Bad quarto

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Bad quarto is a term and concept developed by twentieth-century Shakespeare scholars to explain some problems in the early transmission of the texts of Shakespearan works.

A basic heuristic of palaeography is that the earliest texts in a line of transmission are to be favored over later texts. In the copying of manuscipts, the earliest texts will have the fewest scribal errors and be closest to the author's original intent; the later a text is, the worse it generally is. As bibliography evolved out of palaeography, it was influenced by the same heuristic, which clearly does apply in some cases. (From the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, the plays of Shakespeare were performed in adaptations that varied widely, even wildly, from their creator's intent, while the older texts gave a much better representation of authorial intention.) The mechanical process of printing, however, complicates this heuristic; subsequent printings of a given work plainly do allow for the correction of typographical and other errors, and also for authorial revisions, so that later texts can provide a better delivery of the author's meaning.

For Shakespeare, the First Folio of 1623 is the crucial document; of the thirty-six plays contained in that collection, eighteen have no other source. The eighteen other plays had been printed—usually in quarto form though occasionally in octavo—at least once between 1594 and 1623; but since the prefacatory matter in the First Folio itself warns against the earlier texts, which are termed "stol'n and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by frauds and stealths of injurious impostors," eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editors of Shakespeare tended to ignore the quatro texts in favor of the Folio.

Gradually, however, it was recognized that the quarto texts varied widely among themselves; some were much better than others. It was the bibliographer Alfred W. Pollard who originated the term "bad quarto" in 1909, to distinguish several texts that he judged significantly corrupt. He focused on four early quartos: Romeo and Juliet (1597), Henry V (1600), The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602), and Hamlet (1603). His reasons for citing these three texts as "bad" were that they featured obvious errors, changes in word order, gaps in the sense of the text, jumbled printing of prose as verse and verse and prose, and similar problems.

It was at first suspected that these texts represented shorthand reporting, a practice mentioned by Thomas Heywood:^[1] reporters would surreptitiously take down a play's text in shorthand during a performance, thus pirating a popular play for a competing interest. But W. W. Greg and R. C. Rhodes argued instead for an alternative theory: since some of the minor speeches varied less than those of major characters, their hypothesis held that the actors who played those minor roles had reconstructed the play texts from memory—giving an accurate report of the parts they themselves had memorized and played, but a less correct report of the other actors' parts.

The idea caught on among Shakespeare scholars. Peter Alexander added The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster (1594) and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (1595), the earliest versions of Henry VI, Part 2 and Henry VI, Part 3, to the roster of bad quartos; these were previously thought to be source plays for Shakespeare's later versions of the same stories. The concept of the bad quarto was extended to play texts by authors other than Shakespeare, and by the second half of the twentieth century the idea was widely accepted as valid.^[2]

Some problems remained with the hypothesis, however; the sheep-and-goats division of texts into "good" and "bad" categories was not always easy or elegantly simple. Consider the determination that Q1 of Richard III is a bad quarto, "even though it is an unusually 'good' bad quarto."^[3] Alexander himself recognized that the idea of memorial reconstruction did not apply perfectly to the two plays he studied, which possessed problematical features that could not be explained this way. He maintained that the quartos of the two early histories were partial memorial reconstructions.

And individual dissenters were not lacking. A few critics—Eric Sams is one prominent example, Hardin Craig another—disputed the entire concept of memorial reconstruction, pointing out that, unlike shorthand reporting, there was no reliable historical evidence that actors ever reconstructed plays from memory. In this skeptical view, memorial reconstruction is purely a modern fiction divorced from any underlying Elizabethan reality.

In the skeptics' view, all Elizabethan and Jacobean printed texts are corrupt to one degree or another. The First Folio contains hundreds of errors of various types—typographical errors injected by the typesetters, and errors reflecting problems and quirks in the underlying manuscripts too. The earliest quarto texts of Shakespearean plays are the most defective precisely because they are the earliest; later reprintings benefitted from the natural tendency toward more and better proofreading, correction, and improvement. The hypotheses of bad quartos and memorial reconstruction also rely upon an unspoken assumption: that Shakespeare never, or only rarely, revised his works. The opposite assumption, that Shakespeare regularly revised his work (as for new performances of older plays), would explain some characteristics of varying texts: the parts of major characters differ more than those of minor characters from text to text, precisely because the parts of major characters would be the ones rewritten during revision. (In this view, Shakespeare worked like the modern playwright Tennessee Williams, who repeatedly revised some of his plays, especially the less successful ones, for new productions.) Which alternative does the evidence favor? That is a central point of dispute.^[4]

The hypothesis of memorial reconstruction by actors (Sams abbreviated it to MRA) also requires the supposition that the actors reconstructing the texts were able to improvise lines and passages of verse that are often no worse than Shakespeare's. Some critics also have been troubled by the inherent ideological bias in the bad/good designation.^[5] For these and similar reasons, the strong consensus in favor of the bad-quarto theory began to waver toward the end of the twentieth century.

[edit] Notes

1. ^ In the Prologue to his 1605 play If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody.
2. ^ Halliday, Shakespeare Companion, p. 49.
3. ^ Evans, Riverside Shakespeare, p. 754.
4. ^ Some scholars have argued that the more challenging plays of the Shakespearean canon, like All's Well That Ends Well and Troilus and Cressida, make sense as works that Shakespeare wrote at one time and later revised. And Steven Urkowitz has famously argued the hypothesis that King Lear is a revised work, in Shakespeare's Revision of "King Lear."
5. ^ De Grazia, "essential Shakespeare."

[edit] References

• Alexander, Peter.Shakespeare's Henry VI and Richard III. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1929.
• Craig, Hardin. A New Look at Shakespeare's Quartos. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 1961.
• De Grazia, Margareta. "The essential Shakespeare and the material book." Textual Practice Vol. 2 No. 1 (1988), pp. 69-86.
• Evans, G. Blakemore, textual editor. The Riverside SHakespeare. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1974.
• Halliday, F. E. A Shakespeare Companion 1564-1964. Baltimore, Penguin, 1964.
• Pollard, Alfred W. Shakespeare Folios and Quartos. 1909.
• Rhodes, R. C.Shakespeare's First Folio. 1923.
• Urkowitz, Steven. Shakespeare's Revision of "King Lear." Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1980.