Bad quarto

Hamlet Q1 (1603), the first published text of Hamlet, is often described as a "bad quarto".

A bad quarto, in Shakespearean scholarship, is a quarto-sized printed edition of one of Shakespeare's plays that is considered to be unauthorised, and is theorised to have been pirated from a theatrical performance without permission by someone in the audience writing it down as it was spoken or, alternatively, written down later from memory by an actor or group of actors in the cast – the latter process has been termed "memorial reconstruction". Since the quarto derives from a performance, hence lacks a direct link to the author's original manuscript, the text would be expected to be "bad", i.e. to contain corruptions, abridgements and paraphrasings.[1][2]

In contrast, a "good quarto" is considered to be a text that is authorised and which may have been printed from the author's manuscript (or a working draft thereof, known as his foul papers), or from a scribal copy or prompt copy derived from the manuscript or foul papers.[3]

The concept of the bad quarto originates in 1909, attributed to A W Pollard and W W Greg. The theory defines as "bad quartos" the first quarto printings of Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Hamlet,[2] and seeks to explain why there are substantial textual differences between those quartos and the 1623 printing of the first folio edition of the plays.

The concept has expanded to include quartos of plays by other Elizabethan authors, including Peele's The Battle of Alcazar, Greene's Orlando Furioso, and the collaborative script, Sir Thomas More.[4][5]

The theory has been accepted, studied and expanded by many scholars; but some modern scholars are challenging it[6][7][8][9] and those, such as Eric Sams,[10] consider the entire theory to be without foundation. Jonathan Bate states that "late twentieth- and early twenty-first century scholars have begun to question the whole edifice".[11]

  1. ^ Jenkins, Harold. "Introduction". Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Arden Shakespeare (1982) ISBN 1-903436-67-2. p. 19.
  2. ^ a b Duthie, George Ian. "Introduction; the good and bad quartos". The Bad Quarto of Hamlet. CUP Archive (1941). pp. 1-4
  3. ^ Duthie, George Ian. "Introduction; the good and bad quartos". The Bad Quarto of Hamlet. CUP Archive (1941). pp. 5-9
  4. ^ Erne, Lukas. Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. Cambridge University Press. (2013) ISBN 9781107029651 p. 223
  5. ^ Maguire, Laurie E. Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The 'Bad' Quartos and Their Contexts. Cambridge University Press (1996), ISBN 9780521473644, p. 79
  6. ^ Irace, Kathleen. Reforming the "bad" Quartos: Performance and Provenance of Six Shakespearean First Editions. University of Delaware Press (1994) ISBN 9780874134711 p.14.
  7. ^ Richmond, Hugh Macrae. Shakespeare's Theatre: A Dictionary of His Stage Context. Continuum (2002) ISBN 0 8264 77763. p.58
  8. ^ Jolly, Margrethe. The First Two Quartos of Hamlet: A New View of the Origins and Relationship of the Texts. McFarland (2014) ISBN 9780786478873
  9. ^ McDonald, Russ. The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents. Macmillan (2001) ISBN 9780312248802 p.203
  10. ^ Sams, Eric. The Real Shakespeare; Retrieving the Early Years, 1564 — 1594. Meridian (1995) ISBN 0-300-07282-1
  11. ^ Bate, Jonathan. "The Case for the Folio". (2007) Playshakespeare.com