The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [81]
The First Quarto of Hamlet included this version of a speech that would become celebrated in a very different form:
To be, or not to be, I, there’s the point,
To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:
No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes,
For in that dreame of death, when wee awake,
And borne before an euerlasting Iudge,
From whence no passenger euer retur’nd,
The vndiscovered country, at whose sight
The happy smile, and the accursed damn’d. (7.114–121)
Will any non-academic reader claim that this is the “real” (since apparently “original”) “To be or not to be,” or ask whether it has been effectively superseded by the more familiar text? For an increasing number of Shakespeare scholars, the First Quarto (no longer dubbed “the Bad Quarto,” as if it had a moral flaw) has a legitimacy all its own, regardless of the wider admiration accorded the Second Quarto and Folio. Actors have performed the first version with considerable success, unhampered by the overfamiliarity that breeds not contempt but its affectively positive equivalent, stultifying adoration. The total effect is often that of an aria performed, applauded, and experienced as a whole. The experience of the First Quarto is both disorienting and refreshing—the pleasure of encountering the energies of this astonishing play anew. If it sends us back to the more familiar version, all the better—but this passage seems to suggest a set of rhythms, and an acting style, that show us something powerful and strong.
Coleridge described prose as “words in their best order” and poetry as “the best words in their best order.”17 Close readers in the middle of the twentieth century tended to use poem in an extended sense—to refer, for example, to plays in verse, especially the plays of Shakespeare, and by extension, other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights. “Hamlet, the Prince or the Poem” was the title of an essay by the critic C. S. Lewis,18 and the use of poem here is indicative. Teachers of fiction, and especially of long novels, used close reading to direct attention, for example, to the opening sentences or first paragraphs of these works. This pedagogical technique had a strategic as well as an aesthetic and intellectual payoff, since even those students who had not read the work in question—or had not read far into it—could be brought into a conversation about artistry, word choice, tone, voice, irony, and foreshadowing. A classic instance is the beginning of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
A skilled teacher can elicit discussion of this single sentence for an extended period before turning to the second sentence, which not only superbly undercuts the first but makes the reader reread and reconsider it:
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighborhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
Again, a whole discussion might well be devoted to the single word property, which has major resonances throughout the novel and through Austen’s work more generally. Bear in mind that the single man with the good (not great) fortune alluded to in this first sentence is the amiable and pliable Mr. Bingley, not the far wealthier and more complex Mr. Darcy. The novel sidles into the narrative of its central love affair through this delectably wicked glance at local customs, town gossip, and the neat slide from high-toned philosophical bromide (“it is a truth universally acknowledged”) to the bathetically domestic, or the domestically bathetic, “must be