speech written to insert into a play by someone else. The play is about Sir Thomas More, and the speech might just be written by Shakespeare, and if so it is his handwriting on a page in the British Library, which is quite exciting. But apart from this, nothing survives except the printed editions. This of course has fuelled many conspiracy theories that Shakespeare didn’t write the plays at all. But it’s not so very surprising - there’s not a single page from most of the other playwrights of the time either – Marlowe, Middleton and the rest. Paper just didn’t tend to survive – partly because it was hard to come by, so once it had been used it was used again, for shopping lists or whatever. Also there were an awful lot of fires in those days – the Globe theatre burnt down, no doubt taking a lot of playscripts with it. Then came the great fire of London in 1666 which probably accounted for many more valuable documents!

By the way, it’s always assumed that Shakey went to Stratford-on-Avon Grammar school. But all the records of the school were also destroyed by fire in the 1590s. So we don’t even know that for sure.

Anyway, the text of the folio edition is available online. We downloaded it – to make sure we were using the right words – and copied it into Microsoft Word. At this point Word came up with a warning - “there are too many spelling mistakes and grammatical errors to display in this document”!