Commentary notes (CN):

1. SMALL CAPS Indicate editions. Notes for each commentator are divided into three parts:

In the 1st two lines of a record, when the name of the source text (the siglum) is printed in SMALL CAPS, the comment comes from an EDITION; when it is in normal font, it is derived from a book, article, ms. record or other source. We occasionally use small caps for ms. sources and for works related to editions. See bibliographies for complete information (in process).

2. How comments are related to predecessors' comments. In the second line of a record, a label "without attribution" indicates that a prior writer made the same or a similar point; such similarities do not usually indicate plagiarism because many writers do not, as a practice, indicate the sources of their glosses. We provide the designation ("standard") to indicate a gloss in common use. We use ≈ for "equivalent to" and = for "exactly alike."

3. Original comment. When the second line is blank after the writer's siglum, we are signaling that we have not seen that writer's gloss prior to that date. We welcome correction on this point.

4. Words from the play under discussion (lemmata). In the third line or lines of a record, the lemmata after the TLN (Through Line Number] are from Q2. When the difference between Q2 and the authors' lemma(ta) is significant, we include the writer's lemma(ta). When the gloss is for a whole line or lines, only the line number(s) appear. Through Line Numbers are numbers straight through a play and include stage directions. Most modern editions still use the system of starting line numbers afresh for every scene and do not assign line numbers to stage directions.

5. Bibliographic information. In the third line of the record, where we record the gloss, we provide concise bibliographic information, expanded in the bibliographies, several of which are in process.

6. References to other lines or other works. For a writer's reference to a passage elsewhere in Ham. we provide, in brackets, Through Line Numbers (TLN) from the Norton F1 (used by permission); we call these xref, i.e., cross references. We call references to Shakespearean plays other than Ham. “parallels” (//) and indicate Riverside act, scene and line number as well as TLN. We call references to non-Shakespearean works “analogues.”

7. Further information: See the Introduction for explanations of other abbreviations. Click here for more information about browsing the entries and here for more information about the special symbols used in Hamletworks. Click the question mark icon above to remove this help message.

1778 v1778

v1778

722 Orchard] Steevens (ed. 1778): “Orchard for garden. So, in [Rom. 2.1.5. (860)]: ‘The orchard walls are high, and hard to climb.’ Steevens.”

Ed. note: his note at 744.

1785 v1785

v1785 = v1778

722 Orchard]

1787 ann

ann

722 Orchard] Anon. [Henley?] (1787 6:39): “Orchard was anciently written hortyard, and signified a yard set apart for a garden. ***.”

ann

722 Orchard Henley (1787, 5: 13), for JC 2. 1.1 (615): “Orchard was anciently written hort-yard; hence its original meaning is obvious. Henley.”

The note in JC shows, I think, that the three bullets = Henley.

1790 mal

mal = v1785

722 Orchard

1791- rann

rann ≈ mal 744 without attribution

722 Orchard] Rann (ed. 1791-): “garden. [Rom. 2.2.? (860)].

1793 v1793

v1793 = mal in 744

722 Orchard]

1803 v1803

v1803 = v1793 in 744 +

722 Orchard] Steevens (ed. 1803): “See the Paston Letters [3: 282]: ‘Written in my sleeping time, at afternoon’ &c.” See note on this passage. .Steevens.”

1807 Pye

Pye: v1803

722 Orchard] Pye (1807, p. 313): ‘Orchard for garden.’—Steevens!!!”

Ed. note: Pye’s exclamation points express his disdain for Steevens’s gloss

1813 v1813

v1813 = v1803 in 744

722 Orchard]

1819 cald1

cald1: v1813 + in magenta underlined

722 Orchard] Caldecott (ed. 1820): “Garden. See [JC 2.] Orchard the scene]”

1821 v1821

v1821 = v1813 in 744

722 Orchard]

1832 cald2

cald2 = cald1

722 Orchard]

1854 del2

del2

722 Tis giuen out] Delius (ed. 1854): “to give out = allgemein erklären, erzählen.” [to give out means to generally explain, relate.]

del2

722 Orchard] Delius (ed. 1854): “orchard ist bei Sh. noch = Garten im Allgemeinen, nicht gerade immer —Nutz garden mit Obstbäumen.” [orchard means to Sh. a garden in general, not just a utility garden with fruit trees.]

