The Hamlet First Published (Q1, 1603).

Bert O. States' Hamlet and the Concept of Character is a formal exercise in the analysis of dramatic character. His goal is to discover why it is that the illusion of character works so well, why we take characters for real people, and why "we are so ready to fill in details that are not there and to do so in the style of those that are" (173). The author's goal is not to produce a new reading of the play but "to confront character as a fictional representation of human behavior" (xxiv), to address the impressions which "cannot be proven by textual citation" (147) and which yet give rise to the most pressing questions we have about the text.

In order to achieve this end, States begins with a lengthy theoretical section on the nature of character, and devotes the second part of the book to more conventional forms of literary interpretation. The approach produces some keen insights, such as States' comments on Horatio as a species of dramatic confidant whose "main function is to be little more than an extension of the soliloquy principle in that [he] allow[s] the hero to think out loud realistically. But consider the problem of crafting a companion for Hamlet: he must be a good listener, patient to a fault; a spy of sorts, but not one who will uncover too much too quickly and thereby speed progress. . . ." (147) Horatio survives the play, States argues, as the symbol of our intimacy with the hero. Another compelling chapter of the book compares Hamlet with his dramatic "older brother," Prince Hal. This is a fascinating juxtaposition of two characters who "are in the same situation, the distinction resting roughly on the difference between the problem of killing a king and the problem of becoming one" (159).

The book is full of such incisive and witty analyses of character and its operations. Sadly, States detracts from the book's many strengths by somewhat derisively eschewing the conceptual frameworks - poststructuralism, psychoanalysis - that have been brought to bear over the last twenty years on precisely the issues he poses. States' claim that his emphasis is on the limits of those frameworks of explanation and analysis might be more convincing if one didn't feel that he simplifies "postmodernism" and its constituent currents almost beyond recognition. The crisis in the history of the subject is seen to be an irrelevance which ignores a basic continuity in human identity, a conflation of identity and personality pertaining to an extraneous "thematics" rather than to the matter of character itself. One feels he has missed the point. For example, in rebutting the arguments of Jonathan Dollimore's Radical Tragedy, States contends that "[e]ven critics who dispute the notion of identity or of a coherent self in certain literary characters (for example Shakespeare's) rely on some form of selfish unity in characterization itself in order to make the point that character is far from being unified in, say, the 'humanist essentialist' sense" (xviii). He continues, "How, otherwise, could Dollimore set about revising the 'bourgeois' notion of character without the presumption that through radical change we are always referring, on some level of psychical endurance, to the same person?" (xviii). Of course, postmodern reassessments of the subject make no claims that all human identity is essentially schizophrenic, any more than they claim that literary characters, are "people." Neither do these defensive maneuvers against "postmodern fog" (129) serve to make States' own prose any more lucid: "We now have the interesting task of considering how we get from the semiotic to the mimetic text, from the geno- to the phenotext" (138).

States' approach is also, at times, curiously ahistorical. He maintains that he could have chosen any character in any text to test his theories of character: "I am not interested in the historical content but in the container itself, or in the sense in which something persists in, say, Hamlet that constitutes the fair share of my interest in what becomes of him" (xv). Potentially fascinating material on the theory of the body's humors is also purged of its historical specificity in order to serve purely formalist ends: "I am preparing a tool, out of Renaissance odds and ends," he writes, "with which I might examine one of its own products (Hamlet) from the modern standpoint of personality theory, or characterology" (73). It is disappointing to learn that "where these four substances [the humors] come from, historically and medically is not important for our purposes" (73).

Despite all assertions to the contrary, at the end of the book, it is hard to see any difference between States' study and a humanist-essentialist reading of character in Hamlet. Since within that traditional frame the book offers such an interesting and solid analysis, it seems unfortunate that so much energy has been spent fending off the shadow attack of charges of humanism on the one hand, and the perceived evils of postmodernism on the other.

The specter of "postmodernism" also haunts the collection of essays on the first Quarto of Hamlet edited by Thomas Clayton. It is with some astonishment that one reads on the first page of the introduction that "All the contributors have thought knowledgeably and seriously about the origins, form and intertextualities of Q1 Hamlet, and arrived with conviction at their own conclusions. Their essays advanced views in terms that speak not only about their subjects but for and of the writers themselves and the academic, institutional, and socioeconomic worlds they come from where such subjects are addressed." One gets the impression that an upbringing in the inner city, for instance, automatically carries with it firm convictions about whether Q1 was a memorial reconstruction! Fortunately, such a misapplied concession to the postmodern politics of textual criticism does not much mar this fine anthology, which takes as its subject the "closet Hamlet," that is, the first Hamlet published in 1603 and unknown until it was discovered in a closet in 1823.

