The first quarto of Romeo and Juliet is a small book carrying a large accusation. Printed in London in 1597, it is the earliest printed text of the play: a version some seven hundred lines shorter than the text readers know, rougher in its verse, freer in its wording, and far richer in stage directions. For most of the twentieth century, scholarship filed it under a single damning adjective and moved on. The first quarto was a “bad quarto,” a pirated and corrupt report of the real play, useful only as a warning. The verdict argued through this study is that the accusation fails. The 1597 quarto is a derivative text, and its debts to a fuller version stand exposed in its own loose ends, but derivative is not the same as worthless, and “bad” is not a description of the book at all. It is a verdict delivered in 1909, three centuries after the book was printed, and it conceals more than it reveals. Read on its own terms, the first quarto is the closest surviving witness to Romeo and Juliet as a working theatre text: compressed, fast, theatrically literate, and printed with a care that its nickname denies.

That rehabilitation is not a fringe position. Lukas Erne, who edited the first quarto for the New Cambridge Shakespeare Early Quartos series in 2007, describes it as “a carefully printed text” with “exciting stage directions,” “a shorter, tightened text with considerable pace, and an important number of intelligent alternative readings,” and concludes that in some respects it is “the best witness we have for the dramatic and theatrical practices of Shakespeare and of his company.” Stephen Orgel’s judgement, quoted in Erne’s introduction, goes further: evidence for the nature of a performing text in Shakespeare’s theatre is scarce, “but there is a little. There are the ‘bad’ quartos, whose evidence, in this respect, is not bad, but excellent.” The pages that follow lay out the object itself first: what the book is, who printed it, what its title page claims, how long it runs, what it contains, and where its wording shines or breaks down. Only then do they turn to the label, because the label’s history is the real story. A reader who finishes here will know what the first quarto actually is, which is the one thing its nickname was designed to prevent.

One circumstance makes the stakes plain. Romeo and Juliet survives in three substantive early texts, the two quartos and the First Folio version of 1623, a privilege it shares in the canon only with Hamlet. Three witnesses should mean three times the evidence about how the play was written, played, and read in its first decades. Instead, the earliest witness spent most of the twentieth century under a general order of exclusion, mined for occasional corrections to the text that replaced it and denied a hearing on everything else. The cost was not sentimental. Every question the shorter text might have answered, about the company’s casting, its cutting practice, its sense of an afternoon’s length, its clown’s place in the fiction, waited unasked while the answers sat in print. This study’s business is restitution: to put the first quarto back on the stand, examine what it actually says, and let the label answer for itself afterward.

What Is the First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet?

The first quarto is a playbook: a single play printed in quarto format, the small, cheap format in which most professional plays reached print in the 1590s. Quarto sheets were folded twice to make gatherings of four leaves, producing a book not much larger than a modern paperback, sold unbound for a few pence at booksellers’ stalls around St Paul’s Churchyard. Its title page, transcribed in full, reads: “An Excellent conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet. As it hath been often (with great applause) plaid publiquely, by the right Honourable the L. of Hunsdon his Servants. London, Printed by John Danter. 1597.” Every element of that page earns attention. “Conceited” in 1597 meant ingeniously devised, a term of praise for the play’s wit and construction rather than a slur on its vanity. The title page names no author. Shakespeare’s name appears nowhere in the book, and the play would not carry his name on a title page until an undated fourth quarto years later. The book was also never entered in the Stationers’ Register before publication. Romeo and Juliet and Love’s Labour’s Lost are the two plays of the canon for which no entry or licence prior to publication has been found, an absence that later fed the piracy charge, though unentered publication was a trade irregularity rather than proof of theft.

The company named on the title page fixes the book’s moment with unusual precision. The players were Shakespeare’s own company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, but for a short interval they traded under a different patron’s name. Henry Carey, first Lord Hunsdon and the company’s patron as Lord Chamberlain, died in July 1596; his son George Carey succeeded him as Lord Hunsdon but did not become Lord Chamberlain until April 1597. Edmond Malone pointed out in the 1821 Variorum that the style “L. of Hunsdon” could apply only between 22 July 1596 and 17 April 1597. A title page is advertising, and advertisements can lie, but this one advertises a company name that existed for roughly nine months, and the window it opens sits exactly where the 1597 imprint says it should. The title page also makes the book’s first claim about itself: the text offered for sale is the text of a stage success, played often and applauded publicly. Whatever else the first quarto is, it presents itself as a performance text, and its contents, examined below, keep that promise more faithfully than its detractors allowed.

What kind of printer was John Danter?

John Danter was a London printer whose shop had already produced the first edition of Titus Andronicus in 1594. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature calls him one of the least reputable members of the trade, given to printing pirated works and scurrilous pamphlets. His name colours, but cannot settle, any judgement about his copy.

Danter’s reputation did real damage to the first quarto’s standing, because it let later scholars treat the printer’s character as evidence about the manuscript he printed from. That inference is weaker than it looks. A disreputable printer can set type from good copy, and a respectable one can set type from bad; the presswork of the 1597 Romeo and Juliet is, by the standards of cheap 1590s playbooks, competent, which is why Erne calls the result a carefully printed text. The book is also rare in a way that has nothing to do with its quality. The Census of Shakespeare’s Plays in Quarto published in 1916 registered only four copies of the 1597 Romeo and Juliet, three of them in public ownership; popular playbooks were read to pieces, and a small survival count is the normal fate of a cheap book that people actually used. Rarity, roughness, and a raffish printer: the first quarto’s raw materials for a bad reputation were all in place before anyone had examined its text.

How does the Hunsdon name on the title page date the book?

The Hunsdon style dates the book because George Carey held the Hunsdon title without the chamberlainship for only about nine months, from his father’s death in July 1596 until his own appointment as Lord Chamberlain in April 1597. A company billing itself as the Lord of Hunsdon’s servants belongs to that interval, and Malone fixed its limits in 1821.

The dating matters beyond pedantry. It confirms that the play was established in the company’s repertory, performed “often” and “with great applause,” no later than the winter of 1596 to 1597, and it anchors the first quarto in the middle of the play’s first stage life rather than at its margins. The book is not a late reconstruction of a fading success. It is a by-product of the production while the production was new, printed by a trade printer for a market that the applause had already created. That is the object the rest of this study examines: a 1597 playbook, anonymous, unentered, roughly three-quarters the length of the familiar text, and carrying inside it the fullest surviving record of how the tragedy moved on its first stage.

The imprint repays a moment’s suspicion in the opposite direction as well. Danter’s title page names the printer and stops; it does not name the bookseller from whose shop the edition was sold, the line that customarily completed a playbook’s imprint and that the second quarto supplies with Cuthbert Burby’s shop. The omission leaves the book’s distribution unrecorded, a small silence typical of a hurried trade and useless as evidence about the copy’s provenance, since an imprint describes a book’s manufacture rather than its manuscript. Scholars who read the whole apparatus of the title page, company, applause, printer, date, as an inadvertent confession of piracy were over-reading a page that was written, like all title pages, to sell copies to playgoers. Its rhetoric is commercial from first word to last: excellence, ingenuity, applause, a noble patron, a current production. Judged as advertising it is competent and, on the dating evidence, honest. The book it introduces deserves the same initial presumption, to be judged by inspection rather than by the company its printer kept.

The InsightCrunch Q1 Fact Sheet: Date, Length, and Features at a Glance

The brief’s findable artifact for this article is a fact sheet on the first quarto’s date, length, and features, and it is named here as the prose around it requires: the InsightCrunch Q1 fact sheet. It gathers the verifiable facts of the book in one place, separating what the title page and the collation establish from what scholars have inferred. Every figure in it is argued out in the sections that follow, but a reader who needs the shape of the object quickly, printer, scale, contents, survival, and label, can take it from the InsightCrunch Q1 fact sheet alone.

Feature	The First Quarto (Q1) of Romeo and Juliet
Publication	London, 1597, the first printed edition of the play
Printer	John Danter
Title as printed	An Excellent conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet
Acting company named	The right Honourable the L. of Hunsdon his Servants
Author named on title page	None; the book is anonymous
Stationers’ Register entry	None made before publication
Length	About 2,232 lines, against about 3,007 in the second quarto
Structure	A continuous sequence of scenes, with no act divisions
Second Chorus speech	Absent; the opening Prologue is printed
Stage directions	Fuller, more numerous, and more descriptive than the later text’s
Peter’s speech headings	The part is headed “Clown” in places rather than Peter
Surviving copies	Four registered in the Census of Shakespeare’s Plays in Quarto (1916)
Standard modern edition	Lukas Erne, editor, New Cambridge Shakespeare: The Early Quartos (2007)
Traditional label	“Bad quarto,” a category invented by A. W. Pollard in 1909

Two rows of the fact sheet deserve emphasis before the detail begins. The first is the length row, because the arithmetic of the two quartos is the foundation of every theory about the shorter text: the second quarto carries some seven hundred lines more than the first, and is, in Erne’s phrase, almost one third longer. The second is the stage-direction row, because it records the one respect in which the shorter book is the fuller one. The only part of the first quarto that exceeds the corresponding part of the second, Erne observes, is its stage directions, which tend to be more detailed and more numerous in the shorter text. A corrupt abridgement made by careless pirates is not supposed to out-write its source anywhere. This one does, in exactly the department that belongs to the stage.

A third row earns its emphasis on reflection: the empty one. The Stationers’ Register row records an absence, no entry before publication, and absences are the most dangerous evidence in bibliography because they invite the reader to fill them with narrative. The traditional account filled this one with piracy, and the label built the filling into a felony. Yet the row itself states only that a formality was skipped, in a trade where formalities were skipped for reasons ranging from haste to thrift to a disputed ownership that no surviving document describes. The fact sheet keeps the row empty on purpose. What the register does not contain is a fact; what the silence means is an argument, and the argument is conducted in the sections on the label below, where it belongs, rather than smuggled into a table of facts.

