About "fat and scant of breath"... Sir John Gielgud wrote in a 1930s essay on "Hamlet" that the correct word in that passage is probably "faint," not "fat." He mentioned scholarly support for this, but didn't cite the sources. Do you know of any historical evidence that the word should be "faint"?
I wrote something about this line once before, though on a slightly different note.
I donât know the essay youâre referring to, but Gielgud has some reason to follow the decisions of some of the editors before his time. Heâs perfectly right to say there was scholarly support for the idea, because in the nineteenth century there was a trend where critics regarded âfatâ as a printerâs error. The suggested emendations were âfaintâ (Mattias Mull), âhotâ, or âfeyâ (John Bulloch).
Whether or not this scholarly support was justified is another thing entirely. The real counter-evidence is that all early prints of Shakespeare from the second quarto onwards contain this line, meaning that it was printed the same way by different printers and therefore different setters. Thereâs basically no scholarly reason to think itâs a printerâs error; itâs all conjecture. Where many emendations are suggested when a line doesnât seem to make full sense, as far as I can tell, the only reasons given for the emendation of âfatâ here are based on the idea that itâs simply unacceptable to have a fat Hamlet. Itâs rather telling that the suggestions donât start until the nineteenth century (because implications of fatness were changing), considering that other textual emendations happen much earlier (a lot of them by Johnson in the eighteenth century).
So by 1930 the idea that the word âfatâ should be emended had gone a little out of fashion in academic circles, because, frankly, thereâs no real scholarly evidence for it. But Gielgud is an actor, not a scholar, and many of the older editions with the suggested emendations would have been in circulation and widely accepted.
This doesnât mean that the general prejudice against a fat Hamlet goes away. It just changes form. In the twentieth century, editors start preferring to suggest that âfatâ might mean something else, like âsweatyâ or âfatiguedâ instead of claiming that the word itself is wrong. Thereâs a very good publically-accessible article on this topic by Elena Levy-Navarro if youâre interested in the details.
