The Hopkins 1676 Hamlet Prompt Book
This volume constitutes one of a small number of seventeenth-century printed “prompt books” of Shakespeare’s plays in quarto format that were subsequently marked in manuscript for a specific performance on the London stage. It is of exceptional interest, too, because it is one of just three such copies of Shakespeare’s longest play, which consequently was far more susceptible to major cuts and reinterpretations by players. The earliest of the three copies, the so-called Smock Alley Hamlet, named after the Dublin theater where it was performed, is held by the University of Edinburgh. It derives from the 1663 Third Folio edition of the collected plays, which was broken up and the plays rebound individually by the Shakespeare scholar J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps before he donated his Shakespeare collection to the University Library in Edinburgh. It may have been annotated as early as 1680. The other copy, now at the Folger Shakespeare Library, is a marked-up copy of the 1683 Hamlet quarto, annotated by the actor John Ward (d. 1773), who also adapted the 1676 Hamlet prompt book at Johns Hopkins.
The present 1676 Hamlet prompt book was added to JHU’s collections at the behest of the leading scholar of surviving Shakespeare prompt books J. G. McManaway, becoming part of the Tudor and Stuart Club Collection of Hopkins’s Sheridan Libraries. Though his is by no means a household name, the English actor John Ward is perhaps more distinguished by the acting careers of his legendary grandchildren, Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble. Siddons was arguably the most famous tragedienne ever to have played the role of Lady Macbeth—a character she acted alongside her equally famous younger brother John. Largely based on the evidence of Ward’s handwriting, the annotations in the Hopkins prompt book are believed to have been entered sometime shortly after 1740 for a uniquely tailored, and much abbreviated, performance of the play. An additional and apparently later hand appears on page 76 and again on page 88, though the notes made by this second annotator do not provide any additional interpretive information about the play. Unfortunately, the upper portion of one page, representing part of act 5, scene 2, has been torn and lost, though the original printed text is otherwise completely intact.
The manuscript annotations in the Hopkins prompt book are various. Some consist of stage and prop directions, such as the note written at the beginning of act 5: “Long trap open, earth, skulls and bones in it.” Others list the names of characters meant to enter or exit the stage at a given time. The large majority, however, consist of very large deletions of Shakespeare’s original text: perhaps as much as one-third of acts 2 and 4 are simply crossed out. There is also a handful of original contributions to the printed text apparently conjured by Ward himself. In other cases, various lines have simply been reassigned to other characters, though these reassignments do not seem to alter substantially the dramatic action of the play. Rather, this was very much a working copy, as evident in Ward’s further cancellations of his own handwritten lines (e.g., pp. 32, 64, 80).
A number of the manuscript revisions of Shakespeare’s original language simply affect the word order of particular sentences, such as in act 3 where the line “Shews sick and pale with thought” is changed to “Is sick with the pale cast of thought.” Other revisions are more dramatic, such as at Hamlet’s death when Horatio’s familiar line, “Now cracks a noble heart; Good night sweet prince,” was altered to read “There cracked the cordage of a noble heart.” On balance, these adjustments are minimal and most often appear as minor changes compensating for potential confusion or unintended infelicities of prose caused by Ward’s cancellations of the original printed text.
The most substantial alterations of the content of Shakespeare’s Hamlet consist of the large-scale cancellations. In fact, the 1676 quarto itself was printed with suggested cancellations throughout following an opening explanatory note “To the Reader”: “This play being too long to be conveniently acted, such places as might be least prejudicial to the plot or sense, are left out upon the stage: but that we may no way wrong the incomparable author, are here inserted according to the original copy with this mark “ .” A printed open double quotation mark then appears at the beginning of each line the editors recommend as a candidate for cancellation. Many, though by no means all, of Ward’s cancellations follow these recommendations.
The choices of some deletions eliminate passages that today may seem absolutely essential to the latter-day reader, perhaps most notably Polonius’s famous speech of fatherly advice to Laertes in act 1, scene 3, and Hamlet’s soliloquy on drink in act 1, scene 4. Polonius’s dialogue with Reynaldo at the beginning of act 2, scene 1, is completely cancelled, as are significant portions of Hamlet’s greeting to the players of the play-within-the-play, and also his subsequent recollection in act 2 of one of the visiting players’ earlier speeches delivered on the Fall of Troy. Another of Hamlet’s soliloquies in act 4 (“How all occasions do inform against me”) was also entirely cancelled by Ward, along with Hamlet’s lengthy exchange with Horatio about the plot to kill Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the beginning of act 5, scene 1. Perhaps most dramatic of all was Ward’s decision to truncate the tumultuous closing scene of the play. Fortinbras’s closing announcement of the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and his subsequent exchange with Horatio, were completely excised, causing the play to end abruptly and violently at the very moment of Hamlet’s death on the stage.
Of all the major characters in Hamlet, the one whose role was most diminished by these cancellations in the Hopkins prompt book was clearly that of the king. Many of Claudius’s lengthier speeches were methodically shortened, or simply deleted altogether. This much-reduced presence of Hamlet’s stepfather on the stage may have created a strange sense of him as indifferent, abstract, if also immoral. The contrasting preservation of many of Gertrude’s lines enhances the royal presence of the queen, and of her relationship with Hamlet, as a source of keen dramatic tension and conflict.
It is profoundly significant that the Hopkins Hamlet prompt book was marked up during the middle decades of the eighteenth century, for it was also at around the time when Shakespeare’s literary apotheosis as the prince of English poets and playwrights was also being shaped, from Alexander Pope’s famous “Preface to Shakespeare” (1725) to the erection of sculptural memorials of the Bard in the Temple of British Worthies at Stowe House (1734–35) and in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey (1741). By contrast, the Hopkins prompt book provides unique and intensely revealing insight into the inherent instability of the Shakespeare canon just as others were seeking to secure a permanent place for his plays within large-scale, carefully collated editions, among them Nicholas Rowe and, a generation later, George Steevens and Edmond Malone. In minute detail, this volume presents an alternative vision of Shakespeare’s literary production, not as timeless, but rather as profoundly time-bound—subject equally to the exigencies of practical stage performance and to the fickle vagaries of changing literary fashions and sensibilities.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
G. Blakemore Evans (ed.), Shakespearean Prompt-books of the Seventeenth Century, 8 vols. (Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1960–); E. A. J. Honigmann, The Stability of Shakespeare’s Text (University of Nebraska Press, 1965); J. G. McManaway, “The Two Earliest Prompt Books of Hamlet,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 43:3 (1949), 288-320; [Microfilm Series:] Shakespeare and the Stage: Series 1, Prompt books from the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C., 86 microfilm reels; Series 2, Prompt books from the Harvard Theatre Collection, 36 microfilm reels; Series 3, The Shakespeare Library Collection, Birmingham Public Library, 10 microfilm reels; Series 4, Prompt books from the Shakespeare Centre Library, Stratford-upon-Avon, 85 microfilm reels (Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications, 1985; Reading, Eng.: Research Publications, 1988; Brighton: Harvester, 1986–87. See also: https://bsuva.org/bsuva/promptbook/.
