The Quarto and Folio Editions

The texts of Shakespeare’s plays that we read today are not what Shakespeare wrote. They are editorial reconstructions built from early printed books — quartos and folios — that were produced under conditions ranging from careful to chaotic, and that often contradict each other in significant ways.

What a Quarto Is

A quarto is a small book produced by folding a printed sheet twice, creating four leaves and eight pages. In Shakespeare’s time, quartos were the standard format for cheap, popular print — pamphlets, ballads, and plays. They were affordable, portable, and quick to produce. Between roughly 1594 and 1622, about half of Shakespeare’s plays appeared in quarto editions, some during his lifetime and with varying degrees of reliability.

The critical distinction among quartos is not format but source. Some quartos derive from good manuscripts — possibly authorial drafts, or company prompt books, or texts prepared for publication with some care. These tend to be well-printed, coherent, and reasonably complete. The second quarto of Romeo and Juliet (1599), the 1600 quartos of Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the 1604–05 second quarto of Hamlet are generally considered reliable texts.

Others — the so-called bad quartos — appear to have been assembled by less authoritative means: actors’ memories, notes taken during performance, or imperfect manuscripts. The tell-tale signs are garbled passages, shortened scenes, speeches that lose their characteristic Shakespearean rhythm, and lines that are simply wrong. The first quarto of Hamlet (1603) is the most notorious example. It is roughly half the length of the standard text, contains numerous confused passages, and includes the famous variant “To be, or not to be — ay, there’s the point” in place of “that is the question.” The 1603 Hamlet gives scholars a working text of a kind, but not a reliable one.

The reason bad quartos exist is structural. Plays belonged to the company, not the playwright. Printers who wanted a text had to obtain one by whatever means were available — sometimes from a company that had decided to release an old script, sometimes from shadier sources. Shakespeare appears to have made no effort to supervise the printing of his plays, and the system gave him no mechanism to do so even if he had wanted to.

What a Folio Is

A folio is a larger, more prestigious format — a sheet folded once, creating two leaves and four pages. Folios were expensive to produce and expensive to buy, associated with serious literature: Bibles, legal volumes, major historical works. When Ben Jonson published his collected works in folio in 1616, it was a deliberate and somewhat controversial claim to literary status. Plays, in the received opinion of the time, were not literature.

Shakespeare’s First Folio appeared in 1623, seven years after his death, compiled by his fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell. It contained thirty-six plays, organised into comedies, histories, and tragedies. Eighteen of those plays — including Macbeth, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure, Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, and Coriolanus — had never been printed before in any form. Without the First Folio, those plays would exist only in manuscripts that have since been lost. They would be gone.

Heminges and Condell described their editorial project in the prefatory letter as a rescue operation: they were saving Shakespeare’s work from “stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors,” replacing them with texts from “true original copies.” This claim has been scrutinised by scholars for four centuries. The Folio texts are not consistently better than the quartos; in some cases they appear to derive from the same imperfect sources, and in others they introduce new problems. But the Folio is authoritative in the most practical sense: it is what we have, and for eighteen plays it is the only thing we have.

The First Folio was also a cultural statement. Ben Jonson’s prefatory poem — “To the memory of my beloved, the author, Mr. William Shakespeare” — described him as a writer “not of an age, but for all time.” The Folio positioned Shakespeare as a canonical literary figure in the way that classical authors were canonical: worthy of a collected edition, worthy of serious readership, worthy of posterity. This reframing — from commercial playwright to literary monument — began with the Folio and continued through the editorial tradition that followed it.

When the Texts Differ

The relationship between the quarto and folio texts of the same plays is one of the most complex problems in Shakespearean scholarship, and its resolution affects every edition a reader picks up.

Sometimes the differences are minor: variant spellings, different punctuation, small substitutions of one word for another. Sometimes they are substantial. Othello exists in a quarto (1622) and a folio (1623) that differ in hundreds of lines — the Folio has passages not in the quarto, the quarto has passages not in the Folio, and the two texts make different choices about Desdemona’s speech before her death.

King Lear presents the most extreme case. The quarto (1608) and the Folio offer texts so different from each other — in plot details, in the presence or absence of entire scenes and characters, in the resolution of the story — that many modern scholars now treat them as two distinct plays, both Shakespearean but representing different stages of composition or revision. Some editions print both texts in parallel. Others combine them into a conflated text that represents no single version Shakespeare wrote. Every editorial choice is a choice between imperfect options.

Hamlet exists in three early texts: the bad first quarto, the longer second quarto of 1604–05, and the Folio text of 1623. The second quarto has passages not in the Folio; the Folio has passages not in the second quarto. A modern edition of Hamlet is therefore always an editorial construction, choosing which version to follow line by line and passage by passage.

How Printing Introduced Error

Elizabethan printing was a manual process at every stage. Type was set by hand, one character at a time, by compositors working from manuscripts that were often difficult to read. Each forme — a page of set type — was proofed and corrected mid-run, which means different copies of the same edition could contain different readings depending on when they were printed. Spelling was not standardised; the same word might appear differently within a single page. Damaged or worn type produced letters that were hard to distinguish. A compositor tired or inattentive late in a working day would introduce errors that no one caught.

The manuscripts themselves were often problematic. A prompt book revised for performance would have annotations, deletions, and additions. An authorial draft might be written quickly and illegibly. A reconstructed text built from memory would have confident errors — things that sounded right but were wrong — alongside obvious gaps. Every stage of the process from Shakespeare’s pen to the printed page introduced the possibility of corruption.

This is not a counsel of despair. The texts we have are usable and often very good. But they are not transcripts of what Shakespeare wrote. They are the products of a transmission process that was imperfect at every point, and understanding that imperfection is part of understanding the plays.

The Later Folios

Three further folios followed the First: the Second Folio (1632), the Third Folio (1663–64), and the Fourth Folio (1685). Each introduced its own round of corrections, modernisations, and new errors. The Third Folio added seven plays — including Pericles — that had not appeared in the First, along with several plays Shakespeare almost certainly did not write. By the time of the Fourth Folio, the canon had expanded through accretion to include material whose attribution was already questionable.

The later folios are not without value — they preserve readings and stage directions that the First Folio lacked — but they move progressively further from any contact with Shakespeare himself, and the additions they introduced to the canon required later editors to make decisions about authenticity that are still debated.

What This Means for Readers

Every modern edition of Shakespeare is an editorial act. When you read Hamlet, you are reading a text that combines readings from the second quarto and the First Folio, with editorial judgements resolving the conflicts between them. When you read King Lear, you are reading either one of the two early texts, or a conflation of them, or (in some recent editions) one text accompanied by the other. When you read Macbeth, you are reading a Folio-only text that has been through several centuries of editorial revision and may contain passages interpolated by another hand.

None of this makes the plays less available or less meaningful. It does mean that the texts have a history — that what we read is the product of a long chain of transmission from Shakespeare’s pen through compositors, printers, actors, and editors down to the present edition. That chain is part of the story of the plays, and understanding it is part of understanding Shakespeare.

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