The First Quarto as a Physical Object: Paper, Print Shop, and Survival

Before the text comes the thing. The first quarto was a commodity manufactured for quick sale: printed sheets folded twice into gatherings, stitched or left loose, and sold unbound, as the Folger Shakespeare Library’s account of the play’s publication puts it, for a few pence, the price of admission to the public theatre whose applause its title page advertises. No author’s name dignified it, no dedication sought a patron, no list of characters helped the reader; the book offered nothing but the play and the company’s credit. Such books were bought to be used, carried to the theatre, lent among friends, read aloud, and discarded when they fell apart, and the wonder is not that so few survive but that any do. The 1597 Romeo and Juliet entered the world as the cheapest durable form of a famous entertainment, and every feature of its later scholarly treatment, its rarity, its roughness, its anonymity, follows from that first fact of manufacture. Bibliographers who approached it as a failed monument misread its genre. It was an ephemeral that happened, against its makers’ expectations, to become evidence.

Its afterlife in print charts the trade’s own verdict, which differs from the scholars’. The play was reprinted in quarto four more times before the theatres closed: the second quarto of 1599, printed by Thomas Creede for Cuthbert Burby; a third in 1609, which the Folger introduction notes was reprinted from the second; a fourth, undated, which Carter Hailey’s bibliographical work assigns to 1623 and whose printer appears to have consulted the first quarto for some corrections and word choices; and a fifth in 1637. The sequence instructs. The trade discarded the first quarto’s text as its copy-text within two years, standard commercial practice when a fuller manuscript became available, yet the fourth quarto’s printer still reached back to the condemned book when the received text faltered, exactly as Pope and modern editors would do. And it was on that undated fourth quarto that Shakespeare’s name first appeared on a title page of this play, a reminder that the book-buying public learned to want the author’s name only gradually. The first quarto’s own century thus treated it neither as treasure nor as trash but as stock: superseded, occasionally useful, and entirely unembarrassed. The embarrassment is modern.

The survival figures belong to the same corrective. When Pollard published his Census of Shakespeare’s Plays in Quarto in 1916, the most energetic hunter of these books the field has produced, he could register four copies of the 1597 Romeo and Juliet, three in public ownership. Set the number in its class: one copy of the 1594 Titus Andronicus, two of the first Hamlet, three of the first Richard II, four and a fragment of the first Richard III, five of the Merry Wives, six of Henry V. The four “pirated” quartos, as the census calls them, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, the Merry Wives, and Hamlet, muster seventeen copies between them, about half the average survival of the first quartos as a whole, a disparity the census itself connects with the wear and tear of popularity: books that were read disappeared. Pollard the census-taker, counting four survivors, and Pollard the theorist, branding their text bad, were the same man working seven years apart, and the census volume quietly refutes the use later made of the brand. A book of which four copies survive from a cheap edition is not a book its age despised. It is a book its age consumed. The first quarto’s physical history, manufacture, reprinting, consumption, is the biography of a success, and any account of the text that ignores the object will mistake the scars of use for the marks of crime.

What the First Quarto Proves About the Play’s First Life

A printed playbook is also a dated artefact in the biography of its play, and the first quarto fixes several points in Romeo and Juliet’s early life that no other document fixes as firmly. The Yale edition’s history of the play gathers the internal evidence: the play’s rhymes, metres, and dense verbal quibbling support a composition date before 1596, probably at some time between 1593 and 1595, with reason to believe the text later underwent slight revision. The first quarto’s title page then certifies the outcome of those years of work. By the time Danter printed the book, the tragedy had been played “often” and “with great applause” by the Lord of Hunsdon’s servants, a company style that, on Malone’s showing, could be used only between July 1596 and April 1597. The sequence matters for every theory of the book. Print followed success; the quarto is a souvenir of a repertory hit in its first seasons, not a rescue of a neglected script and not a mausoleum for a dead one. Whatever passed between the company’s playhouse and Danter’s printing house passed while the production was current, the applause still warm, and the actors still playing the parts the book imperfectly or faithfully preserves. Priority in time is the first quarto’s unanswerable credential: of the play’s three early texts, it is the only one that belongs wholly to the play’s first life, and evidence from it about that life, about repertory, casting, and cutting, comes from inside the moment rather than from recollection of it.

The echoes begin at once. One of the first English allusions to the play appears in John Marston’s Scourge of Villanie of 1598, the year after the quarto, which shows the tragedy already quotable in satire, already part of the common stock of the town’s theatre talk. The allusion and the quarto corroborate each other: a play satirised within a year of its first printing was a play the town knew, and a play the town knew was a play whose text had commercial value in a bookstall. This is the market the first quarto served, and recognising the market dissolves one of the label’s quiet assumptions, that a short and rough text must have been foisted on an unwilling public by thieves. Booksellers print what playgoers will buy. The 1597 Romeo and Juliet, with its applauded company on the title page and its two-hour playing length inside, is a product aimed squarely at the audience the performances had created, readers who had seen the tragedy or meant to, and who wanted Verona in their pockets. Its roughness, on this reading, is not the mark of a botched theft but the acceptable finish of a fast-made souvenir, a standard the buyers of 1597 evidently shared, since the trade went on reprinting the play for forty years.

The quarto also disciplines the play’s chronology in a way scholars sometimes underuse. Because the Hunsdon style on its title page belongs to the winter of 1596 to 1597, the tragedy must by then have completed the whole journey from composition through rehearsal to established repertory success: written, on the internal evidence, between 1593 and 1595, staged often enough to earn the advertisement of applause, and valued enough by its owners or its printer to justify the cost of type and paper. Every later document in the play’s early life, the second quarto’s corrections, the allusions, the reprints, unfolds from a success already achieved when the first quarto appeared. The book is therefore not merely the earliest text of Romeo and Juliet. It is the earliest dated proof that the play had conquered its stage, and the foundation stone on which the play’s entire documentary history rests.

How Long Is the First Quarto, and What Does It Leave Out?

The conventional line counts give the first quarto about 2,232 lines and the second about 3,007, which makes the shorter text roughly three-quarters of the familiar one; the Folger Shakespeare Library’s introduction to the text describes it as “only about two-thirds the length of later versions,” and the brief behind this study uses the same phrase. The discrepancy is a counting matter, since prose passages, shared verse lines, and stage directions are tallied differently by different counters, but the substance is not in dispute: about a quarter of the play, some seven hundred lines, is absent from the 1597 book. What matters is how the absence is distributed, because the distribution is evidence. The two versions have the same characters and dramatise the same events in the same order. Every dramatic movement of the longer text has its equivalent in the shorter except two: the Chorus speech that closes the first act in modern editions (“Now old desire doth in his deathbed lie,” 1.5.144-57) is not in the first quarto at all, and a short opening sequence for the Capulet serving-men at the start of the ball scene (1.5.1-14) is likewise absent. Beyond those two gaps, nothing structural is missing. Scenes are not reordered, subplots are not amputated, and no character of consequence disappears. The shortening is done inside speeches and inside scenes, line by line, which is the signature of abridgement for performance rather than of a text falling apart.

Erne’s scene-by-scene comparison sharpens the picture. Each scene of the first quarto is shorter than its equivalent in the longer text, but the ratios vary widely: one scene survives at less than half its later length, while another, the second scene of the play, keeps more than ninety per cent of the fuller text. The wedding scene is the famous casualty. The Folger introduction notes that after tracking the later version closely through the first two acts, the first quarto “offers a wedding scene that is radically different from the one in later texts,” and for the last three acts its language “varies widely” from the fuller version, with speeches abbreviated into forms that strike most readers as awkward beside the originals. The relationship between the texts, as Erne puts it, is relatively close in the first seven scenes, from 1.1 to 2.4, and becomes looser in the remainder of the play. Long set speeches suffer most: soliloquies are trimmed, lyrical expansions are cut back to their narrative bones, and passages of ornamental rhetoric that a playing company might shed on a busy afternoon are shed. What survives everywhere is the plot’s skeleton and the dialogue’s working machinery. A text shortened by forgetting would lose connective tissue at random, scenes collapsing where memory failed. A text shortened by decision loses decoration first, and the first quarto loses decoration first. The Second Quarto of 1599: The ‘Good’ Quarto is the fuller text against which every one of these measurements is taken, and its own making is the next study in this cluster.

The book’s own articulation of the action tells the same story of a text organised by playing rather than by reading. The first quarto prints no act divisions at all: its scenes follow one another in a continuous sequence, twenty movements from the street brawl to the tomb, articulated only by the clearing and filling of the stage. The five-act architecture of the standard text, with its act-break curtains in the theatre and its act headings on the page, descends from later editorial practice and from the Folio’s classicising presentation, not from the 1597 book. The difference is not cosmetic. A continuous text imagines a continuous performance, the tragedy unreeling without formal pause from the Prologue to the Prince’s closing couplet, its momentum carried by entrances and exits rather than by act structure; the first quarto’s celebrated pace is partly this architecture made visible. It also means that every act-and-scene reference in this study, 1.1, 2.4, 4.5, is a courtesy extended by modern editions, a grid laid over a book that knew no grid. Erne’s edition, which numbers the first quarto’s scenes in sequence, restores the original articulation and lets a reader feel the difference: the play as a stream of scenes, each ending when the stage empties, is a more breathless object than the play as five balanced acts, and breathlessness is the quality the shorter text’s admirers from Warburton onward have prized in it. Structure, like the stage directions, is evidence of use, and the use it evidences is performance at full tilt.

