By SHARON EBERSON
You might be wondering, is something rotten about Hamlet: The Bad Quarto? The word “bad,” after all, is in the title.
The Bad Quarto, also known as Q1, was published in 1603, 20 years before what we now know as Hamlet (Folio 1). It is the earliest surviving printed text of what is widely regarded as the greatest play in the English language. About half the length of the standard version of William Shakepeare’s masterpiece, Q1 was discovered in 1823, and few productions have been since been attempted. The early script contains unfamiliar lines, a different order for well-known scenes, and some name changes — Corambis instead of Polonius, for example.
The Bad Quarto is possibly Hamlet as it first flowed from Shakespeare’s pen, or, as many theorize, a bootleg transcription, used to beat Shakespeare to the published page.
Jeremy Seghers, who has directed Shakespeare’s Hamlet previously, has chosen The Bad Quarto for his second directorial project in Pittsburgh — after his dramatization of Franz Kafka’s The Trial in June 2025. He has theories of his own about what good comes of diving into Q1, and why it is a relevant and insightful companion to the Hamlet that we know.
for Hamlet: The Bad Quarto. (Image courtesy of Jeremy Seghers)
“There are more questions about Q1 than there are answers,” Seghers says, and repeats often that the uncertain provenance of the piece is not his concern. Although “I have no doubt that Shakespeare had something to do with it, what always interests me most about anything is not necessarily the answer. It’s the mystery. So it doesn’t matter to me whose hand actually wrote it. What mattered more was the intent behind it, was it actable, and was it active,” Seghers says. “And all of those things were true. All of those things are strengths, I think.”
Seghers noted that some of the dialogue is “clunky; it doesn’t quite roll off the tongue with the poetry of the Folio.” However, he and his company didn’t set out to change the language in Q1, rather, “We really wanted to make sense of it, and coherence was really important. So we have added a couple of things in, but we haven’t rearranged the structure.”
What we might hear as an errant word could reflect the speech patterns of those who rushed it into print, or even the Bard’s original choice.
An example of structural changes, Seghers mentions, is the phrase, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
“It’s a couple of lines earlier in [Act 1, Scene 4], but you get the feeling that Shakespeare knew that line was going to be a banger, and he moved it to the end of the scene as a button, as a way to go out on, “Oh, yeah, that’s good,” although it makes sense the other way, too.”
“Gertred” has a scene with Horatio that isn’t in any other version, Seghers says, so it couldn’t have been misheard, or whatever. … There are a lot of theories.”
Another change is the placement of perhaps the most famous speech of all, Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” monologue. It hit home when he and Ayden Freed, who plays the title character for Seghers, saw the National Theater’s production of Hamlet at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in May.
“I love the placement of the speech in Q1 because it’s earlier. In so many other versions, including the most recent National Theater production. … They put the ‘To be or not to be’ speech at the very end of the play, right before the duel. And I thought, ‘You’ve got this momentum moving up to, Laertes is returned and Ofelia’s dead, and they’re going to [have this duel,] and you’re going to pause and he’s going to have this soliloquy?’ I thought it just killed the momentum. But what’s great about Q1 is, it’s in the second act. It’s early, and Ofelia is present for it, in the text. … So it’s less of a soliloquy and more of a speech to Ofelia.”
Seghers goes on to explain changing the name Corambis is probably related to the fact that “everyone knows he was based on Lord Burley, Queen Elizabeth’s spy man.” Lord Burley’s motto was cor unum [of one heart], and cor ambos literally means of two hearts. … It implies his duplicity … and I just thought that’s got to be intentional for Shakespeare, to have changed that name.”
Seghers, who oversees front of house and box office for Pitt Stages and Department of Music performances at the University of Pittsburgh, returns to the scene of The Trial, staging Q1 at the Richard E. Rauh Studio Theatre is located in the basement of the Cathedral of Learning.
Ayden Freed is “probably one of the most committed actors, young, old, whatever, full stop, that I’ve ever worked with.”
— Jeremy Seghers
Having swiftly become a fixture in the local theater scene after arriving in Pittsburgh in 2023, Seghers worked with Freed on The Trial and with several of the show’s actors, including Johnny Patalano (Claudius) while directing for the Becoming Arts Collective’s first Bridges and Stages 10-minute play festival.
