Shakespeare's "Bad" Quartos
Six Infamous Early Versions of the Plays Make for Great Theater
Jun 17, 2009
Theater companies in Elizabethan England generally did not publish their play scripts for fear that rivals would steal them for their own use. However, eighteen of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare were individually published in quarto form by the time of the writer's death in 1616, and some of those scripts saw multiple printings.
What is a Quarto?
A quarto is a cheaply-produced "book" made up of two large sheets of paper with printing on both sides that are folded to make eight pages.
What is a "Bad" Quarto?
Six of the plays, when first printed, looked very different from the versions that came later. They were much shorter, lacked many of the famous speeches and poetic lines, and often were disjointed, with rough language, incomplete thoughts and even nonsense words. For these and other reasons, Alfred W. Pollard in 1919 stamped the term "bad quarto" upon the first printings of these six plays:
- Henry VI, Part Two (1594)
- Henry VI, Part Three (1595)
- Romeo and Juliet (1597)
- Henry V (1600)
- Merry Wives of Windsor (1602)
- Hamlet (1603)
Why and How Are They So Different?
The years have accumulated numerous theories to explain the existence of these peculiar texts, including:
- Shakespeare was an inexperienced writer when he penned the early versions
- They were written by others and then improved by Shakespeare
- The fuller scripts were edited for performance
- They were assembled from actors' memories and published without authorization
Whatever the reason, there are significant differences between the Q1 Hamlet and the Q2 version that was printed the following year. The text is half the length and doesn't include some of the main character's soliloquies. Plot receives more attention than poetry, which also is true of the Q1 Romeo and Juliet. Both plays are fast-paced and action-packed, and are a lot of fun to see on stage, the venue for which Shakespeare wrote in the first place.
The Standard Versions
When 36 of the plays were collected and published together in the 1623 authorized edition known as the First Folio, the six listed above had been expanded into the poetically-rich, "standardized" versions we know today. At that point, the Shakespearean canon moved from being primarily theatrical to being principally literary.
Judged using modern criteria, the "bad" first quartos are indeed bad: they make for poor reading, with their weak grammar and dearth of poetry. But put these same scripts on stage and you get a whole different experience. In the theater, the "bad" quartos live and breathe, and therein lies their chiefest value.
Sources:
- Unediting the Renaissance, Leah S. Marcus (1996)
- Treasures in Full: Shakespeare in Quarto, British Library
- The First and Second Quartos of Romeo and Juliet, Kristin Jensen (Mount Holyoke College)
