Every reader who opens a modern edition of the tragedy meets the second quarto of 1599 before meeting anything else, whether the edition says so on its cover or not. The second quarto, the long early text that bibliographers call Q2, is the foundation document of the play in print: the fullest of the early editions, the one set in type from a manuscript standing closest to the playwright’s own draft, and the copy-text from which nearly every scholarly edition descends. Its title page boasts that the text was newly corrected, augmented, and amended, and the boast is one of the rare pieces of booksellers’ advertising that collation sustains. Q2 runs to roughly three thousand lines where the first quarto of 1597 offers roughly twenty-two hundred; it restores speeches the shorter text compresses or drops; and its errors, which are plentiful, are the errors of a printing house working from a difficult authorial manuscript rather than the deformations of a text carried in actors’ memories. The verdict argued through this study is plain: the second quarto deserves its standing as the play’s foundation text, not because it is clean, but because its very untidiness is the signature of the author’s papers passing through a press.

That verdict needs the whole portrait to support it. A foundation text can be examined from several sides: as a physical book with a printer, a publisher, a date, and a title page; as a quantity of verse, measurable against the shorter edition it displaced; as the printed trace of a lost manuscript whose character scholars infer from spellings, speech prefixes, and unresolved stage directions; as a site where revision shows through the print, most famously in a pair of dawn speeches that the manuscript behind Q2 apparently carried in two forms at once; and as the head of a line of transmission that runs through the third quarto of 1609 and the fourth and fifth quartos into the First Folio of 1623. Each side of the portrait is taken in turn below, and the scholarly quarrel over the manuscript behind Q2, between W. W. Greg’s foul-papers account and Paul Werstine’s critique of that whole way of reasoning, is faced and adjudicated before the final verdict. The cliché reads a seamless classic. The bibliographical record shows a working draft, hurried through a busy printing house, that happened to carry the play closer to its author’s hand than any other surviving witness.

The label deserves one caution at the outset, since the whole study leans on it. Good and bad, in Pollard’s pairing, are judgments about transmission, not about literary worth or even about accuracy in every particular: the bad quarto preserves stage business the good one lacks, and the good quarto contains misprints the bad one escapes. The pairing also smuggles a narrative, pirates against poets, that later scholarship has found too tidy for the untidy trade that produced both books. This study keeps the label because the tradition thinks in it, and argues the narrower claim the evidence carries: that for the words of the play, their order, their fullness, and their spelling, the 1599 book is the witness to beat, and that its defects are the kind that document their own remedy. Everything else the nickname might imply is decoration.

What Is the Second Quarto of Romeo and Juliet?

The second quarto is the second printed edition of the tragedy, published in London in 1599, two years after the first quarto had appeared from John Danter’s press. A quarto was a small, portable book format produced by folding each printed sheet twice, yielding gatherings of eight pages; play quartos were the paperbacks of the Elizabethan book trade, sold unbound or in cheap wrappers from stationers’ shops. Q2’s imprint names its makers precisely: the book was printed by Thomas Creede, one of the busiest printers of playbooks in the period, for Cuthbert Burby, a bookseller and publisher whose shop stood near the Royal Exchange, and its ninety-two pages carry the fullest text of the tragedy printed in the playwright’s lifetime. Burby was a substantial figure in the trade in drama: his list included the first quarto of Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1598, the earliest play printed under Shakespeare’s name, and his handling of the tragedy shows a publisher who understood that a corrected text was a selling point worth advertising in large type.

The book’s own heading gives the play a grandeur the first quarto’s does not. Where Danter’s 1597 edition called the piece “An Excellent conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Iuliet,” Burby’s edition presents “The Most Excellent and lamentable Tragedie, of Romeo and Iuliet,” a title that reaches for the dignity of a lamentable history rather than the cleverness of a conceit. The performance claim changes in step: the first quarto advertises playing by the Lord Hunsdon’s servants, the company name in use for a brief window in 1596 and 1597, while the second quarto names the right honourable the Lord Chamberlain’s servants, the company’s settled style and the playwright’s own company. Nothing on the title page names an author. Early play quartos routinely sold the company and the story rather than the writer, and the absence is itself a datum: the authority Q2 claims is textual, a claim about the words on the page, not about the name behind them.

