Colour-coded facsimile

Bibliographical DNA in the text of Hamlet Q1, 1603

David Pizzanelli

This paper presents a digital facsimile of The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke as printed in 1603, Shakespeare’s First Quarto, with every word coloured according to whether it reappears, spelled letter for letter the same, in the Second Quarto of 1604–5, in the First Folio of 1623, or in both.

The great majority of Q1’s words are coloured. A reporter working from memory, or a stenographer working from a performance, would give back sense and wording but not Shakespeare’s own idiosyncratic spellings. The shared spellings point to a common written origin: Q1 was set from an earlier state of the same authorial manuscript, before revision produced the “true and perfect coppie” of Q2, which its title page says was “enlarged to almost as much againe as it was”.