Paul Menzer: The Hamlets: Cues, Qs, and Remembered Texts. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008. Pp. 263. Cloth $ 65.00

• Dieter Mehl

This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first book-length study to take seriously the generally familiar fact that the Elizabethan actors learnt their roles not from copies of the complete play-text, but from “‘parts’ that were copied onto individual strips of paper which took the form of ‘rolls’” (p. 17, quoting Scott McMillin, who also coined the phrase “textual debris”). Applied to the text of Hamlet Q2, with twenty-six speaking roles, this means that “there are potentially twenty-six scripts of Hamlet to include among the textual ephemera generated by Shakespeare’s Hamlet. We should imagine then not just two manuscripts (“foul papers” and “prompt book”) but dozens that could be shuffled, revised, reproduced, reassembled, copied, and “published”, in the most expansive sense of that word.” (p. 17) This, inevitably, opens the gate to unlimited possibilities of more or less plausible explanations and downright speculation.

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