The thousands of variants in the three texts of Shakespeare’s Hamlet range from the substitution of individual words, by the author or others, to unique passages in each text. This publication is designed to assist scholars in efficiently identifying and analyzing textual variants, by furnishing a set of parallel texts with variant words and passages color-coded, as described below.
The three texts are displayed in modern type in a parallel arrangement, on pages more than 16 inches wide. On each page of the publication, a page of Q2 text appears in the center, as the control text, flanked by corresponding portions of the Q1 and the Folio texts. Each Q1 variant appears in blue in the Q1 text to the left, and each Folio variant appears in red in the Folio text to the right. When words or entire passages are unique to Q2 vs. the Folio text, these appear in red in the Q2 text.
In the highly limited editorial policy, original spelling, punctuation, and capitalization have been scrupulously maintained with the exception that reading is made less cumbersome by the elimination of the quaint forms of the letter ‘s’ and the adoption of modern use where i and j or u and v are interchanged in the original printings of the three texts.
Since minute particulars can affect scholarly judgment of a textual variant, the editors are preparing facsimile texts which will be available on the internet, arranged to correspond with the pages in this publication.
The HAMLET Text Research Toolset is available for purchase from the Howland Research Shop:
ISBN: 978-0-9825553-5-4
List price $199.95. Enter coupon code ‘ac-toolset’ at checkout to receive the academic/educator’s price of $149.95.