Bibliographers identify the edition by its place in the sequence of five early quartos, Q1 through Q5, and by its printer’s and publisher’s names, since the early texts carry no edition numbers of their own. The shorthand Q2 belongs to the conventions of the twentieth-century bibliography that Alfred W. Pollard and W. W. Greg built, and the nickname that travels with it, the good quarto, is Pollard’s coinage, set against the bad quarto label he fastened on Q1. The labels are polemical shorthand rather than neutral description, and the quarrel section below returns to what they conceal. For the portrait at hand they mark the standing fact: among the early witnesses, the second quarto is the one whose readings editors trust first, whose copy they reconstruct most confidently, and whose text a reader encounters, lightly modernized, in the Folger, Arden, Oxford, and Cambridge editions alike.

One feature of the physical book deserves emphasis before the argument moves on, because it conditions everything else: Q2 is not a handsome or careful piece of printing. Its pages carry misprints, turned letters, irregular spacing, verse set as prose and prose broken into verse, and speech prefixes that wander between full names and clipped abbreviations for the same speaker. Bibliographers comparing presswork have judged the 1599 volume, as a piece of printing, less carefully executed than the supposedly corrupt first quarto it replaced. That paradox, the best copy in the worst dress, is the key to the edition’s character. The value of Q2 was never in Creede’s craftsmanship. It lay in the manuscript on his compositor’s frame, and the case for that manuscript’s authorial character rests on evidence scattered through the very faults that make Q2 an untidy book.

The book also found readers whose traces survive, and their testimony belongs to the portrait. The Edinburgh University Library copy descends from the library of William Drummond of Hawthornden, the Scottish poet whose collections passed to the university and whose reading lists are among the period’s best records of a private library’s contents; a play quarto in such a collection was a book kept, reread, and shelved among poems and histories rather than a disposable pamphlet. Sir John Harington’s lists of his play quartos, compiled around 1609, document the same habit among English courtiers: playbooks were being collected as literature within a decade of Q2’s printing. Against the picture of the early play quarto as ephemera, the tragedy’s surviving early owners suggest that Burby’s positioning of the book as a prestige text worked, and that the fuller, corrected edition was the form in which serious readers chose to own the play. The point matters to the transmission argument: texts survive in proportion as owners value them, and the line of descent that runs from Q2 runs through the libraries that preserved it.

The format itself carried meaning for its first buyers. A quarto playbook was cheap by the standards of print, priced in pence, small enough for a pocket or a satchel, and sold unbound so that purchasers of means could have it stitched into collections of plays, the bound volumes in which several early copies survive. Cheapness and collectability were not opposites in this market: the same stationer’s shop served the apprentice buying a single pamphlet and the gentleman stocking a library shelf, and a corrected edition could address both at once, the apprentice getting a better text than his fellow’s worn 1597 copy and the gentleman getting the version a library should hold. Q2’s ninety-two pages, a substantial quarto by playbook standards, delivered visibly more book for the money than its predecessor had, the augmentation legible in the hand before a page was read. In a trade where buyers judged value partly by bulk, the fuller text was self-recommending, and the edition’s commercial logic and its textual authority reinforced one another from the first day of sale.

Inside Creede’s Printing House: How the Second Quarto Was Set in Type

A quarto text is the residue of a manufacturing process, and Q2’s portrait stays incomplete until the process is in view. Thomas Creede’s house was among the largest printing operations serving the London book trade, producing sermons, pamphlets, news, and playbooks in volume; Burby’s tragedy would have taken its turn among other jobs, set by compositors working at piece pace from the manuscript copy delivered with the commission. The copy had first to be cast off: someone estimated its length against the planned gatherings so that the book would fill its sheets, a calculation that grows treacherous when the copy is a playwright’s draft with passages of irregular density. Compositors then set the type page by page, not in reading order but in the order the formes required, working from the manuscript on the frame and justifying each line by eye and spacing. Where two compositors shared a book, as the shifting orthographic weather of many Creede quartos suggests, their individual habits of spelling and spacing alternate through the gatherings like two hands exchanging a tool.

Three consequences of this process matter for reading Q2. The first is that difficult copy degrades fastest. A compositor setting a fair, legible transcript at speed produces a tolerably clean text; a compositor deciphering a draft, with its abbreviations, interlineations, and cancellations imperfectly struck, produces errors exactly where the author’s thinking was busiest, because those are the places where the hand is hardest to read. Q2’s pattern of faults fits that expectation: the worst confusions gather around set speeches, prefixes, and the duplicated dawn passage, the manuscript’s most worked-over places, rather than distributing evenly as random carelessness would. The second consequence is that verse suffers mechanically. A compositor short of space at a page’s foot, or misjudging the copy’s layout, could run verse lines together as prose, the accident that overtook the Queen Mab speech, or break a line wrongly and disturb the metre for every later reader until an editor repaired the lineation. The third consequence is temporal: printing proceeded forme by forme over days or weeks, proofreading was intermittent, and corrections made at the press stopped nothing already printed, which is why surviving copies disagree in small readings and why the edition must be reconstructed as an ideal copy rather than quoted from any single survivor.