The texture of the verse changes with the compression. The first quarto’s lines are, on the whole, metrically more irregular than the second quarto’s, with short and long lines scattered through speeches that scan smoothly in the fuller text. The two texts also disagree about the border between verse and prose. The first quarto prints Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech (1.4) as verse, where the second quarto sets it as prose; conversely, several of Lady Capulet’s speeches in the third scene are prose in the first quarto and verse in the second, and the Nurse has prose in the ball scene that the later text versifies. Speech assignments occasionally shift as well: two lines the first quarto gives to Montague’s wife in the opening scene belong to Montague in the second quarto, and a short passage in the invocations scene (2.1) that the fuller text gives to Benvolio is Mercutio’s in the shorter. Entrances and exits mostly match, with one telling exception held for the stage-direction discussion below. None of these features is a fingerprint of fraud. They are the ordinary scars of a text that has lived in a theatre, where speeches are cut, reassigned, and relineated to fit the company and the afternoon.

The scale of the shorter text carries one further implication that its defenders have pressed and its detractors have never comfortably answered. The Prologue the first quarto prints promises its audience “the two hours’ traffic of our stage” (Prologue, line 12), the conventional estimate for an afternoon’s playing. The fuller text, spoken entire, runs well past that allowance; at ordinary playing pace it is a three-hour script, which is why acting editions have cut it in every century since. The first quarto, at some 2,232 lines, fits the Prologue’s own measure with room to spare. A text that has been cut to the length its own Chorus advertises looks less like a ruin than like a working script, whatever road it travelled to reach that length, and the memorial theory has to explain why forgetfulness should stop so precisely at the dimensions of performance. Coincidence is possible. Design is simpler. The distribution of the losses examined in this section, decoration first, machinery intact, points the same way as the arithmetic: toward a text shaped by the practical discipline of the stage, a discipline that valued pace over amplitude and cues over ornament. That is the company the first quarto keeps, and the remaining sections test what follows from keeping it.

Which scenes shrink the most in the first quarto?

The shrinkage is uneven, and its extremes are measurable. One scene of the first quarto runs to less than half the length of its fuller counterpart, while the play’s second scene keeps more than ninety per cent of its lines, and the wedding scene is recast thoroughly enough that the Folger introduction calls it radically different.

The pattern of the losses is the informative part. Lyrical and rhetorical amplitude goes first: the long speeches in which characters dilate on love, grief, or fortune are cut back hardest, while short functional exchanges, entrances, orders, and narrative links survive nearly intact. The last three acts diverge more than the first two, so the compression deepens as the play proceeds toward its catastrophe. A reader mapping the cuts learns the playing company’s priorities with unusual clarity: keep the story moving, keep the cues clean, and let the poetry take the losses. That priority list is a theatrical document in itself, and it is one of the reasons the shorter text, whatever its origin, cannot be dismissed as mere debris. Debris does not have priorities.

Does the first quarto keep the whole plot of the play?

The first quarto keeps the whole plot. Every event of the tragedy occurs in it, in the same order: the street brawl, the ball, the balcony, the secret marriage, the killings, the banishment, the potion, the tomb. Only two movements of the longer text lack equivalents, the second Chorus speech and the serving-men’s bustle, and neither carries plot.

This completeness is worth dwelling on, because it distinguishes the 1597 Romeo and Juliet from the other texts Pollard grouped with it. The first quarto of Hamlet rearranges and renames, holding a scene found nowhere else; the first quarto of Henry V drops major figures entirely. The first quarto of Romeo and Juliet drops no one and rearranges nothing. Its differences from the familiar play are differences of fullness and phrasing, not of architecture, which is why the two texts can be printed in parallel columns and followed together, as Jay L. Halio’s parallel-text edition prints them. A plot is the hardest thing to reconstruct from faulty memory and the easiest thing to preserve in an authorised abridgement, and the first quarto’s intact architecture is the first fact any theory of its origin has to explain.

Stage Directions in the First Quarto: The Book’s Fullest Voice

If the first quarto’s dialogue is a compressed version of the familiar play, its stage directions are an expansion of it. This is the text’s most distinctive feature and, in the argument of this study, its most valuable one. Directions in the second quarto tend toward the functional minimum: entrances, exits, fights, deaths. Directions in the first quarto narrate. They specify properties, gestures, groupings, and small pieces of stage business that the later text leaves to inference, and they do so in a continuous present tense that reads like the record of a performance watched by someone who knew where to look. Erne’s summary is exact: the only part of the first quarto longer than the corresponding part of the second quarto is the stage directions, which tend to be more detailed and more numerous in the shorter text. The book that supposedly garbles everything it touches is, in this one department, the more precise of the two witnesses, and the department in question is the one that belongs wholly to the stage rather than to the study.

Individual directions carry the argument. In the scene modern editions number 3.4, where Capulet presses the Paris marriage on a household in mourning, Chikako Kumamoto’s study of time and stage directions in the two quartos singles out a first-quarto direction in which Paris offers to go in and Capulet calls him again: a tiny social hesitation, the suitor starting to withdraw and the father detaining him, spelled out in the direction because the dialogue alone does not mark it. Directions in the final scene show the same narrative habit at the tragedy’s climax. Both quartos have Balthasar and Friar Laurence arrested and brought before the Prince by the watch, but where the second quarto brings the Friar in first, the first quarto brings in Balthasar before the Friar, a difference in the order of the evidence at the moment Verona’s authorities assemble the story. The tomb scene’s properties, torch, mattock, and crow of iron, are inventoried with a property-keeper’s care. Even the speech headings join in. In the first quarto, the Capulet servant Peter is in places headed not by his name but by his function, “Clown,” before the text identifies him as Peter; theatre historian Bart van Es notes the designation, and it preserves the casting reality behind the fiction, the company’s clown playing the servant, in a way no literary manuscript would bother to do. The famous actor-named direction in this play’s early texts, “Enter Will Kemp,” belongs to the second quarto rather than this one, which makes the first quarto’s quieter “Clown” headings the more telling: the book does not name the actor, it simply never forgets that an actor is there.

What these directions are worth depends on a question this article deliberately touches only at instance length, because the question has an article of its own later in the cluster: whether a text so saturated with performance detail should be read as a performance text. The pointer is enough here. A book whose unique surplus is stage business, whose cuts are a playing company’s cuts, and whose headings remember the clown under the character’s name, is a book that has been near a stage. One more feature of the book points the same way, and it cuts against the orthodox story at its weakest joint. Halliday’s settled doctrine held that the bad quartos were reconstructed for performance “by a reduced cast” on provincial tour, yet the first quarto of Romeo and Juliet, alone among Pollard’s exhibits, keeps the fuller text’s entire population: Erne’s comparison stresses that where the first quarto of Henry V omits notable characters present in the Folio, and the first quarto of Hamlet rearranges its material, this text drops no one. A company cutting a play down for a handful of travelling players cuts people; the dramatis personae is where a reduced cast shows. The first quarto’s cast list is the full Verona of the longer version, servants, watchmen, musicians, and all, which means the shortening happened where a full company would do it, in the speeches, not where a depleted one would, in the roster. The book’s theatricality is therefore not the theatricality of the road and the makeshift. It is the theatricality of the play’s own company at full strength, and the distance between that fact and the label’s story of provincial pirates is the distance the label never managed to explain.

Janette Dillon’s caution, raised in her 1994 Shakespeare Quarterly essay “Is There a Performance in This Text?”, that stage directions are slim evidence for reconstructing actual performances, disciplines the claim but does not dissolve it: even a sceptical reading leaves the directions as the first quarto’s most original contribution, the place where it stops echoing the familiar play and starts testifying on its own behalf. Is Q1 a Performance Text? The New View takes up that testimony in full.

Taken together, the directions amount to a second, silent text running beneath the dialogue, and its grammar is consistent enough to describe. Where the familiar text’s directions ration information to what a reader needs to follow the plot, the first quarto’s directions behave like the notes of a man watching the stage with a pen: they notice the suitor’s hesitation that the dialogue leaves unmarked, they count the tools at the tomb, they keep the order in which prisoners are produced when the catastrophe is explained, and they remember which servant is the clown. None of this is the behaviour of a text assembled from a literary manuscript by a pirate who never saw the play. A manuscript’s directions are prescriptive, written before performance to instruct it; these directions are descriptive in grain, written in the idiom of performance remembered or observed. Bibliographers have a term for the prescriptive kind, authorial or playhouse copy, and the first quarto’s directions fit neither cleanly, which is precisely their interest. They are the record of the play as an event, kept by the only early text that treats the event as worth recording, and every production history of Romeo and Juliet that reaches back before the Restoration leans on them, knowingly or not, because there is nowhere else to lean.

What do the first quarto’s stage directions record that dialogue cannot?

The directions record the physical event underneath the words: who is on stage, in what order they arrive, what they carry, and what their bodies do while the speeches run. They register Paris’s half-withdrawal and recall in 3.4, the watch’s order of prisoners in the final scene, and the tomb’s tools, none of which the spoken text states.

Dialogue in any early modern playtext underdetermines performance, since actors supplied gesture and grouping that the author never wrote down. A direction that preserves those choices is the closest thing the period offers to a promptbook’s memory, which is why editors and directors mine the first quarto’s directions even while rejecting its dialogue. The asymmetry is the point. Generations of editors who trusted this book’s directions implicitly, printing its business into the standard text, were trusting the very witness they called corrupt whenever it spoke. The directions do not prove the dialogue genuine, but they prove the book’s proximity to the stage, and proximity to the stage is the quality the “bad quarto” label was invented to deny.

