To blog or not to blog

So, another cornerstone text with oral roots... Hamlet. As you may be aware, Shakespeare rarely created his own plots, but used traditional material from a variety of sources including other plays. In this case, the Hamlet story is a traditional Scandinavian tale best preserved by the Danish mythographer Saxo Grammaticus. This was transmitted, via France, to England, and a play known as the "Ur-Hamlet" was adapted by Shakespeare into the play we know today.

I was reading a book, Saxo Grammaticus & The Life of Hamlet by William Hansen. Hansen points out, not at great length, the fundamentally oral nature of the story, how it is episodic, and the flatness and traditional nature of the characters. Obviously, the latter isn't true of Shakespeare. But you can still see something of the former. Some of Hamlet's noted indecisiveness is a reflection of the original story of a prince who pretends madness. This happens and this happens and this happens (most of the major events in the play have roots in Saxo's account) and Hamlet doesn't do anything about the central problem. Hamlet's oral roots are at the very center of one of the play's most noteworthy characteristics.

But then there's another side to this. The first known publication of Shakespeare's Hamlet was in the first quarto, what's called the "Bad Quarto". It's rather shorter than the "good" play (not necessarily a bad thing, since the complete play is over four hours long), some events take place out of order and some speeches are in different forms. The traditional explanation for the Bad Quarto's existence is basically that they were "memorial reconstructions" by actors and maybe others who had seen the play. In other words, though they never were transmitted orally, they are still essentially oral forms of the text.