- What is a Shakespearean Text? -

Some of Shakespeare's plays were printed in his lifetime in small single editions abou the size of thing modern paperbacks, called quartos, because the sheets of hand-made paper that made up the booklet were folded into fours.

As an actor and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain's Men theatre company (later renamed the King's Men), Shakespeare primarily wrote for the stage. Scholars have debated how much (if any) interest Shakespeare took in the printing of his plays. None of Shakespeare's original play manuscripts survive, though we have his handwriting on legal documents and his contribution to a multi-authored play, Sir Thomas More. Seven years after Shakespeare's death, two of his fellow-actors collected his plays and published them in 1623 as Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. This is the famous First Folio. A copy of the First Folio owned by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, traveling the country in celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's death, will be at the Salt Lake Public Library this fall from October 8-31. 

In 1632, a second edition of Shakespeare's complete works was published. Known as the Second Folio, this edition included a new dedicatory poem by John Milton, the author of Paradise Lost.

- Printing the First Folio -

What exactly did Shakespeare's colleagues John Heminge and Henry Condell deliver to the printers in 1623? For some plays, they might have had Shakespeare's foul papers (the author's original manuscript). For other plays, they might have used the book of the play (the prompt book created by the acting company from the author's text). In some cases, they used the printed quartos.

The printing process is illustrated in the picture [to the right] from the title page of Bernard von Mallinckrot's history of typography, printed in Cologne in 1640.

I. The compositors insert moveable type into frames called forms.

II. Using ink balls, a worker applies ink on the type in the completed forms.

III. The pressmen lay paper on top of the forms in the letterpress. By pulling a lever, they press a plate (the platen) onto the paper, imposing the ink.

IV. A worker removes the printed paper from the form.

V. Proofreaders check the completed sheets before they are sewn together into gatherings.

- Quarto and Folio -

Shakespeare was already a successful actor, playwright, and poet - having pushlished two long poems in 1593 and 1594 - when in 1594 his first plays were published in quarto: Titus Andronicus and Henry the Fourth Part Two, hardly his most well-known works today.

Even in Shakespeare's lifetime the texts of his plays were not stable: in the collaborative world of theatre, lines changed as they were rehearsed and performed, and play-texts were altered to fit staging circumstances. Punctuation and spelling were not standardized in Shakespeare's time, and some details of the printed text of his plays were clearly influenced by the tastes of the compositors (the workers in early modern printing presses who set the metal type for printing).

The result of all this tumult is that we have multiple version of many of Shakespeare's plays. There are so many differences between quarto and First Folio versions of King Lear, for example, that many modern scholars think of them as two separate plays: The Tragedy of King Lear and The History of King Lear.

The most famous line from Hamlet appears in the First Folio as: "Ham. To be, or not to be, that is the Question:" But in the 1603 quarto of the play - Q1, one of four separately published quartos of Hamlet, sometimes called the "bad" Quarto - the line is: "Ham. to be, or not to be, I there's the point".