To view the present revaluation of Q1 Hamlet in perspective, I propose, as a first step, to ask why and under what circumstances the practice of performance, especially its impact on the shape and thrust of Shakespeare's plays, was radically obliterated, disputed or ignored for almost three centuries. It was under these circumstances that writing in the Elizabethan theatre came to occupy a position of unquestioned preeminence, constituting a source of unrivalled, more or less exclusive authority. In addressing these questions, I intend – in a first section – to focus on the early, eighteenth-century version of the traditional scenario of poetic authenticity and playhouse corruption in presenting the Shakespearean text.

However, in a critical review of the modern bias in favor of writing it is neither helpful nor necessary to idealize the First Quarto of Hamlet or, for that matter, to elevate Elizabethan performance practice to the status of any self-determined, originary alternative source of authority. On the contrary, it should freely be admitted that perfectly sound reservations about the First Quarto cannot easily be dismissed. For good reasons, editors like Harold Jenkins, Philip Edwards, and G. R. Hibbard, in spite of their preference for either Q2 or F respectively, take a conflated version of Q2 and F as their base text.