First Quarto Passages Readers Prize: The Short Text in Its Own Words

Judging the first quarto by its differences from the second quarto is fair only if the differences are actually read, and reading them produces a surprise: many are not errors but alternatives, coherent speeches that take the same dramatic moment by a different road. Erne’s edition prints the parallel passages for comparison, and three of them carry this section. Early in the play, the two texts run close. Romeo’s definition of love in the opening scene (Q2, 1.1.181-5) runs in the fuller text: “Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs, / Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes, / Being vexed, a sea nourished with loving tears.” The first quarto (1.118-22) answers: “Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs, / Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes, / Being vexed, a sea raging with a lover’s tears.” Two substitutions, “raised” for “made,” “raging” for “nourished,” and a singular lover for the plural. Nothing is garbled; the conceit survives intact with its antitheses in order. This is the first quarto at its characteristic best, a wording at one remove from the familiar one, close enough to show kinship and different enough to be nobody’s misprint.

The substitutions repay a closer look, because they show the shorter text thinking. A sea “nourished” with tears grows by feeding, a quiet paradox in the fuller version’s chain of paradoxes; a sea “raging” with a lover’s tears storms, trading the paradox for the more obvious fitness of vexation and weather. The exchange is characteristic of the first quarto’s variants at their best and worst at once: sense preserved, image coarsened a degree, the line made slightly easier to grasp at first hearing. Defenders of the text read such variants as the fingerprints of performance, wording adjusted by the ear’s needs in a noisy yard; its detractors read the same coarsening as memory’s blur. Both readings agree on the fact that matters for a portrait of the book: the variant is intelligent. It construes the passage, keeps its grammar, and lands its sense. The first quarto’s failures, catalogued in the next section, are failures of completeness, not of comprehension, and the distinction is the whole difference between a corrupt text and a compressed one. A corrupt text misunderstands its original. This text, passage by passage, demonstrably understands the play it shortens.

The distance widens late in the play, and the apothecary passage of 5.1 shows the shorter text at its most characteristic. The fuller version (Q2, 5.1.37-45) lingers over the shop: “And in his needy shop a tortoise hung, / An alligator stuffed, and other skins / Of ill-shaped fishes, and about his shelves / A beggarly account of empty boxes.” The first quarto (18.28-32) compresses the same memory into five lines: “As I do remember, / Here dwells a ‘pothecary whom oft I noted / As I passed by, whose needy shop is stuffed / With beggarly accounts of empty boxes; / And in the same an alligator hangs.” The tortoise has vanished, the alligator has changed its posture from stuffed specimen to hanging one, and the shop itself has absorbed the word “stuffed.” Yet the anchors hold: remember, dwells, noted, needy shop, beggarly accounts of empty boxes, alligator, hangs. A reader collating the two speeches word by word needs a durable system for keeping parallel passages, variant lists, and scene ratios in order, and a private research vault built for exactly that kind of long project, such as VaultBook, serves the collator better than a scatter of loose notes. What the collation shows here is neither copying nor invention but transformation: the speech’s furniture rearranged by a mind that knew what the speech was for and no longer had its exact wording, or had never needed it.

The third passage is the one that breaks the corruption model outright. When Capulet finds Juliet apparently dead, the fuller text (Q2, 4.5.59-64) gives him the great anaphoric lament: “Despised, distressèd, hated, martyred, killed! / Uncomfortable time, why cam’st thou now / To murder, murder our solemnity? / O child, O child! my soul, and not my child! / Dead art thou. Alack, my child is dead, / And with my child my joys are burièd.” The first quarto (17.85-9) gives him a different speech altogether: “Cruel, unjust, impartial destinies, / Why to this day have you preserved my life? / To see my hope, my stay, my joy, my life, / Deprived of sense, of life, of all by death? / Cruel, unjust, impartial destinies!” The rhetoric is parallel, a grieving father apostrophising the powers that preserved him for this sight, but the wording shares almost nothing with the later version. Nobody mishears a speech into a new speech of this finish. Either an actor rebuilt the moment from its emotional outline, producing competent verse under pressure, or the moment existed in more than one authorial form. On any account, the first quarto at this point is not a broken copy of the second. It is a rival performance of the same grief, and readers who meet it in Erne’s edition meet a Capulet they have never heard before. The systematic collation of such moments across the whole play belongs to Q1 vs Q2: What the Differences Reveal; the passages here stand as this text’s portrait gallery, evidence of what the shorter book contains when it is read rather than sentenced.

Two further exhibits support the portrait. Eric Sams, in his quatercentenary reappraisal of the 1597 quarto, pointed out that modern editions print, at 1.4.7-8, Benvolio’s line about having no “without-book prologue” faintly spoken after the prompter for the maskers’ entrance, a line that survives only in the first quarto, so that the standard text silently depends on the corrupt one at the very moment it condemns it. Sams also observed that the first quarto’s vocabulary is proportionally richer than the second’s, running to some 3,272 distinct words, a density of invention he thought an unlikely achievement for reporting actors. And the first quarto has had distinguished champions before its modern rehabilitation. In the eighteenth century, William Warburton preferred it to the longer text, holding that the “trifling and bombast passages” were far more numerous in the additions; in the early twentieth century Theodor Eichhoff edited the first quarto and argued its superiority over the second in passage after passage. Eichhoff overshot, as Erne notes, finding reasons to prefer the shorter text virtually everywhere, but the existence of his edition proves the point that matters: whenever the first quarto has been edited on its own terms rather than mined for corrections, it has found serious readers willing to call it good.

A third passage deserves its place in the gallery, because it shows the shorter text inventing in a distinctively Shakespearean direction. As Romeo waits at Friar Laurence’s cell for the marriage the lovers arranged that morning, the first quarto gives him lines found nowhere else: “This morning here she pointed we should meet, / And consummate those never-parting bands, / Witness of our hearts’ love by joining hands, / And come she will.” Sams, quoting the lines in his reappraisal, notes the trap they set for the orthodox account: the passage must be classed as an actor’s interpolation, yet its solemnity about the marriage bond, its insistence that joining hands witnesses a sacrament rather than a assignation, conforms precisely to the playwright’s attested reverence for the marriage ceremony elsewhere. Actors reporting a play are not supposed to improve its theology. Either the reporting actor had absorbed the author’s habits of mind to an uncanny depth, or the lines descend from the author’s own pen by a route the theory cannot map. The first quarto keeps producing these embarrassments, small passages that behave like original work in a text certified as secondhand, and the accumulation, not any single instance, is what has eroded the certificate.

Which first-quarto readings have editors adopted into the standard text?

Editors have adopted more of the first quarto than its reputation suggests. Benvolio’s “without-book prologue” line before the ball survives in no other early text, yet modern editions print it; individual first-quarto readings have repeatedly corrected the second quarto and the Folio where those texts falter, and its stage directions pass into standard editions wholesale.

The pattern is older than the label. Alexander Pope, editing in the 1720s, drew eclectically from both quartos, choosing whichever version he preferred and at times combining the two within a single passage or line, a practice Erne records in his history of the text. Pope’s eclecticism treated the first quarto as a witness with authority of its own, entitled to win individual contests against the fuller text. The “bad quarto” verdict reversed that presumption: after 1909, a first-quarto reading needed a special excuse to be admitted. Modern practice, without announcing the change, has drifted back toward Pope. Editors still base the standard text on the second quarto, but they consult the first as a matter of course, and the readings they take from it, its prologue line, its directions, its corrections, accumulate into a quiet admission that the witness was never as bad as its name.

Where the First Quarto Will Not Stand Alone: The Loose Ends

Honesty about the first quarto requires the other exhibit case, because some of its passages cannot be understood from within its own pages. They lean on the fuller text, and the leaning is the strongest single evidence that the shorter version is derivative, a descendant of something like the second quarto rather than an ancestor of it. In the scene modern editions number 3.2, Juliet, alone, swings between cursing Romeo for killing Tybalt and defending him, and the first quarto (11.41-5) ends the movement: “A blister on that tongue! He was not born to shame. / Upon his face shame is ashamed to sit. / But wherefore, villain, didst thou kill my cousin? / That villain cousin would have killed my husband. / All this is comfort.” The closing phrase dangles. “All this” points backward to a consolation the speech has not fully built; in the second quarto (3.2.102-7), six lines stand between the defence and the conclusion, the tears sent back to their native spring, the logic spelled out: “My husband lives that Tybalt would have slain, / And Tybalt’s dead that would have slain my husband: / All this is comfort.” The first quarto keeps the conclusion and drops the reasoning that earns it. Memory abridging in haste explains that shape exactly; an author drafting freely does not amputate his own syllogism and keep its stump.

The second exhibit is smaller and just as damning. In the banter scene of 2.4, Romeo begs pardon for neglected courtesy: “I cry you mercy. My business was great, and in such a case as mine a man may strain courtesy” (Q1, 7.42-6). Mercutio answers with the quibble about bowing in the hams, and Romeo replies, “A most courteous exposition.” Between Mercutio’s joke and Romeo’s reply, the second quarto (2.4.42-8) inserts Romeo’s “Meaning to cur’sy” and Mercutio’s “Thou hast most kindly hit it,” the turns that make the pun on courtesy and curtsy work. The first quarto omits them, and its Mercutio pun hangs in the air unexplained, a joke whose mechanism has been left in the other text. A third class of evidence runs through the play’s source. Shakespeare worked from Arthur Brooke’s poem Romeus and Juliet, and at moment after moment the second quarto echoes Brooke’s wording where the first quarto does not: where Brooke and the fuller text have Capulet “provided” a gentleman of “noble” parentage for Juliet (3.5.176-86), the first quarto’s Capulet has “found out” a gentleman of “princely” parentage (14.138-49), and the verbal echoes of the source evaporate; where Brooke’s mourners bear the corpse “to their church” and the fuller text’s Friar says “bear her to church” (4.5.79-90), the first quarto’s Friar says “Convey her where her ancestors lie tombed” (17.103-8); where Brooke’s Juliet purposes to pray and the fuller text gives her “many orisons” (4.3.3-4), the first quarto’s Juliet has merely “many things to think upon” (17.6-7). Echoes are likelier lost in transmission than invented at revision in passage after passage. Erne assembles this evidence and draws the conclusion it supports: the version behind the first quarto developed away from a text that stood closer to Brooke, which is to say, closer to the fuller play.

