Editing Early texts of Shakespeare's works

{{Short description|Late 16th and early 17th-century editions of William Shakespeare's works}}
[[Image:Bad_quarto%2C_good_quarto%2C_first_folio.png|thumb|320px|Comparison of the '[[To be, or not to be]]' soliloquy in the first three editions of ''Hamlet'', showing the varying quality of the text in the [[Hamlet Q1|Bad Quarto]] (Q1), the Good Quarto (Q2) and the [[First Folio]]]]
The earliest texts of [[William Shakespeare]]'s works were published during the 16th and 17th centuries in [[quarto]] or [[folio]] format. Folios are large, tall volumes; quartos are smaller, roughly half the size. The publications of the latter are usually abbreviated to Q1, Q2, etc., where the letter stands for "quarto" and the number for the first, second, or third edition published.

==Plays==
{{Main|List of Shakespeare plays in quarto}}
Eighteen of the 36 plays in the [[First Folio]] were printed in separate and individual editions prior to 1623. ''[[Pericles, Prince of Tyre|Pericles]]'' (1609) and ''[[The Two Noble Kinsmen]]'' (1634) also appeared separately before their inclusions in folio collections (the Shakespeare Third Folio and the [[Beaumont and Fletcher folios|second Beaumont and  Fletcher folio]], respectively). All of these were [[book size|quarto]] editions, with two exceptions: ''The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York'', the first edition of ''[[Henry VI, Part 3]]'', was printed in [[book size|octavo]] form in 1595, as was the 1611 edition of ''The most lamentable tragedy of Titus Andronicus''.<ref>The identification of the 1611 edition of Titus Andronicus as an octavo rather than, as had previously been assumed, as a quarto is confirmed by [[chain line]] and [[watermark]] evidence, as well as by the dimensions of the leaves. The Houghton Library copy of this text (STC 22330) has vertical chain lines and watermarks in the upper inner margin, just as one would expect to find in an octavo. So too the Folger Shakespeare Library copy (see catalogue description at http://hamnet.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=163950 ). The leaf dimensions of the Houghton copy are 12 cm. x 18 cm.; the result is a longer, more traditional octavo leaf rather than the more distinctively squarish shape one finds in quartos, whose chain lines are almost always oriented horizontally and whose watermarks are usually found in the middle of the gutter.</ref> In chronological order, these publications were:

*''[[Titus Andronicus]],'' 1594, 1600, 1611 (octavo)
*''[[Henry VI, Part 2]],'' 1594, 1600, 1619
*''[[Henry VI, Part 3]],'' 1595 (octavo), 1600, 1619
*''[[Edward III (play)|Edward III]],'' 1596
*''[[Romeo and Juliet]],'' 1597, 1599, 1609
*''[[Richard II (play)|Richard II]],'' 1597, 1598, 1608, 1615
*''[[Richard III (play)|Richard III]],'' 1597, 1598, 1602, 1605, 1612, 1622
*''[[Love's Labour's Lost]],'' 1598
*''[[Henry IV, Part 1]],'' 1598, 1599, 1604, 1608, 1613, 1622
*''[[Henry IV, Part 2]],'' 1600
*''[[Henry V (play)|Henry V]],'' 1600, 1602, 1619
*''[[The Merchant of Venice]],'' 1600, 1619
*''[[A Midsummer Night's Dream]],'' 1600, 1619
*''[[Much Ado About Nothing]],'' 1600
*''[[The Merry Wives of Windsor]],'' 1602, 1619
*''[[Hamlet]],'' 1603, 1604, 1611
*''[[King Lear]],'' 1608, 1619
*''[[Troilus and Cressida]],'' 1609
*''[[Pericles, Prince of Tyre]],'' 1609, 1611, 1619
*''[[Othello]],'' 1622
*''[[The Two Noble Kinsmen]],'' 1634.

Six of the preceding were classified as "[[bad quarto]]s" by [[Alfred W. Pollard]] and other scholars associated with the [[New Bibliography]]. Popular plays like ''1 Henry IV''  and ''Pericles'' were reprinted in their quarto editions even after the First Folio appeared, sometimes more than once.

== Poetry ==

Shakespeare's poems were also printed in quarto or octavo form:
*''[[Venus and Adonis (Shakespeare poem)|Venus and Adonis]],'' Q1—1593, Q2—1594 (with later editions in octavo);
*''[[The Rape of Lucrece]],'' Q—1594 (with later editions in octavo);
*''[[The Phoenix and the Turtle]],'' Q1—1601, Q2—1611 (in Robert Chester's ''Love's Martyr'');
*''[[Shakespeare's Sonnets|The Sonnets]]'' and ''[[A Lover's Complaint]],'' Q—1609.

