1. Kathleen O. Irace's annotated and modern-spelling edition of Hamlet is a text for our times. We believe that early modern publications of playtexts mark a collaborative endeavour, yet we know that the second quarto and the Folio versions of Hamlet have been hailed as the sublime creation of a surpassing literary genius. The first quarto, on the other hand, is perhaps memorialised, perhaps adapted, and possibly the fruit of a shady publishing opportunism. It comes close, for us, to the ideal of what a Renaissance play really ought to be. And in the New Cambridge's handsome edition this quarto gains the full paraphernalia of a scholarly critical edition.

2. We are offered a modernised text, lightly and conservatively repunctuated, extensively relineated, and, where Irace detects good reason for identifying a compositorial error, sparingly amended. Annotations draw attention to the major local and structural differences from Q2 and F, comment upon unique details of the Q1 text, suggest possible stagings, and occasionally gloss text shared with the longer versions. Appendices present (1) a list of 'actors' additions' found only in Q1 and which may furnish evidence of a playhouse provenance, (2) an inventory of couplets partly or wholly unique to Q1, (3) a parallel plot outline of the Q1 and Riverside texts, and (4) a list of all relineations. The three-part introduction first gives a summary of the main theories by which the Q1 text has been accounted for. Irace then examines the special features of Q1's language, plot, characters, and staging, and concludes with a brief account of her own understanding of the text's genesis. Lastly appears a stage history of Q1.

3. Irace handles her task succinctly. Q1 has been a site of scholarly fascination and an arena for bold textual theories, most notably as revealed in Thomas Clayton's 1992 collection of essays, to which Irace importantly contributed, and from which she draws widely and helpfully. Competing explanations for the distinctive aspects of Q1 are deftly summarised and lucidly brought together. Various insights, academic and theatrical, enrich introduction and notes.

4. This volume explicitly champions Q1's capacity to be an effective performance text. Irace wants her edition to encourage and to facilitate the playing of Q1. The accessible text and the stage-orientated introduction alike seek to achieve this and must, in large measure, assist it.

5. The case for Q1's origin as a theatrical abridgement of a longer version, and specifically of a version close to F, is consistently made and leans principally upon Q1's claimed playability. In the second section of Irace's introduction, she repeatedly accounts for Q1's plotting, its inferred characterisation, and its implications for staging, in terms of a potential for effective performance. In the third section, the history of Q1's production is told in a way which illustrates this potential. In doing this, of course, Irace is not making a heterodox assessment, for much recent work on Q1 tends towards the same ends, and Irace handles existing work thoughtfully in developing her position. In some ways this edition is a statement of current thinking about Q1, broad-ranging yet lightly-handled, forthright but not extreme, and ready to acknowledge divergent views while working towards a limited consensus.

6. Yet there are reservations. One concerns the failure to reconcile the strong evidence of a memorialised text with the signs of an authentic playing text. Irace notes that 'many have supported a two-part theory of reconstruction and adaptation', and yokes the twin arguments in developing her plausible conjecture that the manuscript behind Q1 was created for playing before a provincial audience by the Chamberlain's Men, at a time when they lacked the company prompt-book. Unexplored, however, are the implications of such an origin. Irace, we gather, believes the memorial reconstruction, perhaps by an actor who had previously played Marcellus, to have preceded the adaptation, or the two to have occurred as part of a single process. Yet if an adaptor treated what a 'Marcellus' remembered from a longer text, then why is Q1's celebrated tightening of the more discursive version so little apparent in the Marcellus/Voltemar/Lucianus scenes? This is a problem which bears upon the case for Q1 as a theatrical text, for why else should these scenes have been so little abridged but that it was felt that an 'official' version, where possible, was preferable to a heavily-cut text, however skilful the pruning.

7. To this imprecision we may add the lack of any discussion of Honigmann's view that Q1 echoes Othello. This, if accepted, would be significant for the dating of Q1 and thus for establishing a sharpened context for its inception.

8. A further reservation concerns how far contemporary audiences are conditioned by the knowledge of a longer Hamlet in responding to productions of Q1. Irace does not address this directly (although she does note the success of certain performances in appealing to playgoers unfamiliar with Q2/F). To the direct and uncomplicated Q1, present-day spectators will usually have brought an awareness of the better-known texts. The spareness of the shorter work may partly acquire significance and stature from established perceptions of the complexities and the breadth of a longer Hamlet. The versions of Hamlet offered by Marovitz and in the BBC's Animated Tales similarly draw strength from an acquaintance with Shakespeare.

9. An editor must decide which aspects of a text most merit analysis. Irace has not opted to pursue either of the matters raised here. Her edition, as I have sought to stress, is lucid, scholarly, succinct, and consistently prioritises questions of staging. Maybe her achievement would have lost more than gained by taking up my points. Yet by choosing not to address them, Irace leaves open the question, why favour this cut version? Directors have long sought to lend pace and forcefulness to Hamlet through selective abridgement unsanctioned by any early modern source. In doing so they have enjoyed access to a complete Hamlet from which to make their excisions and alterations. The publication of Q1 as part of the New Cambridge Shakespeare is a statement of the text's special status. Perhaps our fascination with Q1 derives not from an inception to which many may directly have contributed, but to a more traditional absorption in anything which has a Shakespearean connection.

CHARLES CATHCART
BLACKBURN