Set against this machinery, the puzzle of Q2 resolves into its proper shape. The puzzle was never how so authoritative a text came to be so faulty; given a draft for copy and a commercial printing house for manufacture, faultiness is the expected condition. The puzzle would be a clean text, which would imply tidier copy and a slower press than Burby’s commission plausibly bought. The edition’s modern students have learned to read the faults as data: compositorial error is corrigible in proportion as it is mechanical, and an editor who can model how Creede’s men worked can reason backward from the printed error to the manuscript reading with a confidence that a more polished, more heavily mediated text would not permit. Q2’s roughness is thus not merely excused by its production history. It is the means by which the production history, and behind it the lost manuscript, stays legible.

The reprinted patch casts a sidelight on the process worth catching. Whoever made the decision to set the missing stretch from Danter’s printed pages made it inside the schedule of a working shop, where a stalled forme costs money and a publisher’s deadline does not move. The decision’s very casualness is informative: nobody in Creede’s house treated the copy’s completeness as sacred, nobody sent back to the playhouse for the wanting leaves, because the job was a commercial impression of a saleable text, not a monument. That the surrounding three thousand lines were nevertheless set from the author’s papers, patch and all, shows the two truths of the edition operating together: the copy was the best obtainable, and the manufacture was ordinary trade work. Editions that have understood both truths at once, from the Cambridge editors onward, have edited Q2 best.

The Title Page of the Second Quarto: Newly Corrected, Augmented, and Amended

Three participles carry the edition’s whole claim. “Newly corrected, augmented, and amended” promises a buyer three distinct operations: errors removed, material added, faults repaired. Title-page language in the period was advertising, and advertising of exactly this kind was a Burby habit; his Love’s Labour’s Lost of the year before had promised a text newly corrected and augmented in nearly the same words. A cautious reader therefore discounts the formula. What distinguishes the 1599 tragedy is that the formula, tested against the surviving first quarto line by line, holds on all three counts to a degree no mere puff could arrange. The corrected element is real: passages garbled or truncated in 1597 stand in coherent full form in 1599. The augmented element is measurable: by one standard count the second quarto contains 3,007 lines of verse against the first quarto’s 2,232, an addition of some 775 lines, well over a third again of the shorter text. The amended element shows in hundreds of local readings where the later text repairs nonsense, restores metre, and gives speeches their rhetorical shape. Brian Gibbons, editing the play for the second Arden series in 1980, read the title page’s words as announcing a replacement rather than a revision: the 1599 book does not present itself as the 1597 text improved by its author but as a better text put in the defective one’s place. The distinction matters for how the first quarto is judged, and it is examined in the quarrel section; for the portrait of Q2 itself, either reading leaves the same bibliographical fact standing, that Burby’s shop issued the volume as a deliberate supersession of Danter’s.

How much of the title-page claim survives checking against the shorter first quarto?

Nearly all of it survives. Collation confirms correction where the earlier text garbles speeches, augmentation on the scale of some eight hundred lines, and amendment in hundreds of local readings where metre, sense, and rhetoric improve together. The formula was a publisher’s habit, but here the advertising and the collation agree.

The performance line on the title page repays a second look, because it dates the book’s theatrical moment with unusual precision. The Lord Chamberlain’s servants had carried that name since 1594, and the claim that the tragedy had been sundry times publicly acted by them was, by 1599, a statement about an established repertory piece rather than a novelty. John Marston’s satires of 1598 glance at the play’s currency; Francis Meres, cataloguing the playwright’s achievements in Palladis Tamia in 1598, lists the tragedy among the works that proved its author’s excellence in the kind. A publisher does not invest in a corrected, enlarged edition of a failing property. Q2’s existence, its format, and its advertised corrections all testify that the tragedy was selling and playing well enough to justify the cost of setting three thousand lines of verse afresh from manuscript copy rather than reprinting Danter’s standing text.

