G. B. Shand English/Drama Studies Glendon College 2275 Bayview Ave. Toronto, Canada M4N 3M6 QUEEN OF THE FIRST QUARTO Whether or not Q1 *Hamlet* was ever conceived with Harry Berger's armchair reader in mind, there can be little question that it bears some intentional connection with performance, perhaps as partial description of past theatrical practice, certainly as partial prescription for future performance. No one publishes a playscript without some awareness that someone somewhere will one day base a production on it. My aim here is to look at Q1 simply as a potential performance document; to focus on a single role, that of the Queen, with an eye to determining how far the scripting of that role might reflect a theatrical intelligence, and whether the conditions inherent in the role might enable us to make some preliminary assumptions about the kind of actor for whom it was explicitly or implicitly prepared. In an earlier study of the role of the Queen in Q2/F,[1] I observed that about half the productions I had examined (including two on which I had worked) played the Queen's death as a conscious suicide, despite apparent textual silence on the subject. This led me to go moment-by-moment through the usually-acted Q2/F conflations, sitting inside the Queen-role as persistently as I could, to determine whether a clearly mappable suicidal through-line was a textually-supported option, or whether the suicide decision simply represented an actor's (or director's) self-indulgence. My conclusion was that, given a certain set of accepted conditions in the world of the play and the process of the actor, suicide was one honest and supportable actorly option for the death of the Q2/F Queen. That Queen-role, in other words, is demonstrably informed by a sophisticated actorly theatrical intelligence: it presents its player with a set of moments of choice (not only about what she does or says, but about what she sees and hears, what she understands and feels, all in the context of what it means to be a woman in Shakespeare's Elsinore), moments in which more than one playable option is frequently available. The role requires from its actor a final decision between unthinking accident and willed self-destruction, either of which must be the logical culmination of a succession of choices made within the bounds of the text. This style of investigation is hampered in the case of Q1: no direct production experience, no video of productions, no readily available production books, precious little recorded stage history, no handy Queen-actors to interview. I am thrown back on the script, and on educated speculation. Nonetheless, my attempt to sit inside the Q1 Queen-role gives rise to a number of observations which, while they do not directly illuminate the question of priority/authenticity, do reinforce a sense of Q1 as a script with an informing practical theatrical intelligence (a conclusion borne out over the years by Hardin Craig's positive response to Ben Greet's 1928 production, by Gunnar Sjo"gren's report on a 1968 production in Sweden, by Nicholas Shrimpton's glowing review of the 1985 Orange Tree version in Richmond, by Scott McMillin's demonstration of the script's carefully controlled doubling options, by its narrative efficiency and its technical simplicity, and so on).[2] It is an intelligence committed to a different, tighter, simpler realisation of the Hamlet story than we find in the copiousness of Q2/F.[3] One aspect of this is Q1's consistently spare vision of character. Rather than Q2/F's tantalising motivational indeterminacy, for instance, intention here seems single and clearly announced, as with the Queen's conscience and allegiance, from the Closet Scene on; conflict is more tightly focussed, more black-and-white, with villainous responsibility for the final events clustered on one character (Leartes [sic] does not have his own mountebank's unction for an unbated sword, for instance--it, like the entire scheme, is here provided by the King alone). Q1 can be mounted efficiently, I suspect, with little of the time-consuming weighing of complex actorly alternatives which characterises rehearsal and production of Q2/F. What Hart Crane called Shakespeare's "hazards,"[4] the profound contracts of risk and challenge presented to audience and to player, are mainly absent from Q1's straight-ahead version of the revenge tale, particularly where its Queen is concerned. Simple though its requirements be, Q1 nonetheless shows strong signs of having been written for actors to play and to play with; observation of a couple of aspects of the Queen-role reinforces this impression. Actors are highly sensitised to the potential for contest between roles, discovering it sometimes in astonishing places. (I think of the Stratford, Ontario, Nurse, a few seasons back, who played a curiously edgy relationship with her Juliet which mystified the Juliet-actor for much of the rehearsal period, until she learned that the Nurse-actor was postulating a love relationship between her own character and Tybalt, and reacting to Tybalt's death accordingly.) This instinct for contest being the case, the actorly writer is likely to exploit and organise it, providing his players with invitations for enactment of a contest consistent with his story. So, for the Queen-actor of Q1, a kind of jousting with Corambis may be initiated in scene 7, growing into a pattern of strikingly unequal contestation between the two almost whenever they appear together, until the scene of his death.