Hamlet’s ‘Sullied’ or ‘Solid’ Flesh: A Bibliographical Case–History

Summary

One of the most debated of all textual problems in Shakespeare is that of Hamlet’s reference to his “too too solid flesh”. Are we to read this as sallied, following the Second Quarto? Are we to adopt the Folio’s solid? Or are we to consider sallied as a misprint for sullied and boldly indulge in emendation?

The traditional reading is the solid of the Folio, but J. Dover Wilson has offered a vigorous defence of sullied. This, he argues, is what Shakespeare wrote, and he suggests that what he calls the misprint sallied was taken over by the Second from the First Quarto. He also points to the Second Quarto's slight sallies at ii, i, 39 and to unsallied for unsullied in Love's Labour's Lost, v, ii, 352—all, in his opinion, exhibiting the same error of a for u. Sullied flesh is for him the key to the soliloquy, for it shows Hamlet thinking of his mother's incestuous marriage as a personal defilement. Solid flesh, he declares, is absurd associated with melt and thaw, whereas on various occasions Shakespeare uses sully with the image, implicit or explicit, of dirt upon a surface of pure white, like snow. An example would be Winter's Tale, i, ii, 326-7, "sully the purity and whiteness of my sheets".