Hamlet Q1
Q1 of Hamlet, or the "First Quarto" as it is also called, is a short and generally inferior early text of the Shakespearean play, entered in the Stationers' Register in 1602 but not published until summer or autumn 1603. The other two early printed texts of Hamlet are the second quarto (Q2, 1604) and Folio (F, 1623) (subsequent quartos over the period 1604-1623 are all, at least in their substantive features, derived from Q2). Both Q2 and F are more than 1600 lines longer than Q1.
Q1 was unknown until 1823, when the first of only two known copies was discovered by Sir Henry Bunbury. Since then the exact relationship between Q1 and the other early texts of the play, as well as its origin as a text, has been extensively debated but no scholarly consensus has been reached. Albert B. Weiner argued in 1962 that Q1 represented a "tourbook" copy, derived originally from a text similar to Q2 or F, which had been trimmed and simplified for performance by a small number of actors on tour in the provinces.[1] But Hardin Craig disagreed in his introduction to Weiner's edition, arguing that Q1 is descended from an earlier draft of the play and that "the second quarto is Shakespeare's revision and amplification of that earlier play." Craig's argument was based on his observation of significant "structural difference" between Q1 and the other texts, that "the first quarto follows the order of events [in the plot] as they appear in Saxo and Belleforest" but that the second quarto, while doubtless a better play, "does not", and in fact interjects "more than 800 lines of other dramatic matter" between the decision of the King and Polonius to spy on Hamlet and the "get thee to a nunnery" scene in which the spying actually transpires.[2]
