Mallecho or Malligo? A Crux in Hamlet Revisited

Abstract

Hamlet’s reaction to the dumbshow preceding the players’ performance of The Murder of Gonzago features a textual crux that has perplexed readers for centuries. The witnesses read: ‘This is myching Mallico, that meanes my chiefe’ (Q1); ‘Marry this munching Mallico, it meanes mischiefe’ (Q2); ‘Marry this is Miching Malicho, that meanes Mischeefe’ (F).1 In Q2 and F the second half of the sentence plausibly serves to explicate the first, while the Q1 version, though not impossible, is usually regarded as a corruption. The real difficulty lies in the first clause. Two clear variants are presented for the verb, whether formed from ‘munch’ or from the lectio difficilior ‘mich’ or ‘mitch’, meaning ‘pilfer’, ‘conceal’, ‘lurk’, ‘skulk’, vel sim.2 But how to interpret ‘Mal(l)ic(h)o’? Thomas Hanmer first glossed this word as ‘a wicked act, a piece of iniquity’, after Spanish malhecho; Edmund Malone, thinking the same, emended the spelling to ‘mallecho’.3 The Hanmer-Malone interpretation, in one orthographical form or another, has since become widely adopted. John Dover Wilson suggested on this basis that Hamlet was castigating the players for ‘prematurely disclosing the Mouse-trap’.4 Yet some skepticism remains: Philip Edwards in the latest Cambridge edition goes so far as to call it an ‘insoluble problem’.5