One rival explanation of the loose ends deserves a hearing before the verdict, because it is the strongest card the first quarto’s defenders hold. Suppose the shorter text is not a report at all but a deliberate abridgement, made from the company’s own manuscript by hands authorised to shorten the play for performance. An abridger with the full text open on the desk cuts cleanly: transitions are rewritten, references to cut material are adjusted, and no conclusion is left standing on a missing premise, because the abridger can see the premise and knows the conclusion needs it. The first quarto’s damage has the opposite shape. It preserves conclusions and loses premises, keeps jokes and drops their setups, retains the destination of an argument and mislays the road. That is not the profile of a man editing a document in front of him. It is the profile of a text that passed through a medium in which the ends of speeches, the quotable summits, lodged more firmly than the connective slopes between them, which is to say, through performance and recollection, whether the recollection was an actor’s, a shorthand writer’s, or a company’s collective memory of its own production. The distinction matters because it disciplines the rehabilitation this study argues. The first quarto is not a tidy acting edition descended in a clean line from the author’s papers. It is a text that lived in men’s minds and mouths before it lived on Danter’s pages, and its authority, where it has authority, is the authority of that life rather than of the desk.

These exhibits adjudicate the first of this article’s disagreements. Y. S. Bains argued that the first quarto is an authorial first draft, Shakespeare’s own earlier version, which revision then expanded into the second quarto; the draft theory had been the default reading of eighteenth-century editors, who treated the shorter text as the play in embryo. The loose ends refute it in its simple form. A first draft does not keep the conclusions of arguments whose premises exist only in its revision, jokes whose explanations were added later, or a source’s echoes present in the revision and absent from the draft. The first quarto knows things it cannot say, and what it cannot say was said in the fuller text. The verdict of this study is therefore precise: the first quarto is a secondary text, derived from the play in something like its fuller form, and its defenders do it no service by pretending otherwise. But derivation settles origin, not value, and the next two sections show how a true fact about origin was inflated, by a label and a theory, into a false verdict about worth.

Where Did the First Quarto Come From? The Traditional Account

The traditional answer to the first quarto’s origin was assembled in stages, and its stages matter because each one hardened a suspicion into a certainty. The turning point came in 1842 to 1844, when John Payne Collier became the first editor to deny that the 1597 book was an authorised impression from an authentic manuscript. Collier proposed that the printer’s copy “was made up, partly from portions of the play as it was acted, but unduly obtained, and partly from notes taken at the theatre during representation,” resting his case on the text’s great inequality, “precisely that degree and kind of imperfectness, which would belong to a manuscript prepared from defective short-hand notes.” Collier’s own reputation later collapsed in forgery scandal, but Erne is just to him: he was the first to argue that the shorter text derives from the fuller one, he noticed the uneven quality that makes any single-cause explanation problematic, and his notion that the book partly reflects “the play as it was acted” anticipates modern thinking. Tycho Mommsen added the memory strand in 1857, arguing that such texts preserve lines “as would impress themselves more literally upon the memory of the hearer,” and the Cambridge editors of the 1860s blended shorthand with assistance from players who helped “either from memory, or by lending their parts in MS.” The ingredients of the orthodox theory, theft, shorthand, actors’ memory, were all on the table fifty years before the theory had a name.

The name and the mechanism arrived together in 1909 and 1910, and the label’s history gets its own section below. What concerns the traditional account is the use made of the new category for this play. In 1919 A. W. Pollard and J. Dover Wilson published a joint theory of the first quarto’s provenance more convoluted than anything since: the book, they held, represented an abridged version of Shakespeare’s first revision of an older, non-Shakespearean play, eked out by what a pirate could remember of the later version. E. K. Chambers reviewed the construction in 1930 and found it unsatisfactory, yet Chambers himself had no doubt that the book was “one of the bad Quartos” and “certainly a ‘reported’ text,” and he referred throughout to “the reporter” as an established personage. The fullest statement came in 1948: H. R. Hoppe’s book-length study, The Bad Quarto of Romeo and Juliet: A Bibliographical and Textual Study, set out, in its author’s words, “to demonstrate that Q1 of Romeo and Juliet is a memorial reconstruction of a version that Q2 represents in substantially correct form.” Greg endorsed the theory in The Shakespeare First Folio, and among modern editors Brian Gibbons in the Arden edition of 1980, G. Blakemore Evans in the Cambridge edition, and Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor in the Oxford Shakespeare carried it forward; Kathleen Irace’s computer-assisted study of the suspect texts gave it statistical dress. A recent Shakespeare Survey assessment confirms that this view, the first quarto as a memorial reconstruction published by Danter without the authority of its owners, remains the current orthodoxy, the foundation of which is Hoppe’s account.

The evidence offered for the orthodox account is the evidence this study has already put on the table, and it is real. The text’s unevenness is the centrepiece: near-verbatim fidelity in the early scenes, dissolving into paraphrase in the later ones, exactly the profile of reporters whose grip weakened as the play proceeded, or of a company resource that ran out. The loose ends of the previous section, the dangling “All this is comfort,” the unexplained curtsy pun, behave like the scars of imperfect recollection. The brevity fits a text assembled for use rather than for the study. The absence of a Stationers’ Register entry fits a copy the company had not licensed. None of this is imaginary, and the theory that organises it, actors reconstructing from memory a text that a printer then published without authority, explains more of the first quarto’s features in one motion than any rival yet devised. Its full trial, the counter-evidence assembled by Laurie E. Maguire’s Shakespearean Suspect Texts and the long quarrel over whether the mechanism has ever been proved for any play, belongs to Memorial Reconstruction and the Bad Quarto Myth, which argues the theory case in full. Here the point is narrower: whatever the mechanism, the first quarto that the traditional account describes is a text at one remove from the fuller play, and the tradition’s error was never the derivation. Its error was the contempt that the derivation licensed, a contempt stated with perfect clarity by J. Dover Wilson in a 1955 survey of textual work on the play: “it is a pirated edition and . . . exhibits all the stigmata we have learnt to associate with such texts . . . And that is practically all an editor needs to know about this text.” An editor needs to know considerably more, as the previous sections show, and a label that instructs editors to stop looking is a label that has stopped describing and started preventing.

Hoppe’s demonstration, for all its industry, asked its readers to accept a psychology that its critics found increasingly hard to credit. On his account, the reporters carried the play in memory with near-verbatim fidelity for its first seven scenes, then lost the thread so completely that whole speeches survive only as emotional outlines, yet still produced, in the lament for Juliet, alternative verse of finished rhetoric, and still preserved the plot’s every joint and the stage’s every significant piece of business. Sams’s cross-check states the difficulty arithmetically: the supposed act of memory reduced some 3,200 lines, stage directions included, to some 2,350, so that the reporters’ memories functioned chiefly to forget a third of the play and invent much of the remainder, while leaving consecutive whole movements intact in their proper order. Memory in the theory is required to be simultaneously stenographic and creative, failing exactly where the theory needs failure and succeeding exactly where it needs success. A mechanism that explains every possible state of the evidence explains nothing in particular, and the suspicion that the theory had become unfalsifiable, available for any short text whatever its features, is the ground on which Maguire’s audit and the revisionist case were built. The quarrel itself belongs to the cluster’s later study; the point for a portrait of the book is that the orthodox mechanism, examined closely, describes the first quarto no better than the label does. Both were built to explain the same embarrassment: a text at once derivative and alive.

The consolidation that followed shows how a theory becomes furniture. Chambers’s 1930 endorsement fixed the canon of Shakespearean bad quartos and gave the Romeo and Juliet case the weight of the period’s greatest authority; Greg’s endorsement in The Shakespeare First Folio (1955) carried it into the Folio’s own scholarship, so that the two poles of the textual tradition, quarto and Folio studies alike, certified the same story. From the handbooks the theory passed into the introductions of the editions students actually read, where it shed its qualifications on the way: Spencer’s New Penguin introduction, Gibbons’s Arden introduction, and the Oxford Complete Works apparatus all present the reported-text account as the text’s settled identity, and a student meeting the play in any of them learns the verdict before learning that a second early text exists to be read. The paradox of the period completes the picture. It was Greg himself who in 1939 initiated the Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles series, the publishing project that put photographic copies of the early quartos, the bad ones included, into the hands of any scholar who wanted them. The theory said the first quarto need not be read; the facsimiles made it readable; and for half a century scholarship held both facts without noticing the contradiction, citing the book in apparatus while leaving its pages unopened. Consensus of that kind is not evidence. It is an agreement to stop collecting evidence, and it lasted exactly as long as nobody with a facsimile on the desk chose to read the shorter play through.

What evidence made scholars call the first quarto a reported text?

The evidence was the text’s uneven fidelity. Its early scenes track the fuller version closely, sometimes line for line, while its later scenes loosen into paraphrase, drop connective passages, and keep conclusions whose reasoning has vanished. That profile, fidelity decaying across the evening, looked like the signature of memory failing under load.

