Folio and Quarto Texts

Of Shakespeare's Plays

• William Shakespeare and other authors of his time wrote their plays for acting companies whose primary purpose was to stage plays rather than publish them

• To print and sell a play in book form was to give rival acting troupes and theatergoers access to the script, thereby diminishing its potential to profit from stage performances. 

• Nevertheless, unscrupulous publishers sometimes bought copies of plays from equally unscrupulous actors who had obtained a handwritten copy of the play or had written it down from memory

• Occasionally, a publisher attended a play and copied the script himself while actors performed their parts. For example, publisher John Danter, hoping to make money by selling Romeo and Juliet, used notes taken during a 1597 performance of the play to piece together a copy of it for public sale

Which is the same as…

• These methods of acquiring a copy often resulted in the publication of scripts with many errors

• To preserve the integrity of a play, the acting company that owned the script sometimes made its own arrangements to publish the text

• Consequently, different printed versions of the play--some accurate (good quarto), some inaccurate (bad quarto) -- were in circulation

• There were two publishing formats: quarto and folio, which will be further explained

• The plays containing errors generally were in quarto form, although some good copies were published in this format

• In 1623, friends and admirers of Shakespeare compiled a reasonably authentic collection of 36 of Shakespeare's plays in a folio edition of more than 900 pages that was entitled Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories & Tragedies

• The printer and publisher was William Jaggard, assisted by his son Isaac. This edition became known as The First Folio

• Because of the presumed authenticity of this collection, later publishers used it to print copies of the plays. Other folios were printed in 1632, 1663 and 1685

Quarto and folioQuarto: A quarto is sheet of printing paper folded twice to form eight separate pages for printing a book

Folio: A folio is a sheet of printing paper folded once to form four separate pages for printing a book 

This line is somehow similar in all three

Text presentation in The Folio

Act and scene divisions in the

Folio

Acts• A major division in a play• Often, individual acts are divided into smaller units

("scenes") that all take place in a specific location. • Originally, Greek plays were not divided into acts. They

took place as a single whole interrupted occasionally by the chorus's singing

• In Roman times, a five-act structure first appeared based upon Horace's recommendations. This five-act structure became a convention of drama (and especially tragedy) during the Renaissance

• Shakespeare's plays have natural divisions that can be taken as the breaks between acts as well; later editors inserted clear "act" and "scene" markings in these locations

Acts• Though modern editions nearly always

divide Shakespeare's plays into acts, among the early texts, only the First Folio has act divisions, and does not use them consistently.

• It is very doubtful that Shakespeare thought of his plays as having a five-act structure, or composed them in acts.

• The Folio's use of Latin titles (e.g. Actus Secundus, scaena prima for Act Two, Scene One) is a reminder that act division is a feature that makes these English plays more "classical" and makes the Shakespeare Folio look more like an edition of Roman plays, such as, for example, the Renaissance editions of the Latin comedies of Terence

Scenes• Sometimes the

First Folio also marks scenes

• However, not all scenes are marked explicitly as shown

Scene divisions• Unlike acts, scenes are

important subdivisions of Shakespeare's plays if they are understood as units of action during which one set of characters enters and leaves the stage

• In this sense, most scenes are generally marked in the early editions, beginning with 'Enter' and ending with 'Exit' or 'Exeunt'

First Folio 1623

Categories of plays

Decoration?

Handling of rare manuscript

Do remember!!!

• No editing of any sort done in all the folios since these plays are collected merely to commemorate Shakespeare

• In the following century, when readers found it difficult to understand the bard’s works, it started the need to innovate the edition

Innovations in presenting Shakespeare’s playtext in the 18th

century*

• Footnotes done by proper editors (to explain obsolete terms)

• Inclusion of illustrations (adornment)

*Important since the reading public becomes bigger and publishers have to attract these readers for sale

Which editions?

• Nicholas Rowe 1709• Nicholas Rowe 1714 (2nd edition)• Lewis Theobald 1740 (2nd edition)• Thomas Hanmer 1743-4 (1st edition)• John Bell 1774, 1776, 1786• John Boydell 1789• George Steevens 1793

Nicholas Rowe

Special features in Rowe’s 1709 edition

• Modernised the punctuation and spelling to the practice of his day

• The first edition in octavo, following the four Folios of the seventeenth century

• The first to bear an editor’s name• It contained the first formal biography of William

Shakespeare, completed with the aid of researches done in Stratford-upon-Avon by the Restoration actor Thomas Betterton, who worked with actors who had known Shakespeare. The biography included several of the legends relating to Shakespeare’s life, including arguably the most famous one of how he was caught poaching deer at Charlecote Park

Special features in Rowe’s 1709 edition

• A Dramatis Personae was attached to each play for the first time

• The first complete division of the plays into acts and scenes

• The edition was also the first to include illustrations, which were based on contemporary stage performances of the plays. The plates therefore give valuable evidence of early eighteenth century stage costume, showing that the plays were staged in what would have been modern costume at the time. For example Macbeth wears a three-cornered hat and William and Mary style wig and coat while Hamlet’s mother wears a late Stuart gown.

The Seventeenth Century actor Thomas Betterton playing Hamlet, from an engraving in Nicholas Rowe's 1709

edition of Shakespeare's Works.

The most ambitious…

• Grangerised editionsA work has been grangerised if

illustrations have been added from other sources, usually other books

Can refer to the mutilation of books by removing their illustrations for this purpose

Who’s responsible for this innovation?

• James Granger, who would have lived and died as an obscure parish published in 1769 A Biographical History of England from Egbert the Great to the Revolution, which combined a chronological catalogue of prints with biographical information. This was a huge success, even among people who didn’t collect portrait prints, and went through several editions.