The Writing Tables of James Roberts

摘要

ON 26 July 1602 James Roberts, stationer and patent-holder for almanacs, prognostications, and playbills, entered 'A booke called the Revenge of Hamlett Prince of Denmark' in the Stationers' Register. It was subsequently published in two quartos: the short version of 1603, printed by Valentine Simmes and issued by Nicholas Ling and John Trundle (QI), and the longer and more familiar version of 1604-05, printed by Roberts and issued by Ling alone. Since a copy of the 1603 First Quarto of Hamlet was first discovered in 1823 the edition has, in the words of Zachary Lesser, 'challenged and transformed our views of Hamlet, Shakespeare, and the nature of the Shakespearean text'.1 Recent decades have placed the New Bibliographers' categorization of QI and other shorter Shakespeare texts as 'bad' quartos under considerable pressure, and the textual theory of versions has legitimized its increasingly routine presence alongside the canonical texts. But the approach through the theory of textual versions merely postpones the inevitable questions of evaluation: the text is, but what is it, and how did it come into being? This paper will take a position that will not be elaborated further here: that QI, in relation to the quarto of 1604-05 and the 1623 Folio texts, where it varies from those longer versions is not only drastically shorter, but also derivative, paraphrased, sometimes poor in sense, sometimes poor and un-Shakespearian in its metre, and generally lacking in distinctive Shakespearian timbre in its language; and that these are symptoms of some kind of disruption of the direct copying from one document to another. This paper will argue for a credible mechanism for the production of such effects. Building on Tiffany Stern's argument that QI was compiled by note-takers in the theatre audience, I will present a glaring but hitherto disregarded fact whose implications run far. In the years before QI was published, James Roberts, the stationer who first entered the play in the Stationers' Register, partly manufactured writing tables, and for some time wholly controlled their publication. These tables could readily have provided the material basis for Roberts to compile a script from notes in shorthand and swift writing taken by annotators in the theatre.