Terri Bourus is Professor of Theatre and Professor of English at Florida State University. She is a General Editor of the four-part New Oxford Shakespeare (2016–2017), and the author of Young Shakespeare's Young Hamlet (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). She has written essays on stage directions, the performance of religious conversion, Shakespeare and Fletcher's Cardenio, the role of Alice in Arden of Faversham, and Middleton's female roles. Bourus is an Equity actor, and has directed and acted in, two very different productions of Hamlet, both based on Q1.

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• List of FiguresIntroduction: Is Q1 Hamlet the First Hamlet?Terri BourusChapter 1. Shakespeare’s Early Gothic HamletGary TaylorChapter 2. The Hybrid Hamlet: Player Tested, Shakespeare ApprovedChristopher MarinoChapter 3. Ofelia’s Interruption of Ophelia in HamletMichael M. WagonerChapter 4. Beautified Q1 HamletDouglas BrusterChapter 5. The Good Enough Quarto: Hamlet as a Material ObjectTerri BourusChapter 6. Harvey’s 1593 ‘To Be and Not To Be’: The Authorship and Date of the First Quarto of HamletDennis McCarthyChapter 7. ‘To Be, or Not To Be’: Hamlet Q1, Q2 and MontaigneSaul FramptonChapter 8. Shakespeare, Virgil and the First HamletJohn. V. NanceChapter 9. Unique Lines and the Ambient Heart of Q1 HamletLaurie JohnsonChapter 10. ‘Brief Let Me Be’: Telescoped Action and Characters in Q1 and Q2 HamletTommaso ContinisioChapter 11. Q1 Hamlet: The Sequence of Creation and Implications for the ‘Allowed Booke’Charles Adams Kelly and Dayna Leigh PlehnChapter 12. What Doesn’t Happen in HamletRory LoughnaneAfterword: Q1 HamletGraham Holderness and Bryan LoughreyIndex