1868 c&mc

c&mc: standard gloss + //

722 Orchard] Clarke & Clarke (ed. 1868): “Garden. See [Ado 2.s.l. (838), n. 53].”

1874 Corson

Corson: F1, cam1

722 my Orchard] Corson (1874, p. 14) prefers F1.

also 744

1877 v1877

v1877 = rann Rom // at 744 without attribution

722 Orchard]

1880 Tanger

Tanger

I guess he means that the variant does not fit into his scheme.

722 my Orchard] Tanger (1880, p. 125) ascribes the variant in F1 as “probably due to the critical revision which the text received at the hands of H.C. [Heminge & Condell], when it was being woven together from the parts of the actors.”

1881 hud3

hud3: standard

722 my Orchard]

1904 ver

ver

722 Verity (ed. 1904): “cf. [2132] .” In his glossary, Verity says, “in Shakespeare commonly if not always = ‘garden.’ This was the original sense, orchard being = wort-yard, ‘herb-garden’; wort = ‘herb, plant.’ Cf. Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, ii. 288, ‘the orchard of th’ Hesperides,’ i.e. the ‘garden.’”

1929 trav

trav

722 Orchard] Travers (ed. 1929) assumes that the orchard would be both fruit and pleasure garden and quotes A New Orchard, 1618: “the honest delight of one wearied with the works of his calling.”

1939 kit2

kit2: standard; derivation ver without attribution

722 Orchard] Kittredge (ed. 1939): "i.e., the palace garden; not merely ’a plantation of fruit trees,’ as in modern usage. The word is a form of wort-yard."

1980 pen2

pen2: standard

722 Orchard] Spencer (ed. 1980): “garden (as at 3.2.270).”

1982 ard2

ard2: standard

722 Orchard] Jenkins (ed. 1982): “garden.”

1985 cam4

cam4

722 Orchard] Edwards (ed. 1985): "garden."

1987 oxf4

oxf4: OED

722 Orchard] Hibbard (ed. 1987): "garden for herbs and fruit-trees (OED 1a)."

1988 bev2

bev2: standard

722 Orchard] Bevington (ed. 1988): “garden.”

1989 OED

OED

722 Orchard] Up to 1300, the obsolete sense (sb.a) obtained = garden. But from 1000 on the present sense of place for cultivating fruit trees existed also. In using orchard as garden Sh. may have been using an obsolete regionalism. So too did Marlowe (see Verity).

1993 Lupton&Reinhard

Lupton & Reinhard

722-65 Lupton & Reinhard (1993, pp. 107-9):<p. 107> “The primal crime of Hamlet is given its first and fullest articulation in the Ghost’s retelling of his murder: [quotes 722-8]. The passage renders two accounts of King Hamlet’s death, the first of which, although revealed as false by the second [744-65], nevertheless offers a fitting emblem for the crime. The initial account of the serpent in the garden is instantly recuperated as an allegory of King Hamlet’s death. In the Ghost’s next lines, the Eden allusion expands to include Eve: [quotes 729-33]. The allegory displaces the </p. 107> <p. 108> primal crime of the play from the fratricide of the Cain and Abel to the legal transgression of the first parents, Adam and Eve. Once more, it is as if Oedipal violence between men can only occur in relation to a woman—not, however, the passive object of male exchange at the heart of the Oedipal and mimetic desire, but a figure of a woman whose demands unnaturally exceed the domestic parameters of need. According to the Ghost, Gertrude is voraciously sexual even to the point of coprophagy, desperately filling up the remainder between need and demand with the rank leftovers of marriage: [quotes 741-2]. The Ghost’s invective against Gertrude threatens to overwhelm the narration of the crime before it can be recounted, mirroring in its own rhetorical procedure the ravenous rage of feminine lust.