Collier saw the inequality first and blamed shorthand; Mommsen saw the memorable lines standing out verbatim amid the paraphrase and blamed, or credited, the hearer’s memory; Hoppe systematised both observations into the memorial-reconstruction account. The reading was never foolish. A text assembled from an authorised manuscript has no obvious reason to be excellent for seven scenes and improvised thereafter, whereas a text carried in men’s heads has every reason. What the traditional account could not explain, and what its champions mostly declined to discuss, is the surplus catalogued in this study: stage directions fuller than the authorised text’s, an intact plot architecture, a rival lament of finished rhetoric, and individual lines good enough for standard editions to steal. Reported texts in the theory are supposed to be the play with its quality drained. The first quarto keeps misbehaving by being interesting.

Who Invented “Bad Quarto”? The Label and What It Hides

The phrase “bad quarto” is not Elizabethan. No stationer, actor, or reader of 1597 called the book bad; the men who printed its successor called that successor “newly corrected, augmented, and amended,” which is a publisher’s boast rather than a bibliographer’s category. The category was invented in 1909 by the bibliographer Alfred W. Pollard in Shakespeare Folios and Quartos: A Study in the Bibliography of Shakespeare’s Plays, and it began as an act of interpretation. In the First Folio of 1623, Shakespeare’s fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell addressed readers who had “been abus’d with diverse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors.” Earlier commentators had taken the stolen copies to mean the quarto editions in general. Pollard argued that the Folio’s editors could hardly condemn all quartos, since several good ones had served as copy for Folio texts, and that the abuse must have meant a specific subset: the first quartos of Romeo and Juliet (1597), Henry V (1600), The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602), Hamlet (1603), and Pericles (1609). Those five he pronounced bad, unauthorised printings of texts stolen from the theatre, and the adjective did the rest. In the following year W. W. Greg, editing the Merry Wives quarto, supplied the mechanism: noticing “the very unusual accuracy with which the part of mine Host is reported” in that text, he concluded that “the pirate who procured the copy . . . was none other than the actor of the Host’s part,” and memorial reconstruction entered the language as both label and explanation.

From five plays the category metastasised. Peter Alexander added the early printings of the Henry VI plays and Richard III in 1929; Chambers fixed a Shakespearean canon of bad quartos in 1930; and by the 1990s the total of suspect texts, Shakespearean and not, had passed forty. F. E. Halliday’s Shakespeare Companion could state the settled doctrine for general readers: the bad quartos “were reconstructed from memory by one or more actors who had played minor parts in a London production, and tried to reproduce the play for a provincial performance. This theory is generally accepted.” Laurie E. Maguire’s Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The “Bad” Quartos and Their Contexts (1996) subjected the diagnostic features of the category to systematic audit, testing twenty-eight supposed symptoms of memorial reconstruction and finding very few of them relevant, then summarising all forty-one suspect texts; her tables remain the map of the territory Pollard fenced. What the label asserts, once unpacked, is a threefold claim: that the text is corrupt, garbled against an authentic original; that it is stolen, printed without the owners’ consent; and that it is distant, separated from the author’s manuscript by the fallible medium of performance and memory. What it conceals is everything that does not fit those three claims. It conceals that the “good” text it is measured against is itself a publisher’s product with its own compositorial errors and its own title-page salesmanship. It conceals that badness, in practice, means distance from whichever copy-text an editor has already chosen, a circular measure that convicts the shorter text for differing and then cites the differences as the crime. And it conceals the book itself: carefully printed, theatrically rich, and, on the evidence of its stage directions, closer to the play in performance than the authorised text it supposedly betrays.

The Folio address on which the whole structure rests deserves a sceptic’s reading of its own. Heminges and Condell were not disinterested witnesses. They were shareholders in the company that owned the plays, introducing an expensive collected volume whose sales pitch required the earlier cheap editions to look like frauds perpetrated on the reader: the Folio, their address promises, offers the plays “cur’d, and perfect of their limbs,” where the stolen copies had left buyers “abus’d.” That is advertising copy written by sellers with a warehouse of folios to move, and every stationer in London would have recognised its genre. Pollard’s achievement was to take the advertisement literally and build a bibliography on it, sorting real books into the sheep and goats of a salesman’s metaphor. The reading was ingenious, and Erne’s summary concedes its logic, since the Folio did use good quartos as copy and could hardly condemn its own sources. But ingenuity is not evidence, and the distinction the address actually draws may have been between authorised and unauthorised printings of any quality, or between the Folio’s texts and everything earlier whatsoever. On the weaker readings, the category of the bad quarto has no foundation document at all, only a puff for a 1623 collected edition, retrospectively promoted into a theory of transmission. The label’s authority has always rested on this single paragraph of marketing. It is a frail pedestal for a century of contempt.

The concealment had consequences that can be counted in scholarly behaviour. Under the label’s protection, the first quarto was, in Erne’s words, “referred to and discussed in introductions to editions of Romeo and Juliet,” while “editors ransacked it for what it could tell us about the play”; it “remained in the margins of Shakespeare scholarship and was rarely mentioned in the criticism.” A text that critics need not read cannot embarrass the theory that condemns it, and for most of a century the first quarto’s best passages, the rival lament, the narrative directions, the stolen-into-the-standard-text prologue line, sat in plain sight under a warning sign. The label also reached backward and falsified the book’s early life. Eighteenth-century editors, who had no category to obey, treated the 1597 text as an authorial version and argued about its merits on the evidence; Pope plundered it, Warburton preferred it. The idea that everyone always knew the first quarto was trash is itself a product of 1909. Pollard invented a shelf, and scholarship obligingly stored the book on it, unread, for the better part of a hundred years.

When was the first quarto first called a bad quarto?

The first quarto was called a bad quarto in 1909, when A. W. Pollard invented the category in Shakespeare Folios and Quartos and placed the 1597 Romeo and Juliet at the head of his list of five. Before then the book had been argued over as a draft and a report, but never filed under Pollard’s adjective.

The date deserves emphasis because the label masquerades as a period judgement, as if the book’s own age had found it wanting. In fact the verdict is younger than the motor car. Shakespeare’s contemporaries left no recorded opinion of the 1597 book’s quality at all; the next generation’s stationers reprinted the play from the second quarto, which is a commercial fact, not a critical one; and the eighteenth century, the first age to edit the play systematically, treated the shorter text as Shakespeare’s own early work. The “bad quarto” is a twentieth-century bibliographer’s tool that hardened into a slur, and remembering its birthday is the first step in retiring it.

What does the word “bad” in “bad quarto” actually claim?

The word “bad” claims three things at once: that the text is corrupt against an authentic original, that its printing was unauthorised and piratical, and that it stands at a remove from the author’s manuscript, filtered through performance and memory. It presents a theory of the book’s birth as if it were a measurement of the book’s quality.

Each claim is separable, and each has a different evidential fate. The remove from the fuller text is demonstrable; the loose ends prove descent. The piracy is an inference from silence, an unentered copy and a disreputable printer, never from a record of complaint by the company that owned the play. The corruption is a judgement that dissolves on inspection into a mixture of genuine paraphrase, defensible alternatives, and passages no theory of corruption can explain, beginning with the stage directions. A word that bundles a fact, an inference, and a dissolved judgement into one adjective is not a description but a verdict in disguise, and it should be read as one. The honest phrase for the 1597 book is the one this study has used throughout: the first quarto, a shorter, derivative, theatrically saturated version of the play, whose value is a question its readers are finally free to ask again.

The First Quarto’s Editors: How the Book Has Been Made Readable

The first quarto’s reputation has always depended on the forms in which readers could meet it, and its editorial history explains its critical one. For two centuries after 1597 the text was available chiefly inside variorum editions of the play, where it appeared as a quarry of variant readings beneath a text based on its successor: present, cited, and structurally subordinate. Frank G. Hubbard’s edition, published in the University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, changed the book’s posture for the classroom. Hubbard set out, as his preface declares, to present the text of the first quarto in modernised form so that it might readily be compared with the standard modern editions based on the second quarto and the Folio; his edition of the first quarto of Hamlet had the same design, and the two together amounted to a quiet argument that the shorter texts were objects of study in themselves, worth a student’s sustained attention rather than a footnote’s glance. Theodor Eichhoff’s German edition and comparative study, discussed earlier in this study, pressed the same claim to the point of partisanship, arguing passage by passage for the first quarto’s superiority. Between Hubbard’s pedagogy and Eichhoff’s advocacy, the early twentieth century possessed the means to read the 1597 text whole. What it lacked was the permission, and Pollard’s category, arriving in the same decades, withheld it: why read entire a book whose kind had been defined as refuse? The facsimile movement told the same story in another medium. The Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles series that Greg initiated in 1939 put photographic reproductions of the early quartos into research libraries, the first quarto of Romeo and Juliet among the texts of its period thus preserved entire, even as the theory Greg had co-founded instructed scholars to value it only in extracts. Access and contempt coexisted for decades, because each served a different scholarly task: the facsimile served the collator, who needs the whole book open beside the standard text, while the contempt served the editor, who needed a reason to print one text and demote the other to an apparatus. Jay L. Halio’s parallel-text edition broke the arrangement by formatting the two quartos as equals on facing pages, a design that makes subordination physically impossible: a reader’s eye moves between the versions as between two performances, and the shorter one keeps winning individual moments. Erne’s 2007 edition completed the sequence by giving the first quarto the full ceremonial of a modern critical edition, introduction, text, collation, commentary, in a series whose very name, The Early Quartos, retires Pollard’s adjective from the shelf-mark. The history has a moral for the label debate. Texts are not read in the abstract; they are read in editions, and a book denied an edition is denied readers. The first quarto was not refuted by the twentieth century. It was unprinted, untaught, and unread, and its rehabilitation began the moment editors started issuing it as a book again.

