Yet even if, however improbably, a publisher did so think, how would he recognize textual corruption? We hear a mangled phrase from a bad quarto, and our familiarity with the received text instantly reveals the deficiency. "To be, or not to be, I there's the point." There is no more familiar or compelling evidence of the manifest deficiency of QI Hamlet. But if we did not know the more familiar version would we think the line flawed? And indeed the putative corruption--"I there's the point"--is of course a perfectly uncorrupt Shakespearean line. It appears in Othello, after Othello painfully comes to see that his worst fears about Desdemona's betrayal must be true, revealingly in language that shows how fully he has internalized the pernicious racism that lago exploits: "And yet how Nature erring from it selfe." Iago instantly interrupts, determined that there should be no retreat from the damning knowledge: "I, there's the point" (3.3.231-2, TLN 1854-5). In Othello, the line marks a moment of unmistakably Shakespearean power along the tragic trajectory of the play; in Hamlet it marks the corruption of the text.

The example may be too neat, and in truth when one looks at the whole speech in QI Hamlet one does find unmistakable signs of logical and syntactic jumble that seem more a function of the troubled transmission of the text than of the troubled mindset of its hero. Nonetheless, the initial question stands. Would a publisher who has come into possession of QI have any reason to be suspicious of the text he had purchased? At least at the level of text, the answer I would insist is "no," though with Hamlet there is another factor that complicates the issue. (I suppose with Hamlet there is always another factor that complicates the issue.)

QI Hamlet was published by Nicholas Ling and John Trundle in 1603; the play, however, had been registered to James Roberts on 26 July 1602. If the quality of the text was not unduly strained, the quality of their right to it seems to be. Roberts's entry establishes his title to the play, a title that is apparently violated by the edition that Ling and Trundle publish. Ling and Trundle are in this case perhaps truly pirates, not because they print a text in unauthorized form or one that had come to them via some actor but because they print a text registered to another stationer.

By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library

Q2 Hamlet (1604), title page, STC 22276.

Nonetheless, I wonder if the ease with which we attribute piracy here is not more a function of our textual expectations than of its publishing history. The usual account is that Ling and Trundle have indeed published what Fredson Bowers calls "a memorially reconstructed pirate text" (On Editing Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Dramatists, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1955, p. 41). A second quarto was, of course, published late in 1604, "Printed by I. R. for N. L.," as its title page has it, that is, printed by James Roberts for Nicholas Ling. This quarto announces itself as "Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect Coppie." It is consciously designed to supplant the first, offering itself as new and improved, or, actually, new and restored, some 1,600 lines longer than QI. The deficiencies of the earlier text are here replaced by authorized copy. Trundle's absence from the publishing arrangements of the second quarto have been taken as evidence that he was the supplier of the corrupt copy for QI, and the co-operation of Roberts and Ling is seen as a pragmatic compromise that acknowledges Roberts's de jure title and Ling's de facto right. In the familiar textual history, Q2 marks the victory of truth and justice. The "memorially reconstructed pirate text" is replaced by a properly authorial version, and the rights of the abused stationer are restored."

It is a good story, but it is not necessarily or even very probably true. Roberts, who was a printer rather than a publisher, had on numerous occasions entered material that was eventually published by another stationer but that Roberts himself printed. The entries seem to be for him usually a way of reserving work for himself without risking the capital that publication would involve. Roberts, for example, entered The Merchant of Venice in 1598, and two years later printed it for its eventual publisher, Thomas Hayes. Ling, on the other hand, was a publisher who, as Gerald Johnson has written (in 'Nicholas Ling, Publisher 1580-1607', Studies in Bibliography, 37, 1985, pp. 203-214), characteristically depended on "other stationers who located copy and brought it to him for help in publishing the editions," often with the printing job reserved for them as their reward. Ling and Roberts also were well known to one another; twenty-three editions published by Ling came from Roberts's press. (Trundle, too, had employed Roberts, indeed in the very year that QI Hamlet was published.) And title to Hamlet seems to have unproblematically settled on Ling, since he transfers it without question to John Smethwick in 1607.

Given these relationships, what seems most likely is that the publication of QI Hamlet was less piratical than pragmatic, the result of a rather ordinary set of prudent arrangements between stationers. The only thing that fits uncomfortably with this thesis is that Roberts did not in fact get to print QI Hamlet. It is, however, not unlikely that the traffic in his print shop (it was the third busiest year of Roberts's career in terms of the number of books printed and probably the heaviest measured by sheets printed) made it impossible to accept the job when it came due. For us it may seem incredible that a printer would pass up the opportunity to work on Hamlet, but job schedules would override any literary considerations; and, in any case, many things for a printer in 1603 might have seemed more compelling than a six-penny playbook, perhaps the edition of Drayton's Barons' Wars that Roberts printed that year for Ling, or Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, or even the two Bills of Mortality that he printed in the autumn of the year. Only an anachronistic sense of Hamlet's value to a printer in 1603 has prevented the more likely version of events from being widely accepted. The putative corruptions of the text, the distortions of Shakespeare's great artistry, demand narratives of motivated villainy. Only a cad would publish a text as "bad" as QI Hamlet.

But to return to my major point here, it is not obvious to me that Ling and Trundle had any particular reason to think the text they published "bad"--or indeed any to think it particularly good. What they thought was that they had acquired copy that was "vendible," a play text that might be published with some small profit to them. When a new text became available the following year, supplied perhaps by the acting company who might well have been dismayed by what was in print, they were no doubt delighted to produce a second edition that might inspire new sales. This is a less interesting story, I admit, than tales of pirates, but it is almost certainly closer to the truth.

I am not saying that QI Hamlet is as good a play as the Hamlet that we usually read (though I would say that it is a better play than has generally been allowed, and certainly not "Hamlet by Dogberry," as Brian Vickers has termed it in "Hamlet by Dogberry: A Perverse Reading of the Bad Quarto", Times Literary Supplement, 24 December 1993, p. 5); I am saying only that such questions of literary judgment should not be allowed to color our understanding of the textual history. When we see that history backwards, through the filter of a cultural authority not fully achieved until the mid-eighteenth century, inevitably we get it wrong. Shakespeare, one could say, was not exactly Shakespeare during his own lifetime.