Download or read book Shakespeare and the First Hamlet written by Terri Bourus and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2022-06-10 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first edition of Hamlet – often called ‘Q1’, shorthand for ‘first quarto’ – was published in 1603, in what we might regard as the early modern equivalent of a cheap paperback. Yet this early version of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy is becoming increasingly canonical, not because there is universal agreement about what it is or what it means, but because more and more Shakespearians agree that it is worth arguing about. The essays in this collected volume explore the ways in which we might approach Q1’s Hamlet, from performance to book history, from Shakespeare’s relationships with his contemporaries to the shape of his whole career.