At EverythingIsMiscellaneous.com, I've posted about the joy of reading an edition of Hamlet that surfaces hundreds of years of scholarly disputes about the meaning of Shakespeare's words, disputes that often are without resolution. We don't know what the old bird/bard meant, but that's all the more reason to love him! [Tags: shakespeare everything_is_miscellaneous hamlet hermeneutics ]

I’ve been having an unnaturally good time going through the Hamlet Variorum (Horace Howard Furness, ed.), which annotates the play with the commentary and disputes that have gone on for hundreds of years. For reasons I don’t understand, I’m made quite happy by reading that the great scholars have suggested that when the Gentleman in Act IV, Scene 5, line 101 says “The ratifiers and props of every word,” there are reasons to think that Shakespeare might actually have meant the last word to be ward, weal, work, worth or wont. Likewise, I am brought joy by the nearly two pages of fine-print dispute over the line “He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice” (I,i, 63). “Sledded Polacks”? Sliding Polacks? Sleaded battle axe, although we don’t know what “sleaded” meant? A pole-axe lined with lead? And if he meant Poles on sleds, what the hell were they doing on sleds? What with three folios to choose from, and the possibility that errors were introduced in transcription and by compositors, not to mention the lack of spelling standards, there’s no shortage of ways the existing texts could misreflect Shakespeare’s intentions.

I truly don’t understand why I enjoy this so much. It is not a devilish delight in finding that we really don’t understand a prominent member of the canon. I love Hamlet all the more for having its ambiguity exposed. Truly. Obviously, the richness of Shakespeare’s work has always meant there are an indefinite number of ways a performance can make sense of the script. A performance can always surprise you. The fact that Hamlet can either be indecisive or a man of action, crazy or feigning, a person of feeling or reason — and, yes, I have my own preferences — is not a weakness of the play. It means there’s always more to discover. And each successful interpretation thrills us with sense-making as the ultimate creative act. But finding that there are historical ambiguities that are simple matters of fact — Shakespeare meant something by “sledded Polacks” — should diminish our enjoyment of the text, like finding out that Bach spilled coffee on the original score of one of his cantatas so we can’t be sure what some of the notes are.

But it doesn’t feel that way to me. Perhaps it’s because the difficulty of Shakespearean language has always meant that I can’t understand it word by word. The meaning has always had to emerge line by line, scene by scene; the language’s distance requires work on our part to hear it at all. Discovering a set of possible meanings for words adds clarity without determination: Here are five different things Shakespeare might have meant by a phrase I didn’t understand, didn’t pay attention to, or had projected the easiest meaning onto: Poles on sleds.

The Hamlet Variorum comes in two volumes. The first contains the full text of the play, including notes on the differences in the quartos and the critical annotations. The second contains source materials. I only have the first volume. It’s a Dover reprint so it’s even moderately priced at $13. I highly recommend it. [Tags: shakespeare hamlet variorum interpretation hermeneutics everything_is_miscellaneous]