ABSTRACT
Shakespeare provides a source text (ST) which requires a difference, which cannot be the same as itself, since itself is an only putative origin, which scholars are all free to reconstruct. Contemporary French translations of Hamlet, then, have increasingly felt able to return to a 'source', but by now this source is a textual fiction. Translation has always fictionalized its source (without admitting it). Alan Durband's 'translation' of Hamlet is rather more ambitious, in two respects: it provides comprehensive stage directions, which include glosses ('In Hamlet's day, incest included marriage with a husbands brother'); it is textually comprehensive: Durband's translation of ll. In respect of punctuation, native editions of Shakespeare are in no better a position than foreign translations. The study of punctuation as a language of translation should not lead one to overvalue individual marks, or to imagine that one can confidently read them as discrete semantic units in a coherent code.