Differing from the quartos of the plays, the first editions of Shakespeare's narrative poems are extremely well printed. "[[Richard Field (publisher)|Richard Field]], Shakespeare's first publisher and printer, was a Stratford man, probably a friend of Shakespeare, and the two produced an excellent text."<ref>Halliday, p. 513.</ref> Shakespeare may have had direct involvement in the publication of the two poems, a check such as [[Ben Jonson]] exercised in reference to the publication of his works, but as Shakespeare clearly did not do in connection with his plays.{{fact|date=May 2018}}

[[John Benson (publisher)|John Benson]] published a collected edition of Shakespeare's ''Poems'' in 1640; the poems were not added to collections of the plays until the 18th century. (The disputed miscellany ''[[The Passionate Pilgrim]]'' was only printed in octavo: twice in 1599, with another in 1612, all by William Jaggard.)<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Jaggard|first=Wm|date=1934-05-19|title=William Jaggard and The 'Passionate Pilgrim.'|url=https://academic.oup.com/nq/article/CLXVI/may19/353/4208836|journal=Notes and Queries|language=en|volume=CLXVI|issue=may19|pages=353–354|doi=10.1093/nq/CLXVI.may19.353d|issn=0029-3970}}</ref>

==Folios==
[[File:Third folio.JPG|thumb|The additional plays section in the 1664 second impression of the Third Folio.]]
{{Seealso|First Folio|Second Folio}}
The folio format was reserved for expensive, prestigious volumes. During Shakespeare's lifetime, stage plays were not generally taken seriously as literature and not considered worthy of being collected into folios, so the plays printed while he was alive were printed as quartos. His poems were never included in his collected works until the eighteenth century.

It was not until 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death, that [[Ben Jonson]] defied convention by issuing a folio collection of his own plays and poems.  Seven years later the folio volume ''Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories & Tragedies'' appeared; this edition is now called the [[First Folio]]. It contains 36 plays, 18 of which were printed for the first time. Because Shakespeare was dead, the folio was compiled by [[John Heminges]] and [[Henry Condell]] (fellow actors in Shakespeare's company), and arranged into comedies, histories and tragedies.  The First Folio is generally looked to by actors and directors as the purest form of Shakespeare's text. While punctuation and grammar are not always accurate by today's rules, these things served as direction to the actors on how to say the lines.

'''The First Folio''' was compiled by Heminges and Condell but published by a trio of stationers (booksellers and publishers): [[William Jaggard]], his son Isaac Jaggard, and [[Edward Blount]]. [[William Aspley]] and [[John Smethwick]] participated in the endeavor as subsidiary partners. It contained, in addition to blandishments provided by various admirers of Shakespeare, such as the dedication signed by "John Heminge and Henry Condell", 36 plays. They included ''Troilus and Cressida'', which was not, however, listed in the table of contents, but omitted ''Pericles'' and ''The Two Noble Kinsmen'', which are now usually considered canonical.<ref>[[William Thomas Lowndes]], ''The Biographer's Manual of English Literature## (London, rev. ed. by Henry G. Bohn, 1890) vol. 8, pages 2253-2255.''</ref> The Jaggards were printers, and did the actual printing of the book. The elder Jaggard has seemed an odd choice to many commentators, given his problematical relationship with the Shakespeare canon: Jaggard issued the suspect collection ''[[The Passionate Pilgrim]]'' in 1599 and 1612, and in 1619 printed the so-called [[False Folio]], ten pirated or spurious Shakespearean plays, some with false dates and title pages. It is thought that the printing of the First Folio was such an enormous task that the Jaggards' shop was simply needed to get the job done. William Jaggard was old, infirm, and blind by 1623, and in fact died a month before the First Folio was complete.<ref>Halliday, pp. 169–71, 249–50, 355–6.</ref>

The First Folio was reprinted three times in the 17th century:

'''The [[Second Folio]]''' appeared in 1632. Isaac Jaggard had died in 1627, and Edward Blount had transferred his rights to stationer [[Robert Allot]] in 1630. The Second Folio was published by Allot, William Aspley, [[Richard Hawkins (publisher)|Richard Hawkins]], [[Richard Meighen]], and John Smethwick, and printed by [[Thomas Cotes]]. It contained the same plays as the First Folio and much of the same additional material, with the addition of an unsigned poem by [[John Milton]].<ref>[[William Thomas Lowndes]], ''The Biographer's Manual of English Literature'' (London, rev. ed. by Henry G. Bohn, 1890) vol. 8, pages 2256-2257.</ref> 

'''The Third Folio''' was issued in 1663, published by [[Philip Chetwinde]]; Chetwinde had married Robert Allot's widow and so obtained the rights to the book. To the second impression of the Third Folio (1664) he added seven plays, namely ''[[Pericles, Prince of Tyre]];''  ''[[Locrine]];'' ''[[The London Prodigal]];'' ''[[The Puritan]];'' ''[[Sir John Oldcastle]];'' ''[[Thomas Lord Cromwell]];'' and ''[[A Yorkshire Tragedy]].'' (See: [[Shakespeare Apocrypha]].) All seven of these additional plays had been published as quartos while Shakespeare was alive, but only ''Pericles'' was eventually widely accepted into the Shakespearean canon.<ref>Wm. Allan Neilson & Ashley Horance Thorndike, ''The Facts About Shakespeare'' (NY, Macmillan, rev. ed. 1931) pages 157-158.</ref> 