[5] One effect of this contest is to situate the Queen in terms of social and political importance: Corambis would dare no comparable set of exchanges with the King, nor even with Hamlet. Let's watch this contest grow. Scene 7 continues an established process of marginalising the Queen which dates from her first appearance:[6] in the first beat of the scene, she has been allowed only to echo (and perhaps correct) the King's thanks to Rossencraft and Gilderstone. The second beat, the arrival of the news-bearing Corambis with Ofelia, denies her the option for actorly complexity which is regularly in play in productions of Q2/F, where, in the Queen's presence, the counsellor tells the King of his theory about the source and cause of Hamlet's madness, whereupon the King repeats the news to the Queen as if she were incapable of hearing or comprehending without him.[7] Q1 offers its Queen-actor a different challenge at this point, based on an arguably less sophisticated perception of the potential for contest. At the conclusion of Corambis's "I have found / The very depth of Hamlets lunacie"(7.27-28), the Queen responds (to the King, to Ofelia, to the audience, or to herself, but most definitely not to Corambis) "God graunt he hath"(7.29). Wherever the line be directed (and whether it be prayerful or no), it excludes Corambis for a moment, placing him in the third person, an act which does not go unnoticed or unrequited by the counsellor, and which ultimately suggests just how marginal even a Queen may become in this claustrophobically masculine environment. Shortly, Corambis will begin his disquisition on Hamlet's madness, and he will speak strictly to the King, rather than to "My liege and madam" as in Q2/F: Now my Lord, / touching the yong Prince Hamlet, Certaine it is / that hee is madde: mad let us grant him then: Now to know the cause of this effect, Or else to say the cause of this defect, For this effect defective comes by cause. (7.58-63:relined by Weiner) At this point the Queen ups the ante in their little contest, interrupting to speed him along ("Good my Lord be briefe"--7.64), whereupon he may merely brush her aside before returning to the hearer about whom he really cares: "Madam I will: my Lord, I have a daughter," etc. (7.65 ff.), and he resumes, focussing entirely on the King. Nor has he finished with her. At the conclusion of Corambis's description of his Hamlet theory, the King, as in Q2/F, turns to the Queen for her opinion, "Thinke you t'is so?"(7.96), but Corambis intervenes before she can begin to respond: How? so my Lord, I would very faine know That thing that I have saide t'is so, positively, And it hath fallen out otherwise. (7.97-99)[8] The actorly invitation to Corambis is to cut her off without a word when her royal husband has just invited her to speak, and it is surely significant not only that he does so, but that the world of Q1 permits him to. Moments later, upon the approach of Hamlet, he will be the one who instructs the Queen, politely but firmly, "Madame, will it please your grace / To leave us here?"(7.111). And she can only respond, "With all my hart"(7.112), and be on her way. If the Queen-actor is noting this treatment, and letting resentment of it develop, it will even be conceivable that the Queen's horror at Corambis's later death will be softened somewhat by a small tickle of satisfaction. This possibility, cheap though it may seem, could turn out to be useful later in easing the swing of her loyalty toward Hamlet. The playwright/compiler extends the potential contest with Corambis into scene 8. As Gertred agrees to the King's invitation to see Hamlet's play, Corambis once again takes charge, making plans for her and shunting her aside in the process: Madame, I pray be ruled by me: And my good Soveraigne, give me leave to speake (8.24-5), whereupon he lays out his spying plan to the King alone, ending with "My Lord, how thinke you on't?" (8.36). Pressed by the King, who has already preempted her choice by voicing his own approval of Corambis's plan, "It likes us well, Gerterd, what say you?"(37), the Queen can only consent, and as the scene concludes Corambis virtually objectifies her as the unwitting stepping-stone to his own advancement: My selfe will be that happy messenger, Who hopes his griefe will be reveal'd to her (8.39-40), a couplet which makes explicit a self-promoting motive we can only guess at in Q2/F's Polonius, but which again, whether aside or to the King, isolates the Queen. Should the Queen-actor choose to overhear this moment (a choice unlikely to surprise the actorly playwright), the potential for an increase in her discomfort, even in her animus against Corambis, is clear. And this is part of the baggage she may bring to the Closet scene, baggage provided by a playwright who evidently knows something of inter-actorly contest and of the little edges on which it will inevitably build. He knows something, too, about placing a silent actor in an emotional pressure cooker based simply on listening and observing and storing responses, for where Q2/F, at the conclusion of the Closet Scene, simply tops the already-extreme violation of the Queen's privacy by bringing the King and his Lords right on into her personal space after Hamlet's exit with the body,[9] Q1 holds the Queen on stage at much greater length, right to the end of what Q2/F marks as 4.3. In the course of their Q1 exchange, the beginning of a crack now opens between Queen and King, marked in the slightest of ways: the King enters asking for news of "our sonne"(12.1); something in the Queen's tale of Corambis's murder, or possibly in her underlying new unease with him, alters the possessive pronoun, and begins to separate him from her: when she has finished he responds, "Gertred, your sonne shall presently to England"(12.14), and his