I cannot recommend this edition of Hamlet.

The issue I have with this text is not that Dr. Faktorovich has delivered as fact the (largely baseless) theory that William Shakespeare was the pen name of William Percy, nor is the issue that she assumes the existence a homosexual subtext, which is certainly possible, but far from certain. No, the issue that I have with this particular edition of Hamlet is in the subtitle, which describes it as a “Modernization Of The Inaccessible British Renaissance.”

While it is a modernization to some degree, the implication by contrast that this edition is “accessible” might be a stretch. To her credit, Dr. Faktorovich doesn’t specify to whom it might be more accessible than the original, but one would be inclined (in the absence of a specified target audience) to presume a general audience of the average reader. If that is the case, then Dr. Faktorovich has not quite, I think, hit the mark. A work which requires over 200 footnotes (some of which offer historic or social context, but many are definitions of archaic terms still present in the text) is hard-pressed to be described as “accessible” to any but a scholarly audience.

Take, as an example, these lines from Marcellus (as modernized by Dr. Faktorovich) in the opening scene of the play:

“Good. Now, sit down, and he who knows tell me,
Why does this same strict and most observant watch
Thus nightly toils with the subjects of this land?
And why such daily casting of brazen cannon
And foreign arms are used as implements of war?
Why are such impressments made on shipwrights, whose sore task
Does not divide the Sunday from the weekday?
Who is it who can inform me?”

The word “toils” should of course be “toil,” but, if the goal is accessibility, why not the simpler word “work” instead? And the syntax of the phrase “Why does this . . . watch Thus nightly toil. . .” is itself archaic. Why not simply say “Why does this. . . watch work every night. . .”?

The word “brazen” does not warrant a footnote in Dr. Faktorovich’s text, but probably should as the most common meaning of the word today involves bold action and not, as it is used here, being “made of brass.” Why not simply say “brass cannon” instead?

Likewise, “impressments” is not footnoted, but should be, or else ought to be changed, as the average modern reader is unlikely to be familiar with a term that denotes “pressing” one into service. The original line (here with the original spelling) reads: “Why such impresse of ship-writes, whose sore taske. . ..” Is “impressment” really an improvement on “impresse” or “impress”? Modern readers are much more likely to associate the word “impress” with an idea of admiration or respect than with the historical, nautical concept of forcing into service.

A truly accessible modernization of these lines might read:

“Good. Now, sit down and tell me, if any of you can, why we’re standing heel-to-toe watches every night, why more cannons are being made every day, why we’re importing weapons from overseas, why the shipwrights are being forced to work seven days a week, what all this constant work every day and night is for. Who can tell me?”

Note also that the question marks at the ends of the second, fourth, and sixth lines in Dr. Faktorovich’s version are both not present in the original text, nor are they correctly used. Marcellus is instructing the others to tell him the reason for these things, not asking. The only actual question is in the last line: “Who is it who can inform me?”

There is a tendency when modernizing Shakespeare (or any number of other great writers of antiquity) to treat the original text as something sacred which must not be altered more than is absolutely necessary, but if the goal is readability, if a modern, average reader is to be able to understand it, then more substantial changes are needed. Perhaps this is the trap into which Dr. Faktorovich fell. Or, on the other hand, if this text is intended for a scholarly audience, (as seems to be the case based on the copious footnotes and commentary) then straying too far from the original text is an issue, and that is certainly the case here.

This version of Hamlet falls short in both directions. It is, at the same time, too different in places from the original text to be of much use to serious scholars of The Bard, and too similar to the original archaic style, structure, and vocabulary to be an easily readable gloss of the story for the average reader.

I wouldn’t recommend this book to someone who simply wanted to read Hamlet for the story. For one thing, anyone who reads this (who isn’t already familiar with the work) is going to get some confused looks when they try to talk about “Rossencroft” and “Guilderstone” with anyone who read the play in school. I also wouldn’t recommend it to someone interested in serious Shakespearean scholarship because annotated editions of the First Quarto are already readily available, and because the issues of authorship and the potential homosexual undertones have already been covered in less-biased ways by other scholars.

There may be more intended audiences in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in my philosophy, but I still failed to dream up one for which this edition of Hamlet is appropriate.