“The Edenic subtext is further reinforced by the lapsarian logic of the Ghost’s prophetically Miltonic exclamation: [quotes 734-5 ‘. . . to me’]. The biblical allusion reinforces the moralized mythological cosmos of the play; at the same time, the alignment of King Hamlet with Adam complicates the innocence of the Ghost, suggesting his weakness to rhetorical manipulation, the ethical vulnerability of his drowsy ear. The positions of tenor and vehicle are thus subject in he passage to a series of reversals: what was first given as an event, the serpent in the garden, transmutes into a trope of the actual event, the poison in the ear, which in turn becomes a figure of rhetoric: [quotes 723-5 ‘so the whole . . . abus’d’]. Moreover, the primal status of this Ursceneca, like that of the notorious Urhamlet, depends on our lack of access to it. The scene’s precise content, location, and veracity shift among alternate biblical archetypes (Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve), competing versions of Christianity (the ghost of the Catholic purgatory versus the Lutheranism of Wittenberg), and, with psychoanalysis, variants of the Oedipal scenario (the patricide of Freud and Lacan, the matricide of Kristeva, the fratricide of Girard).

“The passage presents the Ursceneca of the play, a generative </p. 108><p. 109> narrative that consolidates the Oedipal crime across the figure of demanding Woman. Woman appears in these lines precisely as figure: Gertrude is allegorized under the biblical type of Eve and the demonic substantive ‘Lust’ (capitalized in the First Quarto) [Q1cln 519 and also in F1 741; absent in Q2]; decisively included in the biblical allegory, she is nonetheless excluded from the fratricidal scene that the passage strives to narrate, a scene in which only the two men appear as actors. Gertrude is constructed through intertextual allusion[i.e. play and biblical narrative] and invective without finding a fixed, discernible place in the drama’s plot. This imagining of Gertrude is one of the central activities of the play, and of the play’s criticism, which, as Jacqueline Rose has argued ‘blames” Gertrude for the aesthetic failings of Hamlet [i.e. T. S. Eliot’s criticism]—among other problems, its failure to live up to Aristotelian (and Oedipal) standards. 19 Hamlet’s first and third soliloquies are crucial sites of this maternal imagining.” </p. 109>

<n. 19> <p. 109> Rose (apud Lupton & Reinhard, 1993, p. 109 n. 19): “By focusing on the overlap of these two accusations, of the woman and the play [as Eliot does], we might be able to see how the question of aesthetic form and the question of sexuality are implicated in each other.” From “Sexuality in the Reading of Shakespeare,’ 95-6. </p. 109> </n. 19>

Ed. note: It may be a bit of a stretch to call the directive to increase and multiply “the legal transgression.” Or in psychoanalytic terms is parents’ sex always transgressive, as far as the child is concerned? Excess female lust is a male perspective.

1994 Blayney

Blayney

722 Blayney (1994, privately): Orchard c. 1600 was not considered a high-class word. Garden would be more appropriate to a king.

Ed. note: Blayney’s idea is supported by the fact that Q6 changed to garden and that Steevens thought orchard had to be explained.

2006 ard3q2

ard3q2: W&T

722 Tis] Thompson & Taylor (ed. 2006): “[Wells and Taylor, 1987] notes 1526 instances of ’’Tis’ in the canon as against 35 instances of ’It’s’ (the F reading).”

ard3q2: standard

722 giuen out] Thompson & Taylor (ed. 2006): “announced publicly (presumably by the King and supporters)”

ard3q2: xref; Blake; Bullough

722 sleeping . . . Orchard] Thompson & Taylor (ed. 2006): “while I was sleeping in my orchard. The qualifying phrase refers forward to me in [723] (see Blake, 3.3.6.3). The murder victim is not asleep in either Saxo or Belleforest (see Bullough 7.62 and 87).”

ard3q2: standard

722 Orchard] Thompson & Taylor (ed. 2006): “garden; the term was formerly used in a general sense, not necessarily implying the cultivation of fruit trees as it does today.”