The title page also performs a quieter operation that bibliographers value: it distinguishes the book from its predecessor in the marketplace while keeping the property recognizably the same. The most excellent and lamentable styling, the participle trio, the company’s grander name, and the Exchange address of a fashionable bookseller together reposition the tragedy as a prestige purchase. Readers who study how the play’s reputation was built, how a stage success became a book to own, find in this single page the moment the tragedy crossed from playhouse property to literary commodity. The crossing matters for the transmission history traced below, because a text that stationers treated as a durable property was a text they kept in print: the rights in the copy passed from Burby to Nicholas Ling in January 1607 and from Ling to John Smethwick that November, and Smethwick’s shop kept the tragedy in quarto for three more decades.

The styling deserves a closer word, because the retitling is an argument in itself. Danter’s “excellent conceited” pitched the play as a wit-object, a tragedy of ingenuity; Burby’s “most excellent and lamentable” pitches it as an emotional monument, and the superlative most quietly asserts rank over the earlier book without naming it. Lamentable was a genre signal in the period’s title pages, promising a pitiful history of the kind readers bought for feeling rather than for novelty, and its adoption aligns the tragedy with the lamentable histories of the prose and verse markets. The retitle therefore completes the operation the participles begin: the 1599 book does not present itself as a second helping of a known entertainment but as the tragedy’s proper form, against which the 1597 book is retrospectively redefined as a stopgap. Bibliographers who treat title pages as evidence rather than ornament find here a clean early instance of an edition constructing its predecessor’s reputation, a construction so successful that the vocabulary of bad and good quartos, coined three centuries later, merely ratified what Burby’s compositor had already arranged in display type.

The First Quarto Behind It: What Q2 Was Issued to Replace

The second quarto cannot be measured except against the book it displaced, and the displacement was part of its design. The first quarto of 1597, printed by John Danter with the final sheets finished by Edward Allde, offered readers a tragedy of some 2,200 lines: the same plot, the same sequence of scenes, and long stretches of verse that anticipate the fuller text closely, but with speeches cut to the bone, whole passages missing, and, in the last three acts especially, language that drifts far from the words audiences now know. Harry R. Hoppe’s The Bad Quarto of Romeo and Juliet (1948) gave the classic explanation of that condition: the 1597 text was a memorial reconstruction, assembled from the recollections of actors who had performed the play, probably on a provincial tour with a reduced company. The Folger Shakespeare’s editors summarize the inherited view in similar terms, describing the first quarto as an abridged version put together from memory by players who had performed outside London. That account of the shorter text is the property of its own study, the first quarto of 1597 and its claim to be called the bad quarto, and only its bearing on Q2 belongs here.

The bearing is threefold. First, Q2’s corrections make sense as answers to Q1’s specific wounds: the 1599 text is fullest exactly where the 1597 text is thinnest, in the great set speeches and the closing acts. Second, the relationship is not a simple one of independence. The Folger editors note undeniable signs that the printer of the second quarto consulted the first, and for one short stretch, the passage running from 1.2.55 to 1.3.37, Q2 appears to be little more than a reprint of Q1, as though the manuscript copy had failed or been set aside for those pages and Creede’s men fell back on the printed book. An edition descended from a single pure source would show no such patch; Q2’s mixed ancestry at this one seam is a reminder that its copy, whatever its general character, reached the printing house in a state that occasionally needed supplementing. Third, the pair framed the question every later editor must answer: given two early texts of markedly different fullness and authority, which one stands behind the edition on a modern desk? The near-unanimous answer of editors since the mid-twentieth century, documented in the copy-text section below, is the second quarto, with the first consulted where the second falters. A systematic collation of the two texts, passage by passage and variant by variant, belongs to the companion study of Q1 against Q2 and what their differences reveal; the portrait here needs only the standing of the longer text, which the shorter one’s existence throws into relief.

How Long Is the Second Quarto, and What Fills Its Extra Eight Hundred Lines?

Length is the crudest measure of a text and, in this case, an unusually informative one. The standard count gives Q2 some 3,007 lines against Q1’s 2,232, and although counts shift slightly with the counter’s treatment of part-lines and prose, the proportion is stable: the second quarto is roughly a third longer than the first, and the difference is not padding. The added lines concentrate in the passages on which the play’s fame rests. The Queen Mab speech, Mercutio’s set piece at 1.4.53-94, stands in Q2 at full rhetorical stretch, its catalogue of dreams unspooling through courtiers, lawyers, ladies, parsons, and soldiers before the famous close, “This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs, / That presses them and learns them first to bear” (1.4.92-93). The balcony scene of 2.2 expands from a compressed exchange into the long, meditative duet that includes Juliet’s “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet” (2.2.43-44) and the lovers’ vow-swapping in full. Friar Laurence enters in 2.3 carrying his complete soliloquy on the earth’s bounty and the grace and rude will warring in man and herb alike, beginning “The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night, / Checkering the eastern clouds with streaks of light” (2.3.1-2), a speech the shorter text pares severely.