This is, in a way, a review of a series rather than an individual book. Anna Faktorovich has edited a series of more than a dozen volumes entitled "British Renaissance Re-Attribution and Modernization Series." These volumes are devoted to a claim that William Percy was responsible for a great deal of writing from the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods that has been published under other authors' names -- including that of William Shakespeare.

I'm afraid this is very long, because Faktorovich is advancing a very audacious claim that has to be addressed in at least some detail.

I have not read the entire series. I did, however, ask for two volumes: the volumes on Hamlet (Volume 12: Hamlet: The First Quarto (1603)) and the one for Anthony Munday's plays on Robin Hood (Volume 11: Look Around You (1600)) -- which, contrary to the way I read the Early Reviewers description, is not about The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington, but rather about what is alleged to be earlier play in the same cycle. Still, the Robin Hood play has always been attributed to Munday, so the attempt to claim a different author is significant and is something I want to know about.

I wanted to review two books so that I could see the overall methods Faktorovich used. I can make no claim to be an expert on Elizabethan drama, but I do know a good bit about textual criticism and the early editions of Shakespeare, and a lot about the early Robin Hood legend (the version of the legend you never hear any more). My hope was that my knowledge would let me better understand what Faktorovich was doing. In this I was to be disappointed. It appears that one must read the first volumes in the series to understand the re-attribution of authorship that underlies the later individual volumes. This is an obvious defect which should be addressed in later editions -- no, Faktorovich can't repeat the whole first two book in each later volume, but a decent summary of the results and some descriptions of where to look for more would be really helpful. Faktorovich made the first two volumes available, but it seems to me that I should review the two volumes as they are, since that was my original request.

The large majority of my two reviews are the same, because I am comparing the two books. I will add a few specific comments on the particular book at the end.

Since the thesis of this series is that William Percy wrote much material that was published under others' names, it should be kept in mind that authorship of plays in this period is often a matter of confusion. For instance, Sir John Oldcastle was originally and properly attributed to Anthony Munday and others, yet was sometimes published under Shakespeare's name, so it is perfectly reasonable to examine the authorship of various plays. Such examination can be fruitful -- for instance, in the case of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, attributed to Beaumont and Fletcher, it seems pretty clear that it is by Beaumont alone, and that frees us from having to try to figure out which author wrote what.

But we should also note that it is quite clear that Anthony Munday existed -- we have a lot of his (mostly pedestrian) drama and his (mostly obnoxious and not particularly intelligent) polemical work. We have some records of his life, too -- e.g. we know that he was apprenticed to a stationer. There is no doubt that he wrote at least some dramas. We have, I think, fewer records of the life of William Shakespeare, but there isn't much doubt that he existed too.

So with that as backdrop, what is the case for taking these two books away from their acknowledged authors and attributing them instead to William Percy?

On page 11 of Look Around You, we are told that "Linguistic tests indicated that both Downfall [of Robert Earl of Huntingdon] and Look were ghostwritten by Percy" -- but this statement is not justified in any way. If we are reading Look without the preliminary volumes, we don't even know who Percy is! So this statement comes out of the blue. I looked up both Percy and Look Around You in Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia (no entry for either), then in Kunitz & Haycraft's British Authors Before 1800, where I learned that William Percy was one of the Northumberland Percies who published a minor volume of poems and left six unpublished plays which "show none of the skill one would expect from even a second-rate professional dramatist." Garnett and Gosse's old but monumental Illustrated History of English Literature gives Percy one slightly disdainful line. Ault's Elizabethan Lyrics quotes one sonnet, which opens
It shall be said I deid for Coelia!
Then quick, thou grisly man of Erebus,
Transport me hence unto Proserpina,
To be adjudged as 'wilful amorous";
I'll spare you the rest. Certainly there is nothing to justify making Percy into a major writer.

As for "linguistic tests" -- I've heard that line before. Numerous non-mathematicians have claimed to come up with some sort of linguistic formulae to determine which parts of Shakespeare are not by Shakespeare, or which parts of the Letters of Paul are not by Paul, or that Edward III wrote the Canterbury Tales. OK, I'm making that last one up, but the history of such tests has been one of abject failure -- e.g. things that are obviously by different authors are frequently asserted to be by the same writer. Often such identifications have proved simply to be the orthographic habits of the particular typesetter, or the house style of the publisher. I have a mathematics degree; I believe that such a test is probably possible -- but Faktorovich is going to have to give me a lot more than what I see here, and I want it vetted by a real mathematician.

