ABSTRACT

Q2, the longest text, is also the one closest to an authorial first draft. Its metaphorical texture continually returns to war, yet much of this military flavour is missing from Q1, a text that, for all its casualties oftransmission, records the shape of the play' s wartime performances. The marks of this revision can more clearly be observed, like putlog holes in church interiors, in the systematically adapted structure of the First Folio text. Furthermore, the most substantial disparities between Q2 and F hang together by their common concern with war. It has been argued that revisions made between the First Quarto and Folio texts of King Lear serve to excise the 'extraneous political complication' of Cordelia's alliance with the invading 'Powers ofFrance' in Acts Four and Five (G. Taylor, 1980,30-31). This chapter will also examine changes made to a fourth-act army, but will seek to find grounds for that revision in the wars surrounding Hamlet's composition and performance (as well as in the wars that Hamlet dramatizes), a context overlooked in the considerable critical attention recently given to the play's textual history.3 That wartime can extend an influence over both the performance and text of Hamlet may be shown by two productions ofthe play from our own century.