How Should the First Quarto Be Read? The Verdict on Q1 as a Version

The rehabilitation of the first quarto has been gathering force for a generation, and its institutional marker is the book this study has quoted throughout: Lukas Erne’s 2007 edition of The First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet for the New Cambridge Shakespeare’s Early Quartos series, the first time a major Shakespeare series gave the 1597 text a volume of its own, with introduction, collation, and commentary treating it as a text to be studied rather than a problem to be explained away. Erne’s framing is careful. His edition “does not advocate study of the first quarto for its own sake,” because the two quartos illuminate each other, and students neglect either at their peril; the New Cambridge series, by issuing separate critical editions of both, “invites comparative study of the different versions of Romeo and Juliet.” Version is the operative word. A version is a form of the work with its own integrity and its own history, answerable to the uses it was made for. A corruption is a failed copy of something else. The whole argument of this study is that the first quarto belongs in the first category and was imprisoned in the second by a word.

The witnesses for the version view are not lightweights. Stephen Orgel’s verdict has already been quoted: the so-called bad quartos are, as evidence of the performing text, “not bad, but excellent,” and “if we were less exclusively concerned with establishing texts and more concerned with the nature of plays, these would be the good quartos.” Gary Taylor, co-editor of the Oxford Shakespeare, asserted that a “bad” quarto “may represent a more finished, dramatic, socialised phase of the text than that preserved in an edition printed from Shakespeare’s foul papers,” a judgement that inverts the orthodox scale of values entirely: the derivative, theatrical text may be more finished than the authorial draft, because the theatre finished it. Jay L. Halio’s parallel-text edition embodies the same conviction in its format, printing the two quartos face to face as co-ordinate witnesses. Against these stand the orthodox line, Hoppe’s demonstration renewed by Gibbons, Evans, and the Oxford editors, that the first quarto is a memorial reconstruction, a reported text whose readings have no authority. The disagreement is genuine and this study adjudicates it in two parts, because it is really two disagreements wearing one coat. On origin, the orthodox win: the loose ends catalogued above, the dangling comfort, the stranded pun, the evaporated Brooke echoes, establish descent from the fuller play, and the early-draft theory fails. On value, the revisionists win, and it is not close: a text can descend from the fuller play by a theatrical route and still preserve, in its directions, its pace, its alternative speeches, and its handful of adopted readings, things the fuller play’s own printed form does not contain. Origin is a fact about the past. Value is a judgement about use. The “bad quarto” label survives by confusing the two, and retired as a description, it can remain only as a historical exhibit, the name of a theory that flourished between 1909 and the end of the twentieth century.

Erne states the scholarly gain of the two-text situation with precision: by preserving not only the quarto on which modern editions are based but also the first quarto, the play “may allow us to glimpse, in the gap that separates one quarto from the other, some of the transformations a Shakespeare play underwent in the first years of its existence.” The gap is the evidence. A single-text play offers its students a product; this play, almost alone in the canon, offers a process, the visible distance between what the company first put into print and what the fuller manuscript contained two years later. A short early text threatens the editorial project of establishing one authoritative wording, and the threat was neutralised by declaring the witness corrupt. Read without the declaration, the first quarto of Romeo and Juliet is what Erne calls it, a crucially important witness precisely because of its difference, the earliest form in which the tragedy can be watched working.

The practical verdict follows. Read the first quarto second, after the familiar text, because its differences are its meaning and differences need a baseline. Read it for the stage: for the directions that narrate business the dialogue omits, for the pace of a text tightened by people who had to hold an audience through a tragedy in an afternoon, and for the alternative wordings, the raging sea, the hanging alligator, the cruel and impartial destinies, that show the play’s great moments existing in more than one verbal form. Read it, finally, as the standing refutation of the assumption that the play has one fixed text at all. The series thesis of this cluster is that the familiar Romeo and Juliet is not a single object but a family of competing early versions, and the 1597 quarto is the family’s first-born: shorter, rougher, branded with an adjective it did not earn, and indispensable. The cliche of the one true text dissolves the moment a reader holds the two quartos side by side and watches the same tragedy happen twice, differently. That is what the first quarto actually contains, and it is more than its nickname ever allowed.

The fact sheet at the head of this study can now be read as the verdict in miniature. A book printed in 1597 by a trade printer, naming a great company in the nine months it bore a temporary name, anonymous as its decade expected, unentered as its decade often allowed, three-quarters the length of its successor and fuller than that successor in the one department that records performance, surviving in a handful of copies because its buyers read it to death, and branded three centuries later by a bibliographer who needed a villain for a sales pitch: every row of that sheet describes a working playbook of the first age of the play, and not one row describes a crime. The first quarto’s misfortune was to be judged by a century that had decided in advance what a Shakespeare text should look like, the author’s fair copy, entire and at rest. It looks instead like what it is, the play in motion, caught at the speed of the stage. Scholarship has begun, at last, to prefer the motion.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is the first quarto of Romeo and Juliet?

The first quarto is the earliest printed edition of the play, published in London in 1597 and conventionally abbreviated Q1. It presents a version of the tragedy about a quarter shorter than the familiar text, with the same characters, the same events in the same order, and the same plot, but with compressed speeches, many variant wordings, and stage directions far fuller than those of later editions. Printed anonymously by John Danter and never entered in the Stationers’ Register, it was for most of the twentieth century dismissed as a “bad quarto,” a pirated report of the real play. Modern editions, led by Lukas Erne’s 2007 New Cambridge text, treat it instead as a distinct early version and the fullest surviving witness to the play in performance.

Q: Who printed the first quarto, and in what year did it appear?

The first quarto was printed by John Danter in London in 1597, as its title page states. Danter was a trade printer of doubtful reputation whom the Cambridge History of English and American Literature describes as one of the least reputable members of his trade, given to pirated works and scurrilous pamphlets; three years earlier his shop had produced the first edition of Titus Andronicus. His name on the imprint later served scholars as circumstantial evidence that the copy behind the edition had been irregularly obtained. The inference is weaker than it looks, since reputation says nothing about the manuscript a printer set type from, and the 1597 book itself is competently printed, which is why its modern editor calls it a carefully printed text.

Q: What does the first quarto’s title page say?

The title page reads: “An Excellent conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet. As it hath been often (with great applause) plaid publiquely, by the right Honourable the L. of Hunsdon his Servants. London, Printed by John Danter. 1597.” It names the play as a tragedy, praises it as a stage success performed often and applauded publicly, credits the acting company by its patron’s name, and gives the printer and the year. It does not name the author, and it does not name a bookseller from whose shop copies were sold, an omission the second quarto’s title page would repair by naming Cuthbert Burby’s shop. The page is the book’s own account of itself: a performed play, offered to readers on the strength of the stage.

Q: Why is the 1597 edition called Q1?

The 1597 edition is called Q1 because bibliographers abbreviate each early edition by its format and its order of publication: Q for quarto, the small format made by folding a printed sheet twice, and 1 for the first such edition of the play. The second quarto of 1599 is Q2, the third of 1609 is Q3, and the collected edition of 1623 is F1, the first folio. The shorthand is neutral in itself, a shelf-mark rather than a judgement, which is precisely why textual scholars who reject the “bad quarto” verdict still use it. Q1 says when the book came and what shape it is. It says nothing about whether the book is any good, and that silence is the abbreviation’s virtue.

Q: How many lines long is the first quarto?

The first quarto runs to about 2,232 lines, against about 3,007 in the second quarto of 1599, so roughly seven hundred lines of the familiar play are absent from it. The Folger Shakespeare Library describes the shorter book as only about two-thirds the length of later versions; line counts vary slightly between tallies because prose passages and shared verse lines are counted differently, but the scale of the difference is stable. The loss is not spread evenly. One scene keeps more than ninety per cent of its fuller length, another falls below half, and the final three acts diverge from the longer text far more than the first two. Every scene is present, and the whole plot stands.

Q: How many copies of the first quarto survive?

Very few. The Census of Shakespeare’s Plays in Quarto, published in 1916 under A. W. Pollard’s direction, registered only four copies of the 1597 Romeo and Juliet, three of them in public ownership. Cheap playbooks were working objects, bought unbound for a few pence, read, lent, and discarded, and the survival rate of the whole class is dismal: the same census counts a single copy of the 1594 Titus Andronicus and two of the first Hamlet quarto. The first quarto’s rarity is therefore evidence about the fragility of cheap print rather than about the book’s reception. A text nobody wanted would have been pulped unsold in the printer’s warehouse; a text everybody read was read to pieces, and four survivors are what heavy reading leaves behind.

Q: Why does the first quarto carry no author’s name?

The first quarto carries no author’s name because playbooks of the 1590s were usually sold on the strength of the acting company and the play’s stage success rather than the writer, and Romeo and Juliet’s title page follows that commercial pattern exactly, advertising the Lord of Hunsdon’s servants and their applauded performances. Shakespeare’s name sold poems before it sold plays: his narrative poems had carried his name since 1593, but no play title page bore it until Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1598, and Romeo and Juliet itself did not carry his name on a title page until an undated fourth quarto. Anonymity was the period’s default for printed plays, not a mark of suspicion, and editors who treated the missing name as evidence of piracy were reading a later age’s marketing back into 1597.

Q: What does “conceited” mean in the first quarto’s title?

