Until 1823 there were two texts of Hamlet: a quarto published in 1604 and the text in the First Folio (F) in 1623. The title page of the quarto stated that it was “newly imprinted and enlarged as much again as it was, according to the true and perfect copy,” which implied a previous edition that was both inaccurate and abbreviated, but was now corrected by “the true and perfect copy”—presumably the authorial manuscript or a scribal transcript of it. The Folio text itself, however, differs markedly from that of the quarto, containing about eighty extra lines and omitting over two hundred. The relationship between them was problematic, and was made even more so by the discovery, in 1823, of another quarto, containing a text different again from the other two, printed in 1603 and now called Q1—apparently the version referred to on the title-page of the 1604 quarto, now called Q2. Q1’s own title-page stated that the play had been acted not only in London but also “in the two universities of Cambridge and Oxford,” a claim which later research has failed to substantiate. The volume turned up in the manor house of Sir Henry Bunbury in Suffolk on the east coast of England. Nothing is known for certain about how it came to be there, but its peculiarities form the subject of Zachary Lesser’s ingenious book.

Q1 is exceptionally short, and its text in places very muddled and hard to follow, but, as modern performances