Making me feel even more dubious is the fact that the discussion of Look totally distorts the history of the Robin Hood legend. The legend existed by the fourteenth century, when Langland alludes to it (Piers Plowman says that a character knows "rhymes of Robin Hood"). We have four or perhaps five ballads/romances about it from (probably) the fifteenth century: "The Geste of Robyn Hode," "Robin Hood and the Monk," "Robin Hood and the Potter," "Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne," and possibly "Robin Hood's Death." In these, Robin Hood is a yeoman, not a nobleman; his companions are Little John, Will Scarlock or Scathelock (not "Scarlet"), Much the Miller's Son, and perhaps Gilbert of the White Hand. There is no Maid Marian; there is no Friar Tuck (in fact, in the May Games, Marian was Friar Tuck's sexual interest); and the action is centered on Barnsdale, not Sherwood. And, in the "Gest," Robin Hood's King is not Richard but Edward. Keep that firmly in mind. Robin Hood's King, in the original legend, is one of the Three Edwards -- with the best argument being that it's Edward II. Who happens to have been the great-grandson of King John. So much for dating Robin Hood in the reign of Richard I.

As Faktorovich points out, there are a few minor mentions of Robin Hood in Elizabethan times prior to the Downfall. But it was the "Munday" cycle that completely redirected things -- by grafting an Earl of Huntingdon cycle onto the Robin Hood legend, and re-dating it to the time of Richard I. Bastardized as the result is, it's still the starting point for the modern legend -- in 1632, Martin Parker published the "True Tale of Robin Hood," and it was all downhill from there.

So the question -- a big one -- is, did Munday write the two plays attributed to him, and what is the relationship of Look to the two Munday plays?

There is reason to be uncertain that Munday wrote the Downfall and the Death. The cover of the printed edition of the Downfall does not list an author; only that it was "Acted by the Right Honourable, the Earle of Nottingham, Lord high Admirall of England, his servants" (facsimile on p. A1 of the 1965 Malone Society Reprints edition The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon by Anthony Munday). The attribution to Munday, according to p. v of the preface, "comes from Henslowe's diary" which describes him laying "owt unto antony monday the 15 of febreary 1598 for a playe boocke called the firste parte of Robyne Hoode." This likely means that Henslowe bought a copy of the play from Munday. Not quite proof that Munday wrote it -- remember, Munday had been a stationer; he might just have copied the thing. But Henslowe usually paid the playwright, not an intermediary; the burden is definitely on Faktorovich to prove that Munday didn't write what he gave to Henslowe, or that it's a different play.

Faktorovich, p. 17, does make an interesting point, that a confusion long noted in Downfall -- that the author can't figure out whether his heroine is named "Marian" or "Matilda" -- is explained in Look by the fact that the woman uses both names in different settings. This does not prove identity of authorship, but if, as Faktorovich believes, Look is the earlier play, it could still explain Munday's confusion.

I'm not convinced this is necessary, though. Munday was quite capable of confusion on his own. And, remember, Faktorovich is arguing that her "William Percy" is a good enough author to create something that would become "Hamlet." Yet he's stupid enough that he can call a character who goes by two different names and not explain it?

And on p. 18 Faktorovich argues that aspects of Look are based on legitimate memories of 1173. But what are legitimate memories of 1173 doing in a book about a character who was a fourteenth/fifteenth century legend being created by an author with no sense of history and writing around 1600? Oy.

And while I can't judge the quality of the original text of Look based on Faktorovich's modernization, I have a facsimile of the first printing Downfall, and there is no way you're convincing me that this is the same guy as the guy who wrote Hamlet or Macbeth.

So, bottom line, I don't think much of Faktorovich's contention that Look is a long-misidentified play by William Percy that leads into the plays that Percy wrote but were attributed to Munday. I'm willing to allow that, perhaps, the three Huntingdon plays (a better name than the "Robin Hood" plays) go together, though I'm not convinced, but I need vastly more to buy their Percy-cution.

