ELH

What shall we do with these only marginally significant textual variants of the falconer’s call? Not this, by no means, that the critical tradition bids us do: fix the text in order to fix its meaning. Resist, for the moment, the urge to sort out speech prefixes; the handwritten correction of “Mar.” on this First Quarto copy attests to the strength of that temptation. Refuse to determine referents for “boy” and the Folio’s interpolated “bird”; perhaps it is enough that both “boy” and “bird,” unpegged, free-flying, are called from elsewhere. Disregard the uneven impress that in this Second Quarto copy obliterates the distinction between a and i in the second letter of what is here Hamlet’s line. We can live with these minor ambiguities.

Instead, notice an even more local problem — the process by which Marcellus’s (or Horatio’s) line comes, in 1982, to begin with an H. In terms of precedent in these earliest texts, Harold Jenkins summons that H from nowhere. And yet, because he finds it everywhere (in that line’s ho ho ‘s, which have not varied since the First Quarto, and in the H that begins the second line in both Second Quarto and Folio), and because he desires consistency, he makes what seems a reasonable emendation. Even the First Quarto’s ho, [i]ll, and lo suggest a logical transfiguration into “Hillo.” But by equating illo and hillo, Jenkins conflates two words that are “more [End Page 783] than kin,” with a result that is “less than kind” to a topic explicitly developed during the Renaissance. Not only Shakespeare but his contemporaries Marlowe, Spenser, Jonson, and Overbury — all treated as a topos the pun on Theophrastan and literal character, a pun systematically suppressed by Dryden and the eighteenth-century critics, only to resurface in Joyce’s Ulysses and to explode in Finnegans Wake. A modest investigation into the topic of H in Hamlet explores a notion the play treats more fully, namely the infinitely decomposible and recomposible nature of language. That topic embraces precisely those variations that desituate both the text and the author of Hamlet.

By the time Shakespeare took on Hamlet, both the character and the basic outlines of the story were antiques. The misadventures of the Danish hero Amleth circulated as a folk-tale before they were given connected, if episodic, written form by Saxo Grammaticus in the twelfth century. The story surfaces as a printed text in the 1514 Paris edition of Saxo’s Danorum Regum heroumque Historiae. The French writer François de Belleforest retold it in his 1570 Histoires tragiques, elaborating episodes and moralizing Amleth’s revenge with a vengeance. At least one English play preceded Shakespeare’s, identified now as the Ur-Hamlet, probably written by Thomas Kyd, possibly as early as 1589. Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy may copy and cash in on his own (or another’s) Hamlet. The story moves from Denmark to France to England, from Danish through Latin and French to English, from the oral to the written, from narrative to drama. At least 400 years old in 1601, it has refused to lie in its bed but instead has wandered, “erring and extravagant” like Old Hamlet’s ghost, into the Globe Theater for yet another re-presentation. Somewhere, presumably in Elizabethan England, that ghost has been added to the story Shakespeare inherits. And somewhere, too, the hero’s name has changed from Amleth to Hamlet.

The name “Hamlet” closely resembles the name “Amleth” and is easily glossed as an Anglicization of the Danish. But the two are not identical; Amleth loses its propriety, its particularity, in Hamlet, and it does so in a fascinating way. The final H refuses its ultimate position and moves instead to the beginning of the word. In doing so, its function changes. Fully aspirated, it now initiates the linguistic action of the rest of the name. The alphabetic character circulates, revolves and metamorphoses Amleth into Hamlet: the old parts are all there, so the memory lingers, but Amleth is no longer...