recognition of a potential or actual shift in the lines of alliance is signalled. Q1 now extends the Queen's scene to include the subsequent capture, interrogation and "protective" banishment of Hamlet, all which she must witness in silence, remaining on until the King's curt dismissal of her after Hamlet's departure: "Gertred, leave me, / And take your leave of *Hamlet*"(12.54). Whether we perceive place as unchanging through this sequence of events, or as shifting fluidly before our very eyes,[10] is not finally as important as the fact that the Queen, newly tuned in to the King's treachery, witnesses the entire process between King and Hamlet, including the explosive culmination of a little war-by-naming (another instance of actorly contest) which has run through Q1, but is absent from the other versions. In scene 2, the King established a pattern of asserting his new possession of Hamlet by naming, insisting on addressing him in public as "Sonne *Hamlet*" (27, 41). This continues in the play scene, where the King begins "How now son *Hamlet*"(9.62), and Hamlet for the first time, in the liberty of feigned distraction, responds by calling him "father", in what is, in context, a clear act of aggression. And now, in scene 12, sparring over the location of Corambis's body, they trade "sons" and "fathers" three times before Hamlet tops the King by shifting to "mother" at line 50. The actual "farewel mother" moment is therefore lexically integrated, as it is not in Q2/F, part of a set which has become increasingly marked for contestation in the course of the play, and which must to the Queen's ears echo Hamlet's direct criticism of her in the Closet Scene, and drive home to her the deep fault, by conventional Renaissance standards, in her situation, and its acute painfulness for her son: *King*. Your loving father, *Hamlet*. *Ham*. My mother I say: you married my mother, My mother is your wife, man and wife is one flesh, And so (my mother) farewel. (12.50-53) And Hamlet goes without taking his actual leave of her.[11] It may be her evident distress at this that prompts the King to send her off after him. The playwright's decision to keep her onstage until this moment seems a quite deliberate device to take the Queen further toward understanding the situation she has slid into, and toward sealing her new alliance with the Prince. Certainly the King, as the moment concludes, seems to recognise her openly as Hamlet's ally rather than his own. The separation between himself and the Queen, initiated in Q1 explicitly by the King's equivocation, rather than, as in many productions of Q2/F, subtextually by the Queen's reluctance to accompany his later exits, is evident right here, as he sends her off to bid Hamlet farewell and then, having separated himself from her, turns to the audience to reveal his plan for Hamlet's execution in England (12.54-61). In some ways, its relationship content is most like the much later moment in 5.1 of Q2/F, where Gertrude is sent off to "set some watch over your son"(296) while the scheming King hangs back to counsel patience in Laertes. In these two ways, then, by exploiting actorly contest, and by building pressure on a silent but actively attentive player simply by scripting her presence as witness, the author or compiler of Q1 gives evidence of writing consciously for actors. It may be, furthermore, that the script shows signs of preparation for particular actors, and I want to postulate, as one way of understanding the simplicity of the Q1 Queen-role, simplicity which goes beyond the more straightforward and efficient revenge action of Q1, that the kind of actor for whom the role was intended may be discernible in some of the role's differences from Q2/F. In other words, the deliberate marginalising of the Queen through much of the early stages of the role and again toward the end, the almost complete absence of invitations to play a love-relationship with her King, the monochromatic nature of her shift to Hamlet's camp in the Closet Scene, the clarity of her loyalty to Hamlet after the Closet, and the apparent absence of conflicting alternatives surrounding her death, while all consistent with the creation of an actorly journey through a simpler post-feudal version of the story, may also be consistent with writing for a Queen-actor of considerably more youth, considerably less depth than the Queen-actor of mature and delicate craft for whom Q2 and F seem intended. (I have an intuition of Q1 sending a boy to do what is a man's job in Q2/F!)[12] The marginalising of the Q1 Queen-role is apparent from early on, especially by comparison with Q2/F. Where, for instance, the Gertrude of 1.2 in Q2/F may be, at the beginning, verbally objectified, spoken of as if incapable of speaking for herself, but certainly placed in a figurative spotlight, the Q1 Queen is by contrast ignored. One might even suggest that she is consciously excluded from the first court scene. She is not even mentioned in the King's opening speech: no explicit or implicit presentation of recent bereavement and even more recent (and questionable) remarriage, no acknowledgement of political status as "imperial jointress." Where the Q2/F Kings empower the Gertrude-actor to a considerable degree, both as actor (by focussing attention on her uneasily dual domestic condition), and as narrative participant (by allowing her an explicit share of the throne), Q1 begins by taking her for granted at best, ignoring her altogether at worst. As the scene proceeds, so does this deliberate marginalising. On the subject of Hamlet's continued mourning, the Queen is excluded, for the first of a number of times, from a dialogical