In the first quarto’s title, “conceited” means ingeniously conceived or wittily devised, and it is praise. The word in 1597 belonged to the vocabulary of invention: a conceit was a striking idea or an elaborate figure of wit, and a conceited tragedy was one artfully contrived, full of the verbal ingenuity the play in fact displays in its sonnet exchanges, its wordplay, and its patterned lamentation. The modern sense of conceited as vain or self-admiring had not yet taken the word over. The title therefore compliments the play’s construction, pairing with “Excellent” to make the title page a small advertisement for cleverness: an excellent, ingeniously devised tragedy. Read with the period’s dictionary, the book’s first word about itself is a boast about its artistry, which sits oddly beside the adjective posterity chose for it.

Q: Who were the Lord Hunsdon’s servants named on the title page?

The Lord Hunsdon’s servants were Shakespeare’s own acting company, the players known for most of their history as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Their patron, Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, held the office of Lord Chamberlain; when he died in July 1596 his son George Carey inherited the Hunsdon title but not immediately the chamberlainship, which came to him in April 1597. During that interval the company was billed by the family title rather than the office, and the first quarto’s title page preserves the temporary name. The company included Shakespeare as actor and sharer, Richard Burbage as its leading tragedian, and Will Kemp as its clown. The name on the title page is thus a dating instrument as much as a credit, fixing the book to a nine-month window discussed in the body of this study.

Q: Which speech does the first quarto print as verse that the second quarto prints as prose?

The Queen Mab speech in 1.4. Mercutio’s vision of the fairies’ midwife, galloping through lovers’ brains and soldiers’ dreams, is set as verse in the first quarto and as prose in the second quarto, a disagreement about the speech’s form that shows how differently the two texts were prepared for the press. The border between verse and prose shifts elsewhere as well: several of Lady Capulet’s speeches in the play’s third scene are prose in the first quarto and verse in the second, and the Nurse speaks prose at the ball in the shorter text that the longer text versifies. Such shifts are characteristic of the first quarto’s transmission, in which the visual form of a speech was less fixed than its words, and they remind readers that lineation itself is an editorial inheritance, not a given. An editor preparing the standard text must choose a form for the Queen Mab speech, and the choice silently follows the second quarto; the first quarto stands in the apparatus as the road not taken, proof that the speech’s prose gallop, so often praised as a deliberate effect, was not the only shape the first age of the play knew for it.

Q: Does the first quarto print the play’s second Chorus speech?

It does not. The first quarto prints the opening Prologue, the sonnet that introduces the two households and their ancient grudge, but the second Chorus speech, “Now old desire doth in his deathbed lie,” which in the familiar text closes the first act and introduces the second, is absent from the 1597 book, one of only two movements of the longer play with no equivalent in the shorter. The other is the Capulet serving-men’s bustle at the opening of the ball scene. The omissions are instructive about what the shorter text values: the Chorus is pure commentary, advancing no event, and a version shaped by performance pressure sheds commentary before it sheds story. The play in the first quarto simply gets on with the ball.

Q: What do the first quarto’s speech headings call the servant Peter?

In places they call him “Clown.” The first quarto’s speech headings and directions designate the Capulet servant not always by his character name but by his theatrical function, because the part was played by the company’s clown, the role Will Kemp filled in the original company. Theatre historian Bart van Es notes the designation, and it is one of the most quietly revealing features of the book: the printed text has not fully separated the fiction from the casting that embodied it. The famous actor-named direction in the play’s early texts, “Enter Will Kemp” at the musicians’ scene, belongs to the second quarto, not the first. The first quarto’s habit is subtler and arguably more valuable, since it shows a text written or transmitted from inside a company that thought of the servant and the clown as the same person.

Q: Why was the first quarto never entered in the Stationers’ Register?

No record explains the omission, and honesty requires saying so. Entry in the Stationers’ Register established a stationer’s right in a copy and licensed its printing; Romeo and Juliet and Love’s Labour’s Lost are the two plays of the canon for which no entry or licence before publication has been found. The fact itself is certain, and everything built on it is inference. The traditional account read the missing entry as a pirate’s fingerprint, a sign the copy had been stolen and could not be shown to the wardens. Other explanations are available and unprovable: entry cost money and trouble, enforcement was uneven, and plenty of unentered books were honestly come by. The missing entry establishes that the publication was irregular. It does not establish that it was theft, and the distance between those two findings is the distance the “bad quarto” label exists to hide.

Q: Is the first quarto Shakespeare’s first draft of the play?

The weight of the evidence says no. The draft theory, held by most eighteenth-century editors, treats the shorter text as the play in embryo, later expanded into the second quarto. It fails on the first quarto’s loose ends: passages whose conclusions survive while their reasoning exists only in the fuller text, like Juliet’s “All this is comfort” in 3.2; a pun on courtesy in 2.4 whose explanatory turns are present only in the longer version; and echoes of Arthur Brooke’s source poem that the fuller text preserves where the shorter has lost them. A draft does not quote its own revision. Y. S. Bains argued the draft case in modern times, but the derivative evidence assembled by Lukas Erne answers it: the first quarto descends from the play in something like its fuller form. Its modern revival rode on Ernst Honigmann’s case that Shakespeare revised his plays into two authorial states. For Romeo and Juliet it founders on the direction of the evidence: revision explains added polish, not dangling references to lines the reviser had not yet written. The first quarto is a later, shortened state of the work, not its first sketch.

Q: What is the “without-book prologue” line, and where does it survive?

The line is Benvolio’s, spoken as the maskers prepare to enter Capulet’s ball in 1.4: the maskers will have no prologue “without book” faintly spoken after the prompter to excuse their entrance. It survives only in the first quarto. No other early text of the play contains it, yet modern editions print it at 1.4.7-8 in the standard text, which means the received Romeo and Juliet depends, at this small but famous point, on the testimony of the very book the “bad quarto” verdict declares worthless. Eric Sams drew attention to the irony in his quatercentenary reappraisal of the 1597 edition. The line is also theatrically self-conscious, a joke about memorised speeches and prompters from inside a company of actors, and its survival in the performance-shaped text rather than the literary one is exactly what that text’s defenders would predict.

Q: Why do directors and editors still consult the first quarto?

Because it knows things the fuller text does not say. Its stage directions are more numerous and more descriptive than the second quarto’s, narrating business, groupings, properties, and the order of entrances at moments where the authorised text is silent, and editors print its directions, while directors stage them, as the best surviving evidence of how the play was first performed. Lukas Erne’s edition goes so far as to call the first quarto, in some respects, the best witness available for the dramatic and theatrical practices of Shakespeare’s company, a judgement that would have been unprintable in a scholarly edition two generations ago. Its compressed shape also instructs: a version tightened for playing shows which speeches a working company found load-bearing and which it could shed. And its variant readings occasionally correct or enrich the standard text, from Benvolio’s prologue line to individual phrases. Consultation is not the same as trust in every reading, and editors still base their texts on the second quarto. But a witness consulted by everyone is not a witness anyone believes to be bad.

Q: Where can the first quarto be read in a modern edition?

The standard modern edition is Lukas Erne’s The First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet, published by Cambridge University Press in 2007 in the New Cambridge Shakespeare’s Early Quartos series, with a full introduction on the text’s provenance, a collation against the second quarto, and a commentary. An earlier classroom edition by Frank G. Hubbard, published in the University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, presented the text modernised for comparison with the standard editions and remains a clear entry point. Jay L. Halio’s parallel-text edition prints the first and second quartos together for readers who want the two versions in constant view. Facsimiles and digital images of the 1597 book itself are available through the Folger Shakespeare Library’s digital collections, which exhibit the quarto alongside the other early printings. Between the edition, the parallel text, and the facsimile, the first quarto is now easier to read than at any time since 1597, which is one reason the verdict against it has collapsed: the book can finally answer for itself.

Q: Did the printers of the second quarto use the first quarto?

Yes, for at least a short stretch. The Folger Shakespeare Library’s introduction to the text observes that while the second quarto was for the most part printed from a manuscript of the fuller version, there are undeniable signs that its printer consulted the first quarto, and that for a short stretch of the text, from 1.2.55 to 1.3.37 in modern references, the second quarto seems to be no more than a reprint of the first. The admission matters because it breaks the moral geometry of the traditional account, in which the good text replaces the bad one. The printers of 1599, who advertised their edition as newly corrected, augmented, and amended against the earlier book, nevertheless reached for that book when their manuscript copy ran short or unclear. The condemned text was load-bearing inside its own replacement.

Q: In what order does the first quarto bring Balthasar and the Friar before the Prince?

In the first quarto, Balthasar is brought in before Friar Laurence. In the final scene, the watch arrests both men and produces them before the Prince as witnesses to the catastrophe in the tomb; the second quarto gives the Friar precedence, bringing him on first to begin the unraveling, while the first quarto reverses the order and lets Romeo’s servant precede the Friar. The difference is small and characteristic. Speech assignments and entrance orders are among the features a performance-shaped text preserves in its own arrangement rather than the literary text’s, and Erne’s comparison of the two versions catalogues this reversal among the exceptions to their otherwise matching stage traffic. It changes no meaning. It shows the shorter book disposing the catastrophe’s evidence in its own order, as a company that had played the scene might remember or prefer it.

Q: Is “bad quarto” a fair name for the first quarto?

No, and the case is made in full in the body of this study. The name was invented in 1909 by A. W. Pollard for a category of supposedly pirated texts, and it bundles three claims of very different strength: that the first quarto descends from the fuller play, which is true; that it was stolen, which is inference from an unentered copy and a disreputable printer; and that it is corrupt and worthless, which inspection refutes. Against the name stand the book’s fuller stage directions, its intact plot, its rival lament for Capulet, its readings adopted into the standard text, and the considered judgements of Stephen Orgel and Lukas Erne. “First quarto” is the fair name: it dates the book, places it in the play’s textual family, and leaves its value open to the only tribunal that matters, reading.