Executive Director's Notes:
In addition to the notes below, and so you will *NOT* think all the spelling errors introduced by the printers of the time have been corrected, here are the first few lines of Hamlet, as they are presented herein:
Barnardo. Who's there?
Fran. Nay answer me: Stand & vnfold your selfe
Bar. Long liue the King
As I understand it, the printers often ran out of certain words or letters they had often packed into a "cliche"...this is the original meaning of the term cliche...and thus, being unwilling to unpack the cliches, and thus you will see some substitutions that look very odd...such as the exchanges of u for v, v for u, above...and you may wonder why they did it this way, presuming
Shakespeare did not actually write the play in this manner....
The answer is that they MAY have packed "liue" into a cliche at a time when they were out of "v"'s...possibly having used "vv" in place of some "w"'s, etc. This was a common practice of the day, as print was still quite expensive, and they didn't want to spend more on a wider selection of characters than they had to.
You will find a lot of these kinds of "errors" in this text, as I
have mentioned in other times and places, many "scholars" have an extreme attachment to these errors, and many have accorded them a very high place in the "canon" of Shakespeare. My father read an assortment of these made availa…