exchange which is specifically hers in Q2/F. Instead, the King here carries the full weight for the royal/parental side, and Hamlet's lines to the Queen in Q2/F, "'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother"(1.2.76 ff.), are here exclusively and markedly to his uncle-father: My lord, ti's not the sable sute I weare: No nor the teares that still stand in my eyes, Nor the distracted haviour in the visage, Nor all together mixt with outward semblance, Is equall to the sorrow of my heart, Him I have lost I must of force forgoe, These but the ornaments and sutes of woe. (2.34-40) She is only permitted to add her voice to the exchange after the King's ponderous cliche' on death and everyman, and even that contribution may be at the silent instruction of her husband. And then the royal party is gone, with no doubled (and therefore potentially supercharged) requests for her accompaniment, as in Q2/F.[13] Indeed, once again, she is not mentioned at all in the King's exit speech. He simply takes his leave, and she goes with him. The spoken public pressure under which the Q2/F Queen is deliberately placed, the potential for a final tense two-way pull on her between Hamlet and King, are, at least in the explicit invitations of Q1, entirely foregone, and the Queen-actor may well begin the journey through this role with an even stronger sense of being devalued, of being considered a virtual prop rather than a living creature. The first actorly job, then, for the Queen-actor who seeks to rise above this deliberately undercreated role, will be to seek out and breathe upon the spark of theatrical life in this Queen-doll which Steven Urkowitz has described as "only the idea or symbol of a Queen and mother, a costumed figure who stands for royalty in her regal costume rather than demonstrates royalty through regal behavior."[14] Paradoxically, that spark of life may have to originate in a subversive actorly response to the deliberate lifelessness of the role at the beginning of the play. Q1's lighter load on the Queen-actor extends to the play's treatment of her character's relationship with the King. Where Q2/F's royal couple are given small moments in which to explore a partnership, as at the beginning of 1.2, or even in their brief duologue in 2.2, and where Claudius is given some tenderness and solicitude toward his new wife in small details such as his use in 2.2 of "my sweet Queene"(Q2) or "my dear Gertrard"(F), or his delicacy before her with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on the subject of Hamlet's "transformation"(2.2),[15] the marginalising of the Queen in Q1 renders her marital relationship more a given symbol than a living thing, and we might even be led to speculate, at the fictive level, that the marriage originated in political necessity rather than love. Q1 has markedly little in the way of invitations to affection on the part of the royal couple. It is crude psychology, of course, but one might go so far as to suggest that one real reason for the Closet Scene's swift development of the Queen's new loyalty to Hamlet is that the Prince in that scene is the first person in the entire action of the piece to show any deep concern for her whatsoever. I have suggested that her move to Hamlet's side in the Closet Scene is simpler and clearer than the process her counterpart undergoes in Q2/F. And yet, the scene is in some ways similarly prepared for, in that if the Queen-actor pays intelligent attention to the inset play, she may well bring with her to the Closet inklings of an understanding of Hamlet's charge of murder against the King. Harold Jenkins believes that this understanding is inconsistent and unprepared,[16] but I think the ground for its growth in the observant Queen-actor may be consciously laid, even though less extensively than in Q2/F. Q1 does, admittedly, lack most of the danger signals which lead up to Q2/F's inset play,[17] and so the Q1 Queen enters the play scene (9) much less explicitly conditioned to be on the watch for shadowed messages about the state and intent of her son than are her counterparts in Q2/F. This need not be extended, however, into an indolent imperviousness to all forms of signifying. Q1's Ofelia is vocally obsessed by the act of interpretation, and one possible consequence of her obsession might well be that the listening Queen, too, is alerted to seek out significance in the Dumb Show and play: What meanes this my Lord? (9.79) What doth this meane my lord? (9.81) Will he tell us what this shew meanes? (9.83) Well, the full entertainment turns out to mean, bluntly, that a dumb-show King is murdered, that his widow-Queen goes off with the murderer, that the Duchess in the parallel spoken piece vows eternal fidelity to her Duke, with specific protestation against remarriage in the event of his death, upon which Gertred's son pointedly asks her (and not the King) for her opinion so far, and then engages Ofelia in conversation, surely overheard, raising the subject of his mother's cheery demeanour despite his father's recent death, along with a reminder of the marriage vows in Ofelia's "Still better and worse"(9.152), and Hamlet's "So you must take your husband"(9.153). When the inset play resumes, the noble play-husband, to whom undying wifely loyalty has just been sworn, is murdered, moving the King, Gertred's new husband, abruptly to abort the evening's entertainment and depart, without ceremony of leave-taking, for his bed. Despite these interpretable events, which Hamlet will underline in the Closet with direct description of his father as murdered, the new King as murderer, Jenkins protests that the Q1 Queen's Closet-Scene