The pattern continues through the acts where the first quarto is weakest. Juliet’s potion soliloquy in 4.3, her terrified rehearsal of waking in the vault, “I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins, / That almost freezes up the heat of life” (4.3.15-16), stands complete in Q2 with its full architecture of imagined horrors, and the musicians’ scene that follows her supposed death, cut to almost nothing in 1597, survives in 1599 with its grim comedy intact. In the final scene the long text gives Paris his scene at the tomb, gives the Friar the extended narrative that begins “I will be brief, for my short date of breath / Is not so long as is a tedious tale” (5.3.229-230), and gives the Prince the closing judgment that ends “For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo” (5.3.309-310). A reader moving between the two early books experiences the difference as the difference between a report of the play and the play itself, which is precisely the commercial claim the title page made.

Which scenes gain the most from the second quarto’s fuller text?

The gains concentrate where verse works hardest. The balcony exchange of 2.2 becomes a full duet rather than a summary; the Friar’s entrance soliloquy in 2.3 and Juliet’s potion speech in 4.3 stand complete; the musicians of 4.5 recover their scene; and the tomb sequence gains Paris’s vigil, the Friar’s narrative, and the Prince’s closing sentence.

The extra length also changes what kind of object the play is for a reader. A text of three thousand lines, with its soliloquies at full stretch and its rhetoric uncompressed, invites study in the study: annotation, comparison, quotation, the whole apparatus of literary attention that the early quartos of most plays never sustained. The stationers’ subsequent behaviour confirms that the longer book found that readership. The tragedy passed through three further quarto editions and into the Folio, a print life few plays of the decade matched, and every one of those reprints descends from the 1599 text rather than the 1597 one. In the plainest bibliographical terms, augmentation won: the market, the editors, and the tradition all ratified the fuller book.

The distribution of the extra lines carries one further lesson about the kind of copy behind the longer book. A text padded for the press, enlarged by a hack or by a publisher’s instruction, would spread its additions evenly or cluster them where invention is cheap. Q2’s additions cluster where composition is expensive: in the long, figured speeches that only the author of the surrounding verse plausibly wrote, and in the structural tissue, the Friar’s full narrative, the Prince’s closing judgment, that binds the ending together. The augmentation profile is the profile of a draft that always contained these passages, surfacing in print when a publisher finally set the play from the author’s papers rather than from a performed and reported reduction. Length, in this edition, is not a statistic. It is the most visible single proof that the copy changed between 1597 and 1599, and that the new copy stood nearer the writing desk than the stage.

Why 1599? The Moment the Foundation Text Was Founded

The date on the title page is not a biographical accident; the edition belongs to a specific conjuncture in the theatre, the book trade, and the playwright’s career, and the conjuncture explains why a foundation text became possible in 1599 and not before. On the stage side, the tragedy was a proven repertory asset. Meres had canonized it in print in 1598 among the works proving its author’s excellence; Marston’s satires glance at its currency; the company that owned it, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, stood at the height of its powers and in 1599 acquired the Globe, the playhouse whose name Q3 would carry on the tragedy’s title page a decade later. A company consolidating itself in a new amphitheatre had reasons to keep its properties in good order and no reason to obstruct a respectable edition of a hit. On the trade side, the late 1590s saw play publication quicken and change character: quartos multiplied, corrected-edition formulas spread, and in 1598 Burby himself had issued Love’s Labour’s Lost as the first play printed under the playwright’s name, testing the market for Shakespeare as a selling word a year before the tragedy’s name-free but text-proud second quarto. The 1599 volume sits inside that experiment, its claims about the text doing the work that the author’s name would do on other men’s title pages.