No stranger to local stages, Freed has worked with Pittsburgh International Classic Theatre, Pittsburgh Savoyards, New Hazlett CSA and South Park Theatre, among others. Seghers says of his leading man, a recent graduate of the Point Park University Conservatory of Performing Arts, “He’s probably one of the most committed actors, young, old, whatever, full stop, that I’ve ever worked with.”
Seghers shared that Freed’s dive into the Q1 has led to discoveries within The Bad Quarto that reflect other works by Shakespeare.
The first time the director encountered the actor, “I saw him in [Point Park’s] Arcadia in December of ’24, and I needed an actor to play the student and a couple of other roles in The Trial. I knew he could handle difficult language, because Tom Stoppard, especially the character he played in Arcadia, was really tricky. … I thought, ‘I don’t know if this guy understands everything that he’s saying, but he makes me believe that he understands, so that’s good enough for me.”
Having a young Hamlet such as Freed, and not a 40something actor, as is often the case (Laurence Olivier was 40 when he made the 1948 film version), makes much more sense to Shakespeare’s story of a student prince, his indecisiveness, and his close ties to his mother, “Gertred,” played by Joanna Lowe.
Among the cast, Patalano plays Hamlet’s murderous uncle/step father Claudius, Aika Samora plays the ill-fated Ofelia; Ryan Rattley, Laertes; and Brett Sullivan Santry, Corambis. They are joined by David Nackman as Ghost and Gravedigger 1, Andrew Perfetti as Horatio, Jordan Coury as Rosencraft and Voltemar, Lorna Lominac as Gilderstone and Cornelia, Steven Gallagher as Montano, Gravedigger 2, and Braggart Gentleman, Mike Psenick as Marcellus and Player 1; Andrew Lasswell as Barnardo, Player 2, and Priest, and Mathias Vitullo as First Sentinel, Player 3, and Fortenbrasse
Like their characters, Freed and Perfetti have become such fast friends, “Johnny actually asked Andrew this last week during a rehearsal, ‘How long have you known Ayden?’ And he said, ‘We just met at these rehearsals.’ And he said, ‘It seems like you have so much history together.’ So that’s been wonderful. It’s a great group.”
The play is set in “the very light framework of the kingdom as Mafia family,” inspired by movies such as The Godfather and Goodfellas.
“I love all those movies and I’m highly influenced by them. But whenever you have a story that is about revenge, which at its heart is what Hamlet is, you can’t deny Mafia stories like The Godfather, which, in my opinion, is the greatest revenge story on film. The generational differences, the crime families, their code of ethics, it’s all fascinating.”
Another facet that changes things up has been entering the text through Active Analysis, which instructor/advocate Cotter Smith has inspired throughout Pittsburgh’s theater scene.
In short, the Stanislavski-based technique has actors analyze a script through physical improvisation, rather than passive table work.
There was some resistance among the veteran cast members at first, Seghers says, but the technique gave the actors “an opportunity to … discover things about the characters that stay true to Shakespeare’s intent, and what he wrote, but give them another dimension and a richness that maybe you don’t see all the time if they just stick to the text.”
Seghers has been impressed not only by Pittsburgh’s deep talent pool, but also by its knowledgeable audiences. He was surprised by the familiarity with the plot of The Trial, for instance — Metamorphosis being Kafka’s best-known work. However, most everyone will know Hamlet on some level, and Seghers says to rest assured that the story and much of the text will ring true to the OG Folio.
In other words, don’t be thrown off by characters named
Rosencraft and Gilderstone.
Seghers turns to music to express something akin to experiencing Hamlet: The Bad Quarto. He compares it to “an early demo of a song, so they don’t have all the kinks worked out. Some of the lyrics might be different. I think about something like Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, which has something like 80 verses. But then there’s the version that Jeff Buckley did. And then there’s the version that another person did, and they have different lyrics. There’s also the idea of it feeling like a bootleg of someone recording it at a concert …”
Finally, he adds, “We’re treating it though as if people have never seen Hamlet before. Everything is because it does feel so fresh, we’re trying not to gild the lily too much.”
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Hamlet: The Bad Quarto is at the Richard E. Rauh Studio Theatre, The Cathedral of Learning, 4200 Fifth Ave., Oakland, June 19-22 and 26-28, 2026. Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/hamlet-the-bad-quarto-tickets-1987011305303
Categories: Our Posts, Show Previews
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