With regard to the first quarto of “Hamlet,” and its probable history, something will be said later on. But it might be well here to call attention to the three stage-directions in this quarto, which have dropped out of all the subsequent editions, and which elucidate the context. Ophelia, in her “mad” scene, did not bring in flowers, but had a lute in her hands. There would be no need for the Queen so minutely to describe Ophelia’s flowers at the time of her death if she had been previously seen with the garlands. The ghost, when in the Queen’s chamber, wore a dressing-gown, not armour, probably the same gown he wore at the time of his death; Hamlet is overwhelmed with horror at this pitiful sight of his father. And Ophelia’s body was followed to the grave by villagers and a solitary priest, who took no further part in the ceremony.
Elizabethan players had an advantage over modern actors in that they could more readily appreciate the construction of Shakespeare’s plays. They knew that the dramatist’s characters mutually supported each other within a definite dramatic structure, and that it was the business of the actor to preserve the author’s framework. This attitude towards the play grew naturally out of the conditions belonging to their theatre, for unless the plot were adhered to, confusion would have arisen in the matter of entrances and exits, causing the continuity of the movement to be interrupted.
After the Restoration, when the public theatres were reopened, the “fable” ceased to have the same importance attached to it by the actors, and attention became more and more centred on those characters which were good acting parts. In 1773 appeared a collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, “As they are now performed at the Theatres Royal, Regulated from the Prompt Books of each House.” The volumes were dedicated to Garrick, whom Bell, the compiler, pronounced to be “the best illustrator of, and the best living comment on, Shakespeare that ever has appeared or possibly ever will grace the British stage”; a statement which is qualified by the remark of Capell that “Garrick spoke many speeches of Shakespeare as if he did not understand them.” Garrick, however, expresses his fear lest—
“the prunings, transpositions, or other alterations which in his province as a manager he had often found necessary to make or adopt with regard to the text, for the convenience of representation or accommodation to the powers and capacities of his performers, might be misconstrued into a critical presumption of offering to the literati a reformed and more correct edition of our author’s works; this being by no means his intention.”
The reader need only examine one of the plays in Bell’s “Companion to the Theatre” to understand Garrick’s modesty as to his “prunings.” Take the actor’s stage-version of “Macbeth”—one of Bell’s notes states, “This play, even amidst the fine sentiments it contains, would shrink before criticism did not Macbeth and his lady afford such uncommon scope for acting merit. Upon the whole, it is a fine drama with some gross blemishes.” Apparently the “blemishes” are only found in those scenes where Macbeth or his wife do not appear, for Bell continues:
“The part of the porter is properly omitted....”
“The flat, uninteresting scene, between Lenox and another useless Lord, is properly omitted....”
“Here Shakespeare, as if the vigorous exertion of his faculties in the preceding scene required relaxation, has given us a most trifling, superfluous dialogue between Lady Macduff, Rosse, and her son, merely that another murder may be committed on the stage. We heartily concur in and approve of striking out the greater part of it....”
“There are about eighty lines of this scene (Macduff’s) omitted, which, retained, would render it painfully tedious, and, indeed, we think them as little deserving of the closet as of the stage,” etc.