Christian eschatology of Q1. Following the New Bibliographers, who established Q1 as a memorially reconstructed version of Q2/F, scholars could relax their attempts to set Q2/F above Q1 and could credit Q1’s Christian eschatology to the false memories of the actors; it then became permissible to see “conscience” as a religious term. But Lesser acknowledges the difficulties that currently obtain: “Conscience seems as if it must carry its fully Christian meaning, and yet the speech in which it occurs seems to rule out that meaning” (203). The speech becomes for him a rhetorical set piece in which this proverb simply does not fit. One wishes that Lesser had at this point abandoned his attempt to relate the two soliloquies and simply focused on this thought-provoking interpretation, which takes him close to recognizing that “the question” being debated by Hamlet might be neither suicide nor revenge but rather the question of why miserable men choose life over death, a question suitable for debate by Wittenberg students. Having demonstrated that “from the moment it [reappeared in 1823], Q1 has challenged and transformed our views of Hamlet, Shakespeare, and the nature of the Shakespearean text” (221), Lesser concludes with a brief analysis of why questions about the origin of Q1 and its relation to Q2/F—questions he has deliberately and necessarily bracketed until this point—must ultimately be addressed if we are to move forward in understanding the Hamlet text. The Arden3 Hamlet, he argues, with its printing of “the three versions” of the play and its “serious, rigorous, and careful case for bibliographic agnosticism” (216), stands as an acknowledgment of “the quandary in which we now find ourselves” (214). Scholars today, having agreed to consider Q1, Q2, and F as distinct versions of Hamlet, the relationships among which we cannot deduce, find ourselves unable “to explain precisely how (or even that) they are ‘the same’ play” (211). Unable to “devise a stemma that in any way relates these texts under Shakespeare’s authorship,” how can we “define the boundaries of the ‘same’ work such that it includes . . . the three texts of ‘Shakespeare’s Hamlet’ but not Der bestrafte Brudermord and The Hystorie of Hamblet?” (215). Lesser predicts a major shift in the textual study of Hamlet—“some new effort to understand how Q1 Hamlet relates to its Q2 and F doppelgängers, how Shakespeare the author is related to these multiple texts that seem in some way to be his, and how Shakespeare’s play might have been informed by that other, lost Hamlet that has haunted us since the eighteenth century” (219). In the meantime, Lesser has made it impossible ever again to underestimate the impact of Q1 Hamlet.

中文翻译：

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Lorna Hutson 的环境莎士比亚

Q1的基督教末世论。继新书目作者将 Q1 确立为 Q2/F 的纪念性重建版本之后，学者们可以放松将 Q2/F 设置为高于 Q1 的尝试，并且可以将 Q1 的基督教末世论归因于演员的错误记忆；后来，人们可以将“良心”视为一个宗教术语。但莱瑟承认目前存在的困难：“良心似乎必须具有其完全的基督教意义，但它出现的言论似乎排除了这种意义”（203）。对他来说，演讲变成了一套修辞手法，这句谚语根本不适合。人们希望莱瑟此时放弃了将这两首独白联系起来的尝试，而只专注于这种发人深省的解释，这让他几乎认识到哈姆雷特正在辩论的“问题”可能既不是自杀也不是报复，而是为什么悲惨的人选择生而不是死的问题，这个问题适合维滕贝格的学生辩论。证明了“从它[在 1823 年重新出现] 的那一刻起，Q1 已经挑战并改变了我们对哈姆雷特、莎士比亚和莎士比亚文本的性质的看法”（221），Lesser 最后简要分析了为什么对起源有疑问如果我们要进一步理解哈姆雷特文本，那么 Q1 及其与 Q2/F 的关系——他在此之前有意且必然地将问题括在括号中——必须最终得到解决。他认为，《雅顿哈姆雷特》印刷了该剧的“三个版本”以及“严肃、严谨和谨慎的书目不可知论案例”（216），代表对“我们现在所处的困境”的承认（214）。今天的学者们已经同意将 Q1、Q2 和 F 视为哈姆雷特的不同版本，我们无法推断出它们之间的关系，发现自己无法“准确地解释它们是如何（甚至是）‘相同’的游戏”（211 ）。无法“设计出以任何方式将莎士比亚著作权下的这些文本联系起来的词干”，我们如何“定义'相同'作品的界限，使其包含. . . “莎士比亚的哈姆雷特”的三部文本，而不是《布​​鲁德莫德》和《哈姆莱特的历史》？” (215)。莱瑟预测了《哈姆雷特》文本研究的重大转变——“一些新的努力来理解 Q1 哈姆雷特如何与其 Q2 和 F 分身相关，莎士比亚如何与这些在某种程度上似乎是他的多重文本相关联，以及莎士比亚的戏剧可能是如何被另一个自 18 世纪以来一直困扰着我们的失散的哈姆雷特所告知的”（219）。与此同时，Lesser 使人们再也不可能低估 Q1 哈姆雷特的影响。