FIRST PAPER TOPICS:

As we have seen, the Arden 2 and Arden 3 Hamlets present two very different solutions to a common problem: How should one edit Hamlet?  The editors of both Arden editions appeal to some essential Hamlet, either an ideal yet to be realized (conflated into a fourth edition, as Jenkins does in Arden 2) or a lost manuscript or annotated edition behind the three editions, presented separately, as Arden 3 does.  Let’s postulate that because it is possible to posit a variety of equally plausible, more or less complicated and inctricate explanatory narratives of Hamlet's composition and transmission and because no single edition (Q1, Q2, or F) is consistently the most reliable and authoritative, any modern edition of Hamlet is a fiction, an extreme makeover, a kind of plastic surgery that covers over the scars its editors leave as they cut and paste and annotate the text(s).  A conflated text like Arden 2 never existed (it is the invention--necessary and inescapable--of modern editors); an unedited edition like Arden 3 still emends Q2 based on the same principles of conflation adopted by Jenkins, the only major difference being that emendation occurs less often in Arden 2.  Any edition will be titled Hamlet will implicitly claim to be the essential Hamlet but is really an approximation resulting from unsystematic editorial compromises and hence should really be titled “Hamlet," based on a true story, or so we editors think.  By the same token, any attempt to divide Hamlet editions into performance (Q1) and literary editions (Q2 and F) like the way DVD editions of a film are often divided into theatrical release and director’s (extended or shortened) cut, will fail because many of the cuts in Q1 do not make sense in theatrical terms, while many of the cuts in Q2 that are restored in F do not make sense in literary terms.  Moreover, all three editions make a kind of sense considered on their own. Yet all three editions (Q1, Q2, and F) have elements that do not make (as much) sense when compared with the other two. Similarly, because Renaissance punctuation is not systematic, lines of all three editions may make different kinds of plausible sense to a modern editor.  Any Hamlet edition is thus based on the relative reliability of the three editions from which it derives; any edition (partly because it is modernized) is a translation, not a facsimile.  Even if we had Shakespeare’s handwritten manuscript(s) of Hamlet, we would need to translate it as well in order to render it readable.

  In any case, Arden 2 and Arden 3 give us four editions of Hamlets, conflated (Arden 2) and deconflated, or “unedited” (Arden 3).  From a philosophical (and even pragmatic point) of view, editing the essential Hamlet, let’s say for heuristic purposes, is impossible.  Each edition is a quotation of others.  Unediting is equally impossible.  In the case of Arden 3, one has to read Q1 and F with the Q2 edition since Q2’s notes are not repeated in Q1and F.  Moreover, Q2 includes the additions in F as an appendix, and according to the editors does not need to be read (nor do Q1 and F).   Like the Arden 2 Hamlet, the Arden 3 Hamlet is a stand-alone edition (the 1603 and 1623 texts volume is a supplement).

Here are two paper options:

1. Bearing in mind, then, that any Hamlet edition is really one “Hamlet” among others, not an original or authentic version, discuss ways in which a comparative analysis of Arden 2 and Arden 3 Hamlet editions (all four) opens up a new reading of problems with communication (tablets, letters, songs) in the play otherwise not as fully possible.  (In this sense, comparing the editions does involves clsoe reading but not micrological reading that concerns editors (which leaves discrete, opaque parts of the text emended or not). Your reading might relate to the play’s interest in acting, memory, reporting, calling, questioning and answering, writing, rewriting, reading, lapses of memory, insertions of texts, and so on. Focus on a scene or scene or a character or characters and analysis a selected amount of text very closely with attention to its various forms in the editions.  (I am asking you to do a kind of hyperformalist reading of Hamlet as a hypertext.) You may then bring in other related aspects of the play and cover them more quickly.  Less is more.

2. To repeat:  bearing in mind that any Hamlet edition is really one “Hamlet” among others, not an original or authentic version, pick a film of your choice and discuss the ways in which it deals (however indirectly) with the problems of translating and editing Hamlet for performance.  Four our purposes, any Hamlet film may be considered as a new edition of the play. You might consider the way Olivier plays with cinematic and psychological depth, at points suggesting that the camera can go into the darkest recesses of a character’s mind while at others suggesting that the camera can only go so far and sometimes just remain on the surface.  Or you might consider how Branagh’s film, by contrast, resists depth altogether.  Or you could look at ways in which the Doran and Almeyreda films occasionally disrupt method acting (psychological realism; a chracter has a inner life) in Brechtian ways (distancing us, even alienating us by making us aware that we are watching “Hamlet” that engages other Hamlets, the actor self-consciously playing a role rather than pretending to be a person by quoting rather than delivering the text). You might consider ways in which Brechtian disruptions including the use of telephones, faxes, cameras and related (sometimes anthropomorphized) modern communications technologies (human / inhuman; living / spectral).  In order to come up with an effective thesis, focus on one or two scenes of the film you choose and read it or them very closely and attending to cinematic form (analyze each shot, though not necessarily in sequence). Less is more.

Whteher you want to purpose the first or the second option, keep in mind that you are engaging Hamlet as a philosophical problem: the problem of what Hamlet means is inseparable from the question of what Hamlet is as a text. The meaning of any edition (whther in print or on film) cannot be limited to textual criticism (what needs to be emended) and philology (what needs to be annotated, either to be tied down to a parituclar meaning or left open to a variety of possible meanings). Interpretation is a philosophical problem that cannot be micromanaged with asieres of notes (or an appendix of longer notes). Interpretation begins, for our purposes, at the limits of Hamlet's unpublishability / editability / readability. The entire Hamlet is opaque, not just particular lines or words. To interpret the play is paradoxically to edit ia text that has has already been edited, partly in ways you can't always see such as modernized spellng and punctuation (deliver a new edition, a new "cut").