There can be little doubt about the aesthetic deficiencies of Q1 compared with other versions of the text:

O my Lord, the young Ofelia Having made a garland of sundry sortes of floures, Sitting vpon a willow by a brooke, The envious sprig broke, into the brooke she fell. . .

(Q1, H3v.11-14)

There is a Willow growes ascaunt the Brooke That showes his horry leaues in the glassy streame, Therewith fantastique garlands did she make Of Crowflowers, Nettles, Daises, and long Purples That liberall Shepheards giue a grosser name, But our cull-cold maydes doe dead mens fingers call them. There on the pendant boughes her cronet weedes Clambring to hand, an enuious sliver broke, When downe her weedly trophies and her selfe Fell in the weeping Brooke. . .

(Q2.Mlr.31-Mlv11;4.7.166-75)

But some doubt arguably remains in light of the direct simplicity of lines such as:

Hamlet. I never loved you.

Ofelia. You made me believe you did.

However, even though Q1 is aesthetically weaker as a script than either the 1604 Quarto edition or the 1623 Folio, it is far from clear that it is dramatically less effective. A production in Richmond at the Orange Tree pub in 1985 was an enormous success. One veteran Hamlet scholar who witnessed that production remarked, "[T]his literary patchwork, this simulacrum of a masterpiece, has the stuff - it turns out - of a damned exciting play; I have never seen Q2/F1 produced so skillfully, move so deftly, mount so surely in suspense. The thing was superb. The infelicities of diction never got in the way of the unfolding of the plot" (60). Clayton remarks that this is the paradox of the dual ontology of work for the theater - its effectiveness as script and/or performance, and that performance is very likely to triumph over script.

The authors contributing to this collection take various positions on the Q1 text, all of which are nicely set in context by Clayton's introduction not only to the essays themselves but also to current debate about editing "Shakespeare's" texts. In this lucid and concise summary of the issues at stake, Clayton shows that editions are "conflated" texts and that some textual scholars, such as William B. Long believe they serve only undergraduates and general readers and that serious scholars should take themselves to the quartos and First Folio (45). "The 'definitive edition,'" Clayton concludes, "is a relic of positivism past and modernism gone" (46).

In the midst of these ructions in textual scholarship, what, then, are we to make of Q1? Was it Shakespeare's early draft, or a botched recollection by touring actors of a better play by Shakespeare's own hand? Kathleen Irace's study, based on rigorous analysis of the available versions, claims the plays was indeed a memorial reconstruction. Her essay is thick with enough diagrams and tables to furnish evidence submitted for the Simpson trial and contrasts with G.R. Hibbard's more leisurely argument that the reverse is true, namely that F follows Q1. Alan Dessen's essay, the first in the book, suggests instead methods of adjudicating the texts and looking at their representative features. Other essays also refrain from simply taking sides as to which came first (though not, of course, about which was published first), and instead look at questions of performance (Brian Loughrey, Scott McMillin and Marvin Rosenberg), ideology (Janis Lull and Steven Urkowitz) and interpretation (Philip McGuire, Marga Munkelt, Sidney Thomas, and Giorgio Melchiori). Indeed, some of the wider implications of taking Q1 seriously are remarkable. Scott McMillin, for instance, argues against some of the very compelling evidence put forward by other essayists in the volume that longer versions of the play, contrary to our common sense expectations, may be the more theatrically "economical" texts. The reasoning behind this surprising claim is that what counts as "economy" in the Elizabethan theater is having a large number of roles played by a small cast. When plague struck London and Shakespeare's actors went on tour, McMillin argues, it was not brevity but reduced numbers of actors' roles that was significant.

It is a tribute to the volume's success that one can't put it down with a sense of having either fully embraced or completely rejected Q1. We are left rather with a sense of what Clayton calls the Father Flanegan school of criticism. That is, we feel about the "bad Quarto" as the good priest felt about his wayward charges: "There's no such thing as a bad boy."

DYMPNA C. CALLAGHAN Syracuse University