The quartos of ''Pericles'' (1609 and 1611), ''The London Prodigal'' (1605) and ''A Yorkshire Tragedy'' (1608) were all attributed to William Shakespeare on their front pages. The quartos of ''Locrine'' (1595), ''The Puritan'' (1607) and ''Thomas Lord Cromwell'' (1602 and 1613) were attributed to W. S. on their title pages, but Shakespeare was not the only playwright with those initials; [[Wentworth Smith]] has been put forward as another possible author of these works. ''Sir John Oldcastle'' was printed in 1619, three years after Shakespeare's death, as part of the False Folio. It was attributed to Shakespeare on its title page which also bore a false date of 1600.

The Third Folio is relatively rare, compared to the Second and Fourth, probably because unsold copies were destroyed in the [[Great Fire of London]] in 1666. One surviving copy was purchased by the Irish High Court judge and antiquarian [[William O'Brien (judge)|William O'Brien]] in the 1880s. It was put up for auction by [[Sotheby's]] in 2017.<ref>{{Cite news |last=Kean |first=Danuta |date=2017-06-03 |title=Historic Irish library could make more than £1.8m at auction |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/03/historic-irish-library-could-make-more-than-18m-at-auction |access-date=2025-04-20 |work=The Guardian |language=en-GB |issn=0261-3077}}</ref>

'''The Fourth Folio''' appeared in 1685, published by R. Bentley, E. Brewster, R. Chiswell, and [[Henry Herringman|H. Herringman]]. It contains the same 43 plays as the Third Folio. Brewster, Chiswell, and Herringman were members of the six-man syndicate that published the [[Ben Jonson folios|third Ben Jonson folio]] in 1692; Herringman was one of three stationers who issued the [[Beaumont and Fletcher folios|second Beaumont and Fletcher folio]] in 1679.

The Fourth Folio in turn served as the base for the series of eighteenth-century editions of Shakespeare's plays. [[Nicholas Rowe (writer)|Nicholas Rowe]] used the Fourth Folio text as the foundation of his [[1709 in literature|1709]] edition, and subsequent editors — [[Alexander Pope|Pope]], [[Lewis Theobald|Theobald]], etc. — both adapted and reacted to Rowe's text in their own editions. (See: [[Shakespeare's editors]].)

''[[The Two Noble Kinsmen]]'' did not appear in any Folio edition. It was not printed until 1634, although there is evidence of its being performed much earlier. The title page said "written by the memorable worthies of their time: Mr. [[John Fletcher (playwright)|John Fletcher]] and Mr. William Shakspeare [''sic''], Gent."<ref>[[William Thomas Lowndes]], ''The Biographer's Manual of English Literature'' (London, rev. ed. by Henry G. Bohn, 1890) vol. 8, page 2304.</ref>  It was not included in most editions of Shakespeare (e.g., the Cambridge/Globe editions of Wright and Clark, ca. 1863) until the latter half of the 19th century (it appears, e.g., in Dyce's collected Works of Shakespeare in 1876) but it was not generally accepted into the Shakespeare canon until well into the 20th century, when, for example, it was included in the [[Riverside Shakespeare|Riverside edition]] of 1974.

== See also ==
*[[List of Shakespeare plays in quarto]]
*[[Ben Jonson folios]]
*[[Beaumont and Fletcher folios]]

==Notes==
{{Reflist}}

==References==
*[[F. E. Halliday|Halliday, F. E.]] ''A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964.'' Baltimore, Penguin, 1964.
*[[Alfred W. Pollard|Pollard, Alfred W.]] ''Shakespeare Folios and Quartos.'' 1909.

== External links ==
*[http://william-shakespeare.classic-literature.co.uk/william-shakespeare-first-folio.asp First Folio]—HTML version of this title.
*[https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2270 First Folio] from [[Project Gutenberg]]
*[https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.03.0018 First Folio]—digitally scanned pages from a copy of the first folio
*[http://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/homepage.html Quartos] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110611141145/http://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/homepage.html |date=2011-06-11 }}—high resolution scans of the British Library's 93 copies of Shakespeare plays printed in quarto before 1642
*[http://quartos.org Quartos]—high resolution scans of the 32 copies of Hamlet printed in quarto before 1642 with XML transcriptions
* [http://digital.lib.miamioh.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/wshakespeare/id/11655/rec/1 First Folio]– Walter Havighurst Special Collections, Miami University
* [http://digital.lib.miamioh.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/wshakespeare/id/12576/rec/3 Second Folio]– Walter Havighurst Special Collections, Miami University
* [http://digital.lib.miamioh.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/wshakespeare/id/13617/rec/4 Third Folio]– Walter Havighurst Special Collections, Miami University
* [http://digital.lib.miamioh.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/wshakespeare/id/14548/rec/2 Fourth Folio]– Walter Havighurst Special Collections, Miami University

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[[Category:Early editions of Shakespeare]]