Burby’s own list that year shows a publisher working a coherent line in witty, current writing, Nashe’s Lenten Stuff among his 1599 publications, the tragedy’s corrected edition beside it. For such a list, a demonstrably superior text of a famous play was not antiquarian rescue but front-list publishing, aimed at the same buyers who collected Harington’s and Drummond’s shelves. The playwright’s position completes the picture. By 1599 he was a shareholder in his company and in its new playhouse, a man with a coat of arms newly confirmed to his family and a Stratford estate growing behind him; the distance between the hired writer of the early 1590s and the proprietor of 1599 measures the distance between a text that could be pirated into a short quarto without remedy and a text whose full, corrected publication served the interests of everyone with a stake in it. None of this requires the playwright to have supervised Creede’s press, and the edition’s faults show that he did not. It requires only that the conditions for obtaining and printing the author’s papers existed, as they had not existed in 1597: a valuable property, a confident company, an ambitious publisher, and a market ready to pay for the complete article. The foundation text was founded when the economics of the play finally pointed toward its author’s desk.

The counterfactual measures the stakes. Suppose Burby had reprinted Danter’s text, or let the property rest: the Smethwick line would then have descended from the short quarto, the Folio’s printers would have set the tragedy from that line’s annotated descendant, and the full text would have survived, if at all, as a manuscript curiosity outside the printed tradition. Every passage this study has cited as restored, the Mab speech at length, the Friar’s soliloquy, Juliet’s potion terrors, the tomb narrative, would stand outside the play the world reads, and editors of later centuries would have possessed no authorial witness against which to detect the loss. Textual traditions are path-dependent to a degree literary reputations seldom acknowledge: one stationer’s decision about copy in one year fixed the channel through which all later centuries received the work. The second quarto’s portrait therefore ends its historical movement on the contingency as well as the authority of the book. Q2 is the foundation text because Burby built on the author’s papers when building on them first became commercially rational, and the whole subsequent tradition, Folio, editors, readers, memories, is the superstructure on that single commercial act of bibliographical judgment.

What Manuscript Stands Behind Q2? The Case for the Author’s Foul Papers

No manuscript of the tragedy survives, in the playwright’s hand or any other; everything known about the copy from which Creede’s compositors set Q2 is inference from the printed page. The inference that has commanded the field for a century runs as follows. The manuscript was the author’s own working draft, the papers W. W. Greg taught bibliography to call foul papers: the draft in which the play was composed, carrying the marks of composition still on it, rather than the fair copy prepared from that draft for the playhouse or the promptbook annotated for performance. Greg developed the category across his bibliographical writings, giving it canonical shape in The Shakespeare First Folio: Its Bibliographical and Textual History (1955), and R. B. McKerrow’s Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare (1939) had already framed the working contrast between the untidiness of authorial drafts and the regularity expected of theatrical documents. Applied to the 1599 tragedy by John Dover Wilson in his 1955 New Shakespeare edition and sustained by T. J. B. Spencer’s New Penguin edition of 1967, by Brian Gibbons’s Arden edition of 1980, by Jill L. Levenson’s Oxford edition of 2000, and by René Weis’s Arden edition of 2012, the foul-papers account explains, in a single hypothesis, the largest number of Q2’s peculiarities with the fewest additions.

The hypothesis earns its keep on the character of the peculiarities. A promptbook, prepared so that a bookkeeper could run a performance from it, regularizes: it fixes who speaks, who enters, what properties are wanted, and where warnings fall. Q2’s copy does the opposite at point after point. Its stage directions are descriptive where a promptbook’s would be operational, naming groups loosely and sometimes massing characters at a scene’s head who enter only later or not at all. Its speech prefixes vary for the same character within a few pages, as a writer’s hand varies when the person is present to the mind rather than to a cast list. Its text preserves, in the duplicated dawn passage examined below, what looks like a first and a second attempt at the same lines standing side by side, the earlier attempt never struck through. And for one short stretch the compositors seem to have had no manuscript at all and reprinted Q1, an accident easier to understand if the copy was a bundle of draft papers, losable and disorderly, than if it was the playhouse’s guarded book. None of these features is conclusive alone. Their convergence on a single kind of document is the argument.

An older generation of editors resisted the inference, and their resistance sharpens the case. William George Clark and William Aldis Wright, introducing the Cambridge Shakespeare in the 1860s, pronounced Q2 unquestionably the best authority and then denied that it was printed from the author’s manuscript at all: in their judgment it came from a transcript whose scribe was careless and took unwarrantable liberties with the text. The Cambridge editors thereby separated two questions that the foul-papers account joins: whether Q2 is authoritative, and through how many hands its authority passed. Their transcript theory has not held the field, chiefly because the specific texture of Q2’s irregularities, prefixes that behave like a composing author’s shorthand and directions that think in images rather than stage traffic, matches a draft better than a copy of a copy. But the Cambridge dissent fixed a permanent caution in the tradition: the manuscript behind Q2 is reconstructed, not inspected, and every claim about it is a probability judgment. That caution returns, in a stronger form, in the quarrel with Werstine below.