knowledge of the murder is an inconsistency, for "Hamlet has given her no account of it"(34). I would suggest that, on the contrary, he has, albeit in the form of show, and that the evidence of Q1's Closet Scene is that she has interpreted, quite correctly and completely, what she has seen and heard, both in the show and in its impact on its onstage audience. The fact that she has been given no words in the play-scene should not deceive us into imagining that she has been given no mind. Which brings us to the Closet proper. Not only does it move the Queen efficiently to Hamlet's side, it does so with clear theatrical intelligence, and without forcing the actor to deal with undue psychological complexity. From the moment of Hamlet's entry, it becomes clear that the playwright/compiler has his own plan for softening up the Queen, for she is instantly made to feel more vulnerable, her danger more explicit and acute than in the analogous moment in Q2/F: Hamlet prefaces any conversation with "first weele make all safe"(11.6), a line which invites him at least to secure the door by which he has entered, thus locking her in and help out, possibly even to check around to see that they are alone. Any such action on his part, threatening both entrapment and discovery, is likely to spark urgent apprehension in the Queen, upping the ante far more directly, even sensationally, than in Q2/F. That Q1's Hamlet does in fact suspect an eavesdropping presence seems confirmed by his response to Corambis's outcry. Rather than the apparent query of the Folio text, "How now, a Rat? dead for a Ducate, dead"(Hinman, 2404), the line in Q1 sounds like suspicion confirmed: "I a Rat, dead for a Duckat"(11.15), and he runs the overbearing counsellor through. In the exchanges with Hamlet following the death of Corambis, Q1 brings the Queen quickly and explicitly into alliance with her son. Hamlet's concern in this version is fine-tuned differently from Q2/F, and it is in part that difference which enables her move to him. He is, to begin with, much more direct about the death of his father, and about the new King's guilt: and he is dead: Murdred, damnably murdred. (11.34-35) here is your husband, With a face like *Vulcan*. A looke fit for a murder and a rape. (11.36-38) can you looke on him That slew my father, and your deere husband, To live in the incestuous pleasure of his bed? (11.43-45) And she is quick to take his meaning, and proclaim her innocence: But as I have a soule, I sweare by heaven, I never knew of this most horride murder. (11.91-2) Q1's Hamlet seems more concerned that she recognise the material fact of murder than that she save her incestuous soul, and he seems markedly less obsessed with the sexuality of her fault. Indeed, he seems to imply that her sexual guilt is quite narrowly circumscribed (an implication which, as with the later treatment of the poison plot, concentrates the play's evil in the King). Crucial to this understanding of his assessment of the extent of her guilt, is Hamlet's use of the term "rape"(38). Granted, she continues now in an incestuous relationship, but that it began as a rape may absolve her in the Prince's eyes, and conceivably in her own, at least of initiating or willing the incest, and this might in turn begin to enable the Queen (whose conscience, after all, is not that of a Christianised Lucrece--she is not even given Q2/F's later soliloquy on the subject of her sick soul) to forgive herself more readily, and to join forces against the man who has murdered her husband, and violated her chastity. Such self-forgiveness is a huge simplifying step beyond the deep and obscure self-condemnations of Q2/F. And now her alliance with Hamlet is further eased, along with the complexity of her role, for where Q2 and F continue to concern themselves intensely with working the Queen's spiritual salvation, the terms Hamlet offers here shift suddenly away from any Christian perception of guilty stains on the eternal soul, toward a simplistic pagan stress on fame/shame and revenge: O mother, if ever you did my deare father love, Forbeare the adulterous bed to night, And win your selfe by little as you may, In time it may be you wil lothe him quite: And mother, but assist mee in revenge, And in his death your infamy shall die. (11.97-102) To which she responds, out of an apparently comfortable relationship with her God, and with no apparent sense of the collision here between pagan and Christian precepts: Hamlet, I vow by that majesty, That knowes our thoughts, and lookes into our hearts, I will conceale, consent, and doe my best, What stratagem soe're thou shalt devise. (11.103-106)[18] This seems to me to account for the absence from Q1 of any developed suicide option, so evident a possible choice in Q2/F. While the Gertrude of the usually-acted conflation is anchored in a material world where "one woe doth tread upon another's heels, so fast they follow," and is consequently prone to despair when faced with her guilt and her isolation, a condition exacerbated by the promptings of conscience and a wide-ranging sense of personal responsibility, the Queen of the First Quarto is blessed with a much more comfortable and constant relationship with an easier God, and a much narrower sense of her fault. Although her role is just over half the size of the Q2/F Gertrude, she has three times the number of references to God, heaven, her soul, and prayer, culminating in this vow to Hamlet. But her God seems no longer concerned about her incest, her infidelity to her first husband, her direct or indirect share of responsibility for Denmark's rottenness, after this point in the Closet Scene. She has only two