What do you do with a play like Hamlet, the most talked about and most performed play in the Shakespearean canon? Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor took on this challenge head-on in their talk entitled ‘Making Hamlet New’ during the King’s Shakespeare Festival.

Thompson and Taylor are the editors of the 2006 Arden edition of Hamlet, which was ground breaking in that it was the first edition to provide modern, annotated versions of all three existing play-texts of Hamlet: the 1603 First Quarto, often dubbed the ‘bad quarto’ because it deviates so radically from the Hamlet we are familiar with, the 1604/5 Second Quarto, which is the version we are familiar with, and the 1623 First Folio, printed alongside Shakespeare’s complete works.

In particular, the talk focused on the question of what to do with a play that exists in three different versions, from the perspective of a critic, an editor and a director, which allowed the audience to understand the subject from these three different angles.

For an editor, the problem of the three versions of Hamlet meant a decision between conflating all three into one edition and approaching them separately – or side by side, as the Arden chooses to do. Thompson and Taylor talked about their experiences compiling the 2006 Arden Hamlet – which they jokingly called ‘the good, the bad and the folio’ – and the range of responses they received to their approach, from positive to humourously negative, and looked forward to the publication of the 2016 Arden Hamlet. It was fascinating to hear about the process of editing such a canonical play and the hurdles editors encountered.

The talk was punctuated by performed readings from Hamlet by a pair of actors, which was a pleasant break from the lecture and also incorporated a visual, theatrical supplement to some of the points being raised. Thompson and Taylor also spoke about how directors of various productions and adaptations of Hamlet have drawn from its different versions. Lyndsy Turner’s Hamlet at the Barbican made the controversial choice of moving the ‘to be or not to be’ speech to the beginning of the play – though this was later changed due to public outcry – and Trevor Nunn moved the famous soliloquy to a scene earlier, coinciding with its place in the First Quarto.

Taylor and Thompson concluded that the fragmentation of Hamlet into three versions is ‘symptomatic of the play’s refusal to be bound in a nutshell’. This is perhaps why the play lends itself to such a myriad of re-workings and adaptations, which the talk went on to discuss: from the touring Globe to Globe Hamlet to foreign language adaptations, to spin-offs and sequels such as novels that focus on Ophelia and the bizarre film Hamlet 2, to the German puppet version of Hamlet. Such a conclusion seemed to deliver an answer to the implied question in the talk’s title: yes, there will always be something new to say about Hamlet.