LETTERS Hamlet's black hole
Sir: At the close of his article (The trick of that voice', 30 October) Mr J. Enoch Pow- ell asks, 'What happened to create the black hole between Hamlet (printed in quarto in 1603) and the sending of the copy for the first Folio of 1623 to the printer?'
'Black hole' seems an odd phrase for a period of intense creativity and active the- atrical production. In fact there was the second Quarto of 1604 (the first is thought to have been written imperfectly from memory by an actor), which is much nearer to the first Folio. The 'full-length' Hamlet (not often performed) is a combination of the two, and most productions select from each of them.
Earlier there was the lost play known as the 'Ur-Hamlet' and further back there was Saxo-Grammaticus's Danish history of Amleth, Prince of Jutland' and later Belle- forest's retelling of it in Histoires Tragiques (these facts are in Anne Barton's introduc- tion to the New Penguin 1980 edition of the play, which I recommend to Mr Powell).
The story of Hamlet was rewritten over centuries in an effort (finally and supremely achieved by Shakespeare) to adapt a pagan saga to a Christian community and ulti- mately transform it from a savage story of revenge and murder to a renaissance drama of moral conscience set in a Christian soci- ety. Even at the end there are inconsisten- cies, but the ultimate result is the greatest drama in the English language, both pro- found and exciting and continually in pro- duction.
Every play even today is adapted and improved in rehearsal, usually with the help of the cast, and to that extent may be 'writ- ten by a committee', but the individual voice of the author is unmistakable. Mr Powell seems to recycle the tire& old attempts to identify the author of the Shakespearean canon as Bacon or the Earl of Oxford or some mysterious unknown. who of course was more highly educated than the boy from Stratford grammar school.
L. W. Bailey
10 Woodcote Close, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey
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