further prayerful moments, neither of them concerned with her own spiritual state. For the most part, after the Closet Scene, she becomes a willing (if inactive) accomplice in a simple old-fashioned revenge action. Despite her having been won over to Hamlet's side, the King's glozing may be so successful at the beginning of Ofelia's mad scene (14), that for a single moment the Queen wavers (as she need not necessarily do in Q2/F),[19] only coming fully back onside with Hamlet in the following scene, when Horatio tells her of the King's plan for Hamlet's death in England, and she is moved to comment directly on his dissembling, the "treason in his lookes / That seem'd to sugar o're his villanie"(15.10-11). Such wavering, it seems to me, is adequate to account for her protection of the King against Leartes in Q1, where it seems inadequate to the invited subtleties and complexities of Q2/F. But from this point on, and consistent with my sense of the difference in available actorly skills, I think the playwright/compiler of Q1 narrows the path for his Queen-actor. To begin with, Q1's version of Ofelia's madness is not so problematic for the Queen as it is in Q2/F. Where the girl's Q2/F entry is an unwanted intrusion into the Queen's physical and spiritual space, forced on her by one or both of Horatio and the Gentleman, Ofelia here simply arrives before Queen and King, and the Queen is issued no invitation to play reluctance. Nor is the confrontation preceded by any indication of guilty conscience on the part of the Queen, the sort of indication of personal responsibility and pain which might invite her to watch Ofelia's distress as something she helped create. On the whole, it is as if enrollment in Hamlet's revenge plan, however vague at this point, has absolved her of all thoughts of guilt, thoughts which in any event seem confined to her own personal state in this play, rather than extended to her responsibility for others. The latter stages of Q1's action lack the Q2/F opportunities for the Queen to observe the King's behaviour and so puzzle out the details of his final scheme against her son. As scene 14 moves into its last moments, the Queen, who in Q2/F is potentially left on stage to witness the beginning of the King-Laertes alliance against her son, seems more likely, given the King's comforting and specific lines to Leartes on the subject of Hamlet's fate ("thinke already the revenge is done / On him that makes you such a haplesse sonne"--14.116-117), and her own apparent surprise at Horatio's revelations in the next scene, to have followed the modern Q2/F convention which takes her offstage with, or right after, Ophelia.[20] Indeed, the fact that she is given an entry with Horatio at the top of the next scene, as well as the fact that Horatio's news seems to reopen her eyes on the subject of the King, both suggest that she has departed the stage in 14 either without witnessing or without quite comprehending the new liaison between Leartes and King, and the King's hinting nudges concerning the fate of the absent Prince. This will be important to the narrowing of awareness in her final scene. Q2/F, in 4.7, presents ways for the Queen-actor to discover, should she choose this option, that Laertes and the King are in mid-plot when she enters with the news of Ophelia's death. Not so Q1, I think, where her arrival is held back until the completion of the King's poisoning schemes, and there is no apparent sense, as there is particularly in Q2, that the plotters have anything to hide.[21] Nor is her description of the drowning the same internalised meditation that it becomes in Q2/F. Where in that immensely sophisticated version she begins by economically informing Laertes of the death, then moves to the elaborated narrative which soon ceases to assume any audience but herself, becoming something close to soliloquy, here she goes straight into her considerably sparser story, holding back the specific news of the death until the very end. It is not an unusual structure for reporting a death, but it withholds the option of verbalised meditation, and of internalised growth toward the play's final events, which Q2/F's arrangement of the event provides. Perhaps the most striking thing about the Queen's experience of the next scene, Ofelia's funeral, is how bold the King has now become in his dissimulation with her, the extent to which he dismisses her. His falseness with her at the close of scene 17 is obvious, as he speaks aside with Leartes, reassuring him "This very day shall Hamlet drinke his last"(17.156), and then invites the Queen to exit with him (as opposed to their separate and clearly disenchanted departures in Q2/F): Come *Gertred*, wee'l have *Leartes*, and our sonne, Made friends and Lovers, as befittes them both, Even as they tender us, and love their countrie. (17.160-162) Given the fact that she is fully aware, after scene 15, of his schemes and his glozing, her response, "God grant they may"(17.163), suggests she has begun to develop an ability to play at his game herself. But it is too little too late. She is invited to play nothing more subversive or self-fulfilling than this moment in the remainder of her action. In the final scene (18), it seems clear that no complicating suicide option is available. This Queen has not acquired the specific information which might lead her to suspect the fencing match as the King's plot, nor has she been given occasion or even cause to grow into the deep despair which is so possible a choice in Q2/F. Instead, she comes into scene 18 as a clear but secret ally of Hamlet, primitively shriven by their exchange in the Closet, awaiting but not materially