theprettygoodgatsby:

my favorite part of hamlet is at the beginning when they see the ghost of hamlet sr for the first time

and the guards are like “Horatio, you go talk to it! You went to college!”

and Horatio is like “Yeah! I did go to college! I will go talk to the ghost!”

like. where did horatio go to college. did he go to ghost college

vega-ofthe-lyre:

Most people who have read Hamlet at some point in the past are unaware that what they’re reading is usually a version that Shakespeare never wrote, and that his players never played. What most of us have read is, rather, an artificial “conflation” or superimposition of conflicting printed texts from his time and immediately afterwards. (There is of course no manuscript in Shakespeare’s hand.) Such conflations obscure marked differences between the competing versions. The conflated play is, in effect, a patchwork quilt composed of fabric from the various versions threaded through with conjectures, guesses, and emendations from editors…

The uncertainties Hamlet editors grapple with make crucial differences in the way Hamlet is printed, read and played. “Everyone who wants to understand Hamlet,” argues Philip Edwards, editor of the New Cambridge Hamlet, “as a reader, actor, or director, needs to understand the nature of the play’s textual questions and to have his or her own view of the questions in order to approach the ambiguities of meaning.”

from The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups by Ron Rosenbaum