None of the quartos believed by modern scholars to be unauthoritative was used unaltered as copy for the Folio. As men of the theatre, Heminges and Condell had access to theatre copies, and they made considerable use of them. For some plays, such as Titus Andronicus (which includes a whole scene not present in the quarto), and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the printers had a copy of a quarto (not necessarily the first) marked up with alterations made as the result of comparison with a theatre manuscript. For other plays (the first four to be printed in the Folio—The Tempest, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Measure for Measure—along with The Winter’s Tale and probably Othello) they employed a professional scribe, Ralph Crane, to transcribe papers in the theatre’s possession. For others, such as Henry V and All’s Well That Ends Well, they seem to have had authorial papers; and for yet others, such as Macbeth, a theatre manuscript. We cannot always be sure of the copy used by the printers, and sometimes it may have been mixed: for Richard III they seem to have used pages of the third quarto mixed with pages of the sixth quarto combined with passages in manuscript; a copy of the third quarto of Richard II, a copy of the fifth quarto, and a theatre manuscript all contributed to the Folio text of that play; the annotated third quarto of Titus Andronicus was supplemented by the ‘fly’ scene (3.2) which Shakespeare appears to have added after the play was first composed. Dedicating the Folio to the brother Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, Heminges and Condell claimed that, in collecting Shakespeare’s plays together, they had ‘done an office to the dead to procure his orphans guardians’ (that is, to provide noble patrons for the works he had left behind), ‘without ambition either of self profit or fame, only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare’. Certainly they deserve our gratitude.
The Modern Editor’s Task
It will be clear from all this that the documents from which even the authoritative early editions of Shakespeare’s plays were printed were of a very variable nature. Some were his own papers in a rough state, including loose ends, duplications, inconsistencies, and vaguenesses. At the other extreme were theatre copies representing the play as close to the state in which it appeared in Shakespeare’s theatre as we can get; and there were various intermediate states. For those plays of which we have only one text—those first printed in the Folio, along with Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Edward III-the editor is at least not faced with the problem of alternative choices. The surviving text of Macbeth gives every sign of being an adaptation: if so, there is no means of recovering what Shakespeare originally wrote. The scribe seems to have entirely expunged Shakespeare’s stage directions from The Two Gentlemen of Verona: we must make do with what we have. Other plays, however, confront the editor with a problem of choice. Pared down to its essentials, it is this: should readers be offered a text which is as close as possible to what Shakespeare originally wrote, or should the editor aim to formulate a text presenting the play as it appeared when performed by the company of which Shakespeare was a principal shareholder in the theatres that he helped to control and on whose success his livelihood depended? The problem exists in two different forms. For some plays, the changes made in the more theatrical text (always the Folio, if we discount the bad quartos) are relatively minor, consisting perhaps in a few reallocations of dialogue, the addition of music cues to the stage directions, and perhaps some cuts. So it is with, for example, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Richard II. More acute—and more critically exciting—are the problems raised when the more theatrical version appears to represent, not merely the text as originally written after it had been prepared for theatrical use, but a more radical revision of that text made (in some cases) after the first version had been presented in its own terms. At least five of Shakespeare’s plays exist in these states: they are 2 Henry IV, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, and King Lear.
The editorial problem is compounded by the existence of conflicting theories to explain the divergences between the surviving texts of these plays. Until recently, it was generally believed that the differences resulted from imperfect transmission: that Shakespeare wrote only one version of each play, and that each variant text represents that original text in a more or less corrupt form. As a consequence of this belief, editors conflated the texts, adding to one passages present only in the other, and selecting among variants in wording in an effort to present what the editor regarded as the most ‘Shakespearian’ version possible. Hamlet provides an example. The 1604 quarto was set from Shakespeare’s own papers (with some contamination from the reported text of 1603). The Folio includes about 80 lines that are not in the quarto, but omits about 23 that are there. The Folio was clearly influenced by, if not printed directly from, a theatre manuscript. There are hundreds of local variants. Editors have conflated the two texts, assuming that the absence of passages from each was the result either of accidental omission or of cuts made in the theatre against Shakespeare’s wishes; they have also rejected a selection of the variant readings. It is at least arguable that this produces a version that never existed in Shakespeare’s time. We believe that the 1604 quarto represents the play as Shakespeare first wrote it, before it was performed, and that the Folio represents a theatrical text of the play after he had revised it. Given this belief, it would be equally logical to base an edition on either text: one the more literary, the other the more theatrical. Both types of edition would be of interest; each would present within its proper context readings which editors who conflate the texts have to abandon.