Hamlet Q1

[1] Strikingly, the role of Gertrude is significantly different, since she becomes an accomplice of Hamlet in his plot against Claudius, insisting that she knew nothing of her first husband's murder and agreeing to help her son.

Hibbard believes that the original names were too close to those of two famous Oxford scholars, the university's founder Robert Polenius and the Puritan theologian John Rainolds.

After its discovery in 1823, its initial editors typically took the view that Q1 was an early draft of the play, perhaps even a revision of the Ur-Hamlet, but John Payne Collier argued in 1843 that it was simply a bad version: a "pirated" text, one of the "stol'n and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by frauds and stealths of injurious impostors", which were denounced in the preface to the 1623 First Folio.

It was one of the publications named by the bibliographer Alfred W. Pollard as a "bad quarto" in 1909, a term he coined to distinguish several texts that he judged significantly corrupt.

[2] In 1943 G. I. Duthie published The 'Bad' Quarto of 'Hamlet', a book in which he argued in great detail for the memorial reconstruction theory, asserting that the actor probably played the roles of Marcellus and Lucianus and had been hired for a provincial touring production.

[5] A. W. Pollard argued that Roberts was acting on behalf of Shakespeare's company, and that the entry was intended, albeit unsuccessfully, to block the publication of the play by another publisher.

[6] While the "bad quarto" theory is still widely accepted,[3] some later scholars have taken a very different view, arguing that the text may be an accurate version of an alternative form of the play.

Albert B. Weiner argued in 1962 that Q1 represented a "tourbook" copy, derived originally from a text similar to Q2 or F, which had been trimmed and simplified for performance by a small number of actors on tour in the provinces.

[8] The most prominent opponent of the "bad quarto" view was Eric Sams, who argued that Q1 represented an early version of the play and that distinctive spelling variations typical of Shakespeare imply that it was set up from his manuscript.