Which brings us to the Hamlet, which is where Faktorovich's case really stands or falls. It's not just that no one (except nuts like me) cares about Anthony Munday. More significant is the fact that William Shakespeare wrote in a very distinct style that is not much like Anthony Munday's.

To understand the claim about Hamlet, we need some background. (This part is me writing, not Faktorovich.) There are three significant sources for Hamlet: the First Quarto (1603), the Second Quarto (1604), and the First Folio (1623). The Second Quarto and the First Folio texts, while not identical, are fairly close -- clearly they come from fairly similar originals. Not so the First Quarto! It's a lousy piece of typesetting (as is the Second Quarto), but it's clear that it came from a drastically different original. It's only a little more than half the length of the other two editions, and so distinct that the cover of the Second Quarto in essence comes out and say, "Hey, we got it right; that other printing is junk."

This situation -- of two dramatically different texts -- afflicts almost a dozen Shakespeare plays; Faktorovich, p. 10, cites two of them in addition to Hamlet, those being King Lear and Richard III. So far, Faktorovich is on solid ground; of all the plays for which we have so-called Bad Quartos, those for Lear and Richard are the most important, for two reasons: First, they aren't nearly as bad as most of the Bad Quartos, and second, they (especially Lear) contain material not found in the "good" texts. Hamlet isn't in the same situation -- the First Quarto is truly bad -- but because it's Hamlet, people care about it a lot.

Faktorovich says on p. 11 of the 1603 First Quarto "The claim that this copy is pirated is in part absurd because its title-page has the longest and most specific series of preceding performance details that also happens to be the only instance in the Renaissance of a naming of the two major universities: 'diverse times acted by His Highness' servants in the city of London: as also in the two universities of Cambridge and Oxford, and elsewhere.'" This is true and completely irrelevant. Has Faktorovich never heard of false advertising? Fake manuscripts have a tendency to pile on the details to try to fool the unwary.

Nonetheless there is some uncertainty about the registration of Hamlet, so it is possible that the First Quarto was "legal." That is not the same as saying it is accurate. In any case, to compare the Bad Quarto of Hamlet with the Bad Quarto of Lear is bogus. The quarto of Lear has problems, but most now think it represents a slightly different, but finished, version of Lear. The First Quarto of Hamlet looks like a very bad reconstruction of the text that was more correctly published in the Second Quarto and Folio.

On page 11 we read further that it is "blatantly obvious that [the First Quarto] is the first draft Percy wrote." The idea that the First Quarto was a rough draft, or a version of an earlier play, is not new. But it was entirely swept aside when people started noticing that there were other pirated editions of Shakespeare plays, most of them very bad.

Faktorovich, p. 15, has an explanation of why the First Quarto was so much shorter than the Second: "William Percy explained why many of his early drafts were up to twice shorter than his latest folio versions intended for public sale when he added the handwritten stage directions in the Fairy Pastoral: 'for Paul's two-hour maximum duration.'" In other words, he had to keep it short because plays could only run so long.

Yes, but -- what sort of crazy author publishes a version of his work that he doesn't like when he could publish a better version? Faktorovich seems to think that it was for money. But William Percy was the son of the Earl of Northumberland! There were plenty of impoverished gentry in Elizabethan England, but the pittance Percy would have gotten for this text wasn't going to make any real difference. And why so many sloppy lines in the First Quarto? That's a key piece of evidence: The text of the First Quarto just isn't good poetry. It does not sound like the author of the Second Quarto.

As for the idea that Hamlet had the hots for Horatio -- I am not impressed by the sexual arguments. Yes, there was a tremendous amount of cross-dressing in Elizabethan drama -- but we all know why: it's because they didn't let women act, so the roles of women and girls were played by young boys; cross-dressing made it easier for them to play the roles. The claim on p. 28 that Horatio and Hamlet's "friendship is blatantly intended to have homoerotic tones, especially when Horatio nearly commits suicide (semi-echoing Romeo and Juliet’s sacrifices for love) after learning Hamlet is about to die in the resolution" and that "Hamlet is not only pretending to be mad, but also pretending to be in love with Ofelia" is simply unconvincing. Our modern age doesn't have much use for male-male friendship, but in the Middle Ages there were Amys and Amiloun, and Palamon and Arcite in Chaucer's Knight's Tale that became the basis for The Two Noble Kinsmen. In Amys and Amiloun, one of the friends was ready to murder his children for the other; in the Knight's Tale, the only thing that ever comes between Palamon and Arcite is a woman. That's at least as much as we see between Hamlet and Horatio.

