Early texts of Shakespeare's works

With Quarto refers to the expenditure of Shakespeare's plays, which were published in his lifetime. The name actually means only the paper sizes Quart, on which they were printed.

The market for drama texts

Spectacles were not intended basically for printing and publication as literature. They were the raw material with which to work the acting forces, therefore part of their working capital and strictly guarded as such. So a publication was not in the interest of the theater. Less well because it was believed that people would rather read instead of going to the theater, as from fear, that competition could copy and market a successful piece.

So a case of 1600 has been handed down, in which the acting troupe The Admiral's Men a printer offered 40 shillings to him from the pressure of her pieces, Patient Grisell to hold. And in 1608 met some London theater a formal agreement to respect their pieces against each other and not to publish.

However, often published unofficial pirated editions, as some printers did make a profit with the titles of success pieces. These expenses are then usually of low quality, so-called bad quartos. One such example is a copy of Hamlet in 1603, which was so bad that a reader who had not seen the play, had to get the wrong impression. In this case, the Lord Chamberlain's Men made ​​an exception and therefore prompted even the pressure of an official text version, probably to counteract the bad impression in public.

Obviously, however, there was a market for drama texts and they were printed in large numbers. Shakespeare was an unusually successful author, and so his pieces in new editions appeared: Richard II was published in 6 issues 1597-1623 ( was the year in which the official Shakespeare anthology Folio published ), Henry IV Part 1 in 7 issues from 1598, Romeo and Juliet in five editions from 1597th

Methods of Black Copier

The type of error, the inaccuracies deviations suggest different methods and recognize to some extent in the texts.

So a member of the theater could have sold the text itself. However, since only few within the troupe - handwritten - copies existed, often complement each only with the text for the single role, so had the actor in question the rest of the text from memory. In such a text output then some parts were better than others.

Was another option to take down during the performance. That it had to act in this case to a greatly shortened version, is obvious. The writer had to later reconstruct the text from the memory before printing.

There was also a kind of shorthand, called charactery, which was based basically on a picture writing. So could the essential meaning of what was said on stage, write down, but poetic effects and many puns had to be lost. As an example (taken from the book by Anthony Burgess, Shakespeare, Harmondsworth, 1970 ), may the famous sentence from Hamlet are: " To be or not, that is the question " (to be or not to be is the question did ): " his ": so you wrote the character for" life "-" not to be ": that's the opposite - " This is " here then handed an equal sign - " the question ": the corresponding character meant both question and disagreement or argument. And so the famous sentence reads in the quarto edition of 1603 "To be, or not to be, I there's the point. "

This is a shorthand the intricacies of Shakespeare's language could not be adequately reproduced.

You could steal the text of course. Then the result would certainly be a fairly reliable output, but on the other hand, the manuscripts were well secured and not so easy to steal if you do not know a traitor in the troops (by which we are back to case one).

Textual Criticism

About half of the plays of Shakespeare, which appeared in 1623 in the Folio, were already more or less poor spending on the market ( Richard III. , Titus Andronicus, Lost Love's Labour's, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Richard II, The Taming taming, The Merchant of Venice, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Much Ado about Nothing, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, King Lear, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Othello, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor ).

A critical study of the various texts have to try to come as close as possible to the original Shakespeare. The rules for a conscientious editor are:

• Actually, the original manuscript of the author would be the basis. But Shakespeare, there are no written records of his plays.

• Then, the text must be used, which is the original time and space the next. That would be the quarto editions. But as seen in the example of Hamlet, the first edition was partially unusually bad, so it could be more appropriate to use the second corrected edition.

• Spelling and printing conventions of the time must be considered, because the printer has an original text may be "improved" according to his own taste. Obvious typographical errors are relatively easy to recognize. If sentences are completely pointless, probably must be some mistake. But often such a decision is a question of interpretation.

• Since the Folio was published by 1623 as a commemorative edition with some care, you can be given in case of disagreement between various texts in doubt preferred.

A critical edition of Shakespeare's works should specify the exact source of individual passages in each case, as well as a justification for the preference of one over the other.