Greg’s taxonomy gives the case its working checklist, and Q2 satisfies the checklist item by item. Foul papers, in his account, betray themselves by directions that describe the scene as imagined rather than prescribe it as staged; by characters massed at a scene’s opening whether or not the action needs them yet; by permissive or anticipatory directions that look forward to business the dialogue has not reached; by uncertainty in naming, the same person designated in more than one way; and by the survival of matter a revising author meant to discard. The second quarto exhibits every class. Its entrances group figures picturesquely where a bookkeeper would have staggered them; its directions occasionally reach past the immediate moment toward the scene’s whole design; its prefixes wander as the evidence section shows; and its dawn doublet preserves discarded matter in the most legible form the period’s printing affords. The checklist matters because it converts an impression, that Q2 feels close to a writing desk, into a set of testable correspondences between the printed book and a hypothesized document. Rival hypotheses can be put to the same checklist. A promptbook fails it at nearly every item, since regularity is a promptbook’s function. A scribal transcript of a promptbook fails it likewise. A transcript of foul papers passes it, which is why the Cambridge editors’ alternative, though abandoned, was never absurd: the checklist identifies the character of the ultimate copy, and leaves one intermediary, a scribe copying a draft faithfully, formally possible. Editors have judged that intermediary unnecessary because the spelling evidence ties the print to an authorial hand without a copying stage, but the honest statement of the position is that Q2’s copy was the foul papers or, at the furthest remove the evidence permits, a faithful transcript of them. The portrait’s claims are framed to hold on either branch.

The Evidence in the Details: Prefixes, Spellings, and Untidied Directions

The foul-papers case rests on small things, and the small things repay close attention because they are checkable by any reader with a facsimile. Begin with the speech prefixes, the abbreviated labels that tell a compositor, and a reader, who speaks. Throughout Q2 the prefixes fluctuate in the manner of a hand writing at speed with the characters present to the imagination: Romeo appears as Romeo, Rom., and Ro.; Juliet as Iuliet, Iuli, and Iu.; Tybalt as Tibalt, Tib, and Tyb; Capulet as Capu, Cap, and Ca; the Friar as Frier and Fri; the Nurse as Nurse, Nurs, and Nur. A professional scribe preparing a fair copy, and still more a bookkeeper preparing a promptbook, tends to settle on one form per character and keep it; a dramatist drafting a scene thinks of the speaker, not of the label, and abbreviates as the pen moves. The pattern in Q2 is the pattern of composition caught mid-gesture. It matters practically as well as evidentially, because at several points the instability touches sense: where prefixes shrink or swap, editors must decide who speaks, and their decisions start from the recognition that the copy’s labels are an author’s working shorthand rather than a theatre document’s considered assignments.

The directions tell the same story in another register. Q2’s copy seems to have described imagined action rather than cued performed action: entrances are grouped in ways no stage could execute as written, properties and attendants appear in the wording as the writer pictured the scene, and at least one direction looks past the fiction altogether. The notorious instance is the prefix Horatio at 1.4, attached in Q2 to lines every modern edition gives to Mercutio: a name belonging to no character in Verona, most plausibly a slip arising in copy or in the printing house, and one the Folio text, descending from Q2 through the third quarto, faithfully transmitted until editors removed it. However the slip arose, its survival through two reprintings shows how closely Q2’s descendants followed their copy, and its presence in Q2 shows how far that copy was from a document polished for the stage. Spelling adds a third strand of evidence. Q2’s pages carry a scatter of distinctive spellings that bibliographers have compared with the spellings of the three pages in the manuscript of Sir Thomas More widely attributed to the playwright’s hand: forms such as souldiers, suddaine, comming, and tearme recur in the quarto, the kind of low-level orthographic habit that survives typesetting because compositors, following copy at speed, reproduce more of its accidentals than they normalize. No single spelling proves a holograph behind the print. The cumulative scatter is what an authorial draft would be expected to leave behind after passing through a printing house, and it is what Q2 shows.

What would a promptbook copy have tidied that Q2 leaves rough?

A promptbook regularizes performance machinery: one settled prefix per speaker, entrances marked where actors must actually come on, warnings for properties and music, and no duplicated matter to trip the bookkeeper. Q2’s copy leaves fluctuating prefixes, anticipatory entrances, descriptive directions, and one unrevised doublet standing, the profile of a draft no playhouse official had worked over.