Oh -- and there is no way in blue blazes that such a plot would get past the censor if the censor detected it! Yes, the Tudor police state was most worried about threats to their crown (since Henry Tudor had been an usurper), but they didn't allow "indecency" either.

I may have missed something in there. Reading all the arguments made my eyes glaze over. I doubt I kept track of it all, simply because the line of reasoning is so poorly organized. That is a consistent problem with the volumes: these books don't give you the help you need to understand what they're saying. It starts with the fact that there is no explanation of Faktorovich's "linguistic method" or background on who this William Percy guy was; it continues through the fact that she never previews her arguments to give the reader a clue what to look for. A good editor would have been all over these books for that. I would like to say that I gave these arguments all the consideration due them, but I'm sure I didn't, because it was too hard to know what was being said.

Plus there is a lot of bogus special pleading in here -- e.g. Faktorovich has to explain why regicide was publishable in Richard III. The reason Shakespeare could talk about regicide in Richard III had nothing to do with rules -- it was because, without the killing of Richard III, there would have been no Tudor dynasty! Richard III is not an exception to rules. Or take the claim on p. 13 that "Q2 [the Second Quarto] was also not designed for sale to the general public, as its first '1604' marked printing has three surviving copies, and its second '1605' printing only has four." Ahem. That is a very substantial number of copies. A great many of the items in the Stationer's Register exist in no copies whatsoever. Caxton's first edition of Le Morte d'Arthur exists in two, one of them incomplete. Going back to Robin Hood, there are seven surviving editions of the Gest. We have only one copy of each, and only three of the seven are complete, and one of those was broken into three parts found in book bindings.

One argument that Faktorovich could have used but does not is the amount of violence done to the sources in both Hamlet and the Huntingdon plays. On the other hand, Hamlet, at least arguably, improves its sources. The Huntingdon plays do not; Robin Hood as deposed nobleman might be of more interest to the English nobility, but it drains much of the originality out of the story.

And yet, one of Faktorovich's arguments about Hamlet seems to be that the First Quarto version is less original and closer to the sources. The William Percy she imagines is far less original than the person who so messed up the Robin Hood saga.

So who is right, Faktorovich or the overwhelming mass of Shakespeare scholars who think the First Quarto was a ripped-off version taken from an actor's memories -- an actor who played bit parts, not a big role like Hamlet or Claudius? Both my gut and my logic say the latter.

I've gone on long enough for a non-academic review. (Really, these books should have been given to qualified reviewers -- but perhaps none would touch them. It's noteworthy that they aren't from an academic press.) Let's sum up: The arguments that Faktorovich made about Look Around You are provocative and interesting, but pushing them to include the First Quarto of Hamlet is simply an assertion too far, and the fact that her method lets her make the claim casts pretty strong doubt on her method.

That's the general review. So is there any value to this particular volume? I think we can cast aside the assertion that the First Quarto of Hamlet is some lost early edition. And the very format of this edition makes the claim hard to test. In order to decide whether the First and Second Quartos go back to "the same" original, one must look at the precise texts of the editions involved. A modernization just won't do.

Is the modernization of value in itself? I would say... probably not. A modernization of the real Hamlet has value to help us understand the text -- the actors might want to read it to understand the play. For something other than Shakespeare, a modernization might even be worth acting. (I assume that, in general, when people see a Shakespeare play, they want to hear Shakespeare!) But here's the thing: The First Quarto, in my belief and most scholars' belief, is not Shakespeare. It is a badly-typeset edition of a garbled memory of Shakespeare. At best, it's like listening to a karaoke version of a pop song by someone who doesn't remember the words. Why bother? Some of the volumes in this series have value if you set aside Faktorovich's notions. But for the First Quarto of Hamlet, there are only two options: print it verbatim for scholars -- or print a real edition of Hamlet, based on the Second Quarto and the Folio.