Shakespeare: Folio and Quarto Texts

Folio and Quarto Texts Of Shakespeare's Plays

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. By Michael J. Cummings...© 2003 Revised in 2006 . .......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 theateragoers 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.

.......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, some inaccurate--were in circulation. Shakespeare's poetry also appeared in different versions. In at least one instance, a printer even published poems of other authors under Shakespeare's name in hopes of capitalizing on the magic of his byline.
.......There were two publishing formats: quarto and folio, which are explained below. 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. To what extent the original manuscripts of the plays had been edited is uncertain. 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. In 1664, a second printing of the 1663 folio included the first publication of Pericles, Prince of Athens.
.......The following paragraphs explain the difference between quarto and folio formats.

........Quarto: A quarto is sheet of printing paper folded twice to form eight separate pages for printing a book.
........To better visualize a quarto, hold before you a standard sheet of typing paper and fold it as you would a letter.
........You now have a rectangular piece of paper. Fold the paper again to form it into a square (or near square).
........Now unfold the paper and lay it flat before you. Notice that the sheet of.paper now has four sections on one side
........and four on the other. In Shakespeare's time, printing paper was folded in this way. Each of the four sections
........on one side became a page, and each of the .four sections on the other side became page. Thus, there were eight
........pages in all. Each of these pages was about a foot high.

........Folio: A folio is a sheet of printing paper folded once to form four separate pages for printing a book.
........To better visualize a folio, hold before you a standard sheet of typing paper and fold it as you would a letter.
........You now have a rectangular piece of paper. Hold it so it opens from right to left. What you are looking at is Page 1.
........Now turn the flap from right to left to open the rectangle. You are now looking at Pages 2 and 3 separated by a
........crease. When you close the right flap over the left, you will be looking at Page 4. A folio was considerably larger
........than a quarto.

........The publishing industry operated under the control of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, a trade organization which the government established and supervised in order to guard against printing subversive books or books unduly critical of the Crown. If a play met government standards--that is, if it did not attempt to inflame the people against the crown--a publisher could print and sell the play.
........Over the centuries, publishers of Shakespeare's works used both quarto and folio texts to prepare new editions of his works edited to reflect spelling and punctuation rules current at the time. They also made other editing changes. Today, the most popular editions of Shakespeare--such as The Riverside Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, and The Arden Shakespeare--generally contain nearly identical texts of his works. However, close reading of them will reveal some slight variations in wording and punctuation, as well as in the interpretation of difficult passages.