The force of these details is cumulative and generic at once: each belongs to a recognized class of foul-paper traits in Greg’s taxonomy, and together they profile a document that had not passed through the regularizing hands, scribal or theatrical, that stand between a draft and a performance text. Editors from Dover Wilson to Weis have treated the profile as decisive for copy-text purposes, and the Folger editors’ summary registers the consensus: through the later twentieth century it was widely assumed that, the one reprinted patch apart, the second quarto was printed from the playwright’s own manuscript. The portrait can adopt that consensus while keeping the Cambridge caution in view, because the practical consequences are the same either way: Q2’s accidentals, its spelling and punctuation and prefix habits, are the closest surviving approach to the author’s own presentation of the play, and that closeness, in Greg’s theory of copy-text, is what an editor is bound to preserve.

The spelling strand of the evidence has its own scholarly history, which strengthens it. E. A. J. Honigmann, studying the three pages of the Sir Thomas More manuscript attributed to the playwright, identified clusters of idiosyncratic spellings there, habits such as the substitution of y for i in certain words and distinctive vowel doublings, and traced the same habits recurring in the good quartos, the texts printed from authorial copy. The recurrence is the kind of evidence that resists alternative explanation: a compositor invents nothing so systematic, a scribe normalizes rather than preserves, and a reporting actor transmits words, not spellings. Applied to the 1599 tragedy, the argument runs that the quarto’s scatter of distinctive forms, souldiers, suddaine, comming, tearme, and their companions, descends from spellings in the copy itself, and that the copy’s spellings behave like the spellings of the one dramatic manuscript in the playwright’s hand that survives for comparison. The inference is probabilistic, as every claim in this section is, but it operates at a level below conscious transmission, where memorial reconstruction and scribal mediation have no mechanism to produce the effect. Orthography is the foul papers’ fingerprint dust: invisible to the play’s first readers, decisive to its bibliographers.

The Reprinted Patch: Where the Second Quarto Falls Back on the First

One stretch of Q2 breaks the foul-papers pattern, and the break is among the most instructive features of the whole edition. For the passage running from 1.2.55 to 1.3.37, the close of Capulet’s interview with Paris and the opening movement of the scene with the Nurse, the second quarto ceases to follow its manuscript and becomes, in the Folger editors’ phrase, little more than a reprint of the first quarto. The readings, the layout, and the errors of the 1597 text reproduce themselves in the 1599 book across those pages, a fingerprint match that no theory of independent descent can explain: here, demonstrably, Creede’s compositors had Danter’s printed pages on the frame. The passage is short, some two hundred lines, and easy to overlook in a book of three thousand. Bibliographers fasten on it because it converts the edition’s general argument into local certainty about how the copy reached the press.

The explanations offered for the patch converge on the physical state of the manuscript. The most economical is loss: the leaves of the draft covering this stretch were missing, damaged, or illegible when the copy was delivered, and the printing house, unwilling to halt a commissioned book, supplied the gap from the one printed text at hand. A variant holds that the manuscript leaves were present but so heavily worked over, cancelled and interlined at the point where the playwright was knitting the exposition scenes together, that the compositors or their master set the passage aside and fell back on print. Either account presupposes exactly the kind of copy the foul-papers theory describes: loose papers, vulnerable at the leaf level, whose defects a commercial shop patched pragmatically rather than a bound playhouse book whose integrity the company would have protected. A promptbook does not lose leaves unnoticed; a bundle of draft papers loses them precisely as drafts do.

Editorial practice has absorbed the patch with unusual explicitness. Because the stretch descends from Q1, its readings carry Q1’s authority and no more, so an editor building on Q2 must treat those pages as a Q1 text wearing Q2’s dress. The Folger edition states the consequence openly: its text follows the second quarto throughout except for this passage, where it follows the first quarto, since there the first quarto is the copy being reprinted and stands one step closer to whatever the compositors saw. The patch also disciplines the larger claims made for the edition in two directions at once. Against any romantic account of Q2 as the author’s book pure and simple, it proves the edition a manufactured object, assembled under deadline from materials of mixed provenance. Against any dismissal of the foul-papers account, it proves the copy’s incompleteness at the leaf level, a defect characteristic of draft papers and anomalous for every rival document type. The portrait therefore keeps the patch at the centre of its evidence: the one place where the printing house’s behaviour can be watched directly is the place where the copy failed, and the failure is foul-paper shaped.

Revision Caught in the Act: The Friar’s