assisting his revenge against her husband. One actorly strategy to focus and intensify the action of any scene is to know as clearly as possible what the character is actually expecting as it gets underway. This Queen may enter here expecting, even hoping, simply that she is about to witness Hamlet's achievement of his revenge, an expectation which will lend special poignancy to the irony of her own death. She is not even shown the mechanics of the poisoning in this version. The King's offer of a special pearl or union, so underlined in Q2/F, is not mentioned in Q1. Instead, he has either prepared the poisoned cup in advance of the fencing, as he seems to intend when plotting with Leartes (16.33-36), or his placing the pearl in the drink now is actually deliberately covered by the Queen's business with Hamlet and her napkin, and so hidden from her: *King* Here *Hamlet*, the King doth drinke a health to thee[.] *Queene* Here *Hamlet*, take my napkin, wipe thy face. (18.64-65) And she crosses to Hamlet, or he to her, just as the King would be spicing the potion before his "Give him the wine"(66). And finally, at her moment of drinking, the articulated defiance so prized by commentators on Q2/F, and by Gertrude-actors, is also denied her: *Queene* Here *Hamlet*, thy mother drinkes to thee. *Shee drinkes*. *King* Do not drinke *Gertred*: O t'is the poysned cup! (18.69-70) It is of course conceivable and playable that the stage direction is simply typeset a half line early, and that she does not drink until after the King has urged her not to, but even so she does not get Q2/F's wonderful line, "I will, my lord, I pray you pardon me"(5.2.291), and with it go some of her options for this moment, at least as embedded in text. The writerly instinct here may be related to that of the numerous nineteenth-century promptbooks which emended toward wifely politesse at just this point, altering her Q2/F blend of defiance and apology to apology pure and simple: *King* Gertrude, do not drink. *Queen* I have, my lord. I pray you pardon me.[22] In those nineteenth-century versions as in Q1, the script tightens the focus on the struggle between Prince and King, and in doing so simplifies drastically the range of actorly choices open to the Queen-actor. Indeed it sees to it that the manly action of villainy and virtuous revenge is not finally tainted by any actorly instinct to play the accessory female right through to any inconveniently complicating conclusion of her own. I might at this point subvert my entire argument by suggesting that all of this Q1 treatment of the Queen really amounts to nothing more than another instance of mindless chauvinist obliviousness, in which the Queen is mainly given little to do because no one has thought about her at all. But much of what she is given to do has real theatrical intelligence, and where she is given little or nothing, the comparable moments in Q2/F are usually complex, asking for a player of considerable sophistication. My sense, in other words, is that the constraining simplicity here may well result from deliberate and reasonably accomplished theatrical shaping of the role to suit a player of limited craft, rather than from sins of commission or omission by some unnamed representative of the dominant culture. NOTES 1 Forthcoming as "Realising Gertrude: The Suicide Option," in *Elizabethan Theatre XIII*. 2 See Craig's preface to Albert B. Weiner, ed., *Hamlet: The First Quarto, 1603*. (Great Neck, New York: Barron's, 1962), p.iii. Greet's production is also reported on, though not very helpfully, by Winnifred F. E. C. Isaac, *Ben Greet and the Old Vic* (London: Greenbank, [1964]), 189-209. Marvin Rosenberg has collected numerous responses to William Poel's 1881 production in "The First Modern Staging of Hamlet Q1," forthcoming in Thomas Clayton, ed., *Q1 Now!* See also Robert Speaight, *William Poel and the Elizabethan Revival* (London: Heinemann, 1954), 51. And see Sjgren, "Producing the First Quarto Hamlet," *Hamlet Studies*, 1 (1979), 35-44; Shrimpton, "Shakespeare Performances in London and Stratford-upon-Avon 1984-5," *Shakespeare Survey 39* (1987), 193-197; and McMillin, "Casting the Hamlet Quartos: The Limit of Eleven," also forthcoming in Clayton's volume. Sjgren finds that "the play could have been produced by twelve actors: four stockholders, three boys, three older apprentices and two local talents"(37)--this represents a generous distribution of the roles and, I suspect, one which avoids doubling Ofelia or Gertred into men's parts. Shrimpton reports that the Orange Tree version was played by nine (194). (Note the potential similarity of the *Hamlet* situation to that proposed by Taylor for the Quarto of *Henry 5* : "We Happy Few: The 1600 Abridgement," in *Modernizing Shakespeare's Spelling*, Stanley Wells. Oxford: Clarendon, 1979. 72-119.) 3 Janis Lull's assessment of this difference, namely "that the Q1 text affirms the ethics of the post-feudal honor culture, especially the value of heroic individualism, while the F text shows Hamlet accepting the newer Protestant ethic by subordinating his individual will to divine providence," is a suggestive response to the simpler Q1 revenge tale, whether or not one accepts her linked view on priority/authenticity ("Forgetting Hamlet," forthcoming in Thomas Clayton, ed., *Q1 Now! *). 4 "To Shakespeare," in *The Poems of Hart Crane*, ed. Marc Simon (New York: Liveright, 1986), p. 131. 5 Q1 is quoted from the facsimile edition by Michael J. B. Allen and Kenneth Muir (Berkeley: University of California, 1981), supplemented by scene and line numbers from Weiner, *Hamlet: The First Quarto, 1603*. Quotations from Q2/F are from *The Riverside Shakespeare*, ed. G. B. Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). 6 See below, p.7 ff. 7 I make the initial assumption, at all points like this one, that, in the absence of clear evidence to the contrary, Gertrude is meant to hear everything that goes on around her. Playing a moment like the discussion between King and counsellor as an aside may have the effect of neutralising or avoiding an actorly challenge which is much more interesting and resonant when confronted head-on. 8 Lest we think that Corambis might not be interrupting here, that the King's question might in fact be to his counsellor and not to the Queen at all, we might note that the logic of the moment, with Corambis's opinion already complete, invites a second opinion rather than a reiteration; and in any event, the King is in the habit of using the familiar *thee* and *thou* with his pal the Lord Chamberlain, but the more formal and respectful *you* with his wife.One might well compare Q1/F's Polonius, in his 1.3 advice to Laertes followed by Ophelia: Laertes consistently has the male-bonding code laid on him with the familiar *thee*; Ophelia gets her sexual marching orders in a stern and consistent *you*. 9 While Q2/F makes intense use of such violated privacy in the psychology of the Queen, it has been much less evident prior to this point in Q1. 10 As it does in Middleton and Rowley's *The Changeling* (2.2), where Beatrice's private chamber, into which Diaphanta must conduct Alsemero in secrecy, becomes, without textual accounting, a place where De Flores can spy on Beatrice and Alsemero, then a place where she can subsequently encounter De Flores without apparent surprise at his presence, then a place in which she can leave him without comment, and finally a place where he can be joined by Alonso! By this last point, it is surely no longer her chamber. 11 At least, no such leavetaking is scripted: the Hamlet-actor may, of course, make a decision to remedy that in the playing. I am imagining, for the moment, that he does not. 12 On this subject, it should be noted that the so-called boys' roles in London companies were sometimes played by actors at least as old as 20 or 21, at which age they might have been professionals for as long as ten years, and could hardly be called boys where the maturity of their craft was concerned. See T. J. King, "The King's Men on Stage: Actors and Their Parts, 1611-32," in *Elizabethan Theatre IX*, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Port Credit: Meany, 1981); and J. B. Streett, "The Durability of Boy Actors," *Notes & Queries*, 218 (1973), 461-465. In "The Queen's Men in 1594: A Study of 'Good' and 'Bad' Quartos," *ELR* 14 (1984), 55-69, Scott McMillin draws a distinction between boys and youths, but assigns to boys "all female roles and all roles for males who . . . have not reached puberty"(64). The youths are assumed, by McMillin, to have played mainly "younger male characters who are anything but boyish"(64-65). Nonetheless, he goes on (65-66) to suggest that Queen Margaret in *The True Tragedy* was assigned to an adult, and to point out that while this might seem an exception to the rule, "it is an exception that was made by earlier Tudor companies (where adults often played older female characters) and that was not unknown to the London companies after 1576"(66). In a private communication, T.J. King points out that an adult, Anthony Turner, played a brief comic Kitchen Maid role in Heywood's *Fair Maid of the West*, Part One (c. 1630), but according to King's evidence this is anomalous, and "in the other plays that identify actors in principal roles all principal female roles are played by boys." 13 In fact, Q1 does not once adopt that telling Q2/F exit technique. 14 "Five Women Eleven Ways," 300. 15 And note that Claudius's admission to Laertes in 4.7: "My virtue or my plague, be it either which-- / She is so conjunctive to my life and soul, / That, as the star moves not but in his sphere, / I could not but by her"(13-16), while it could be a Machiavellian calculation, could also be a quite straightforward indicator of the attitude from which he plays with her throughout. There is no such declaration (and perhaps, therefore, no such attitude) in Q1. 16 Introduction to the Arden *Hamlet* (London: Methuen, 1982), 34. 17 Signals such as the King's description of Hamlet's condition in 2.2 as "put on," and Guildenstern's subsequent assessment of his madness as "crafty." 18 The importing of the latter lines from a memory of *The Spanish Tragedy* is irrelevant to this argument. Wherever they originated, their place now is in the fabric of Q1, as a spontaneous speech-act generated by the Queen in response to the immediate stimuli of the theatrical moment around her. There is no other actorly way to deal with them. 19 I deal with this point in "The Suicide Option," as does Ellen J. O'Brien, in her unpublished paper from the Berlin World Congress, "Unheard is not Unseen." 20 She is given no specific exit direction in any of the early texts. 21 See Steven Urkowitz, "'Well-sayd olde Mole': Burying Three Hamlets in Modern Editions," in Georgiana Ziegler, ed., *Shakespeare Study Today* (New York: AMS, 1986), 58. 22 As printed, for instance, in Simpkin, Marshall, and Company's 1839 edition, used as prompt text by Henry Betty, who later wrote the same reading into his prompt copy of the 1843 Charles Knight and Company version; the polite reading also appeared in the much-used nineteenth-century "French's Standard Drama" version [n.d.]. Ellen O'Brien comments on this same emendation in "Unseen is not Unheard."
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