WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. * WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor.

Abstract

ON 26 July 1602 James Roberts entered in the Stationers’ Register for his copy ‘the Revenge of HAMLETT Prince [of] Denmarke’ as yt was latelie Acted by the Lord Chamberleyne his servantes’, but clearly he passed on the copyright to Nicholas Ling in some way, though the documentation of this has not survived, for when the first quarto printing appeared in 1603 (Q1) the work was The Tragicall Historie of HAMLET Prince of Denmarke by William Shake-speare. As it hath beene diuerse times acted by his Highnesse seruants in the Cittie of London: as also in the two Vniuersities of Cambridge and Oxford, and else-where, and was printed by Valentine Simmes for Ling and John Trundell. And when, in the following year, there appeared a second quarto, The Tragicall Historie of HAMLET, Prince of Denmarke by William Shakespeare. Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect Coppie, it was printed by James Roberts for Ling alone (Q2), and there was no need to seek new copyright registration even though the title-page confesses to the vastly changed nature of the text. The play does appear again in the Stationers’ Register on 19 November 1607 in a list of sixteen works which had belonged to Ling but were now being transferred to John Smethwick who issued third, fourth, and fifth quarto editions of the play in 1611, some date after that, and 1637, and who was a member of the syndicate which published the First Folio (F1) in 1623 and who is listed in the colophon. All of this happened without the need to do any further registering or transferring of the play Hamlet in the Stationers’ records because the printing/publishing industry obviously knew that copyright ownership resided in a particular work, or title, and not in a specific version of that work, or title. If one had the right to publish a work called Hamlet, one had that right no matter what words it contained. And so, students of Shakespeare, and especially of Hamlet, have thought down the centuries that what editors edit and what publishers publish is the work, and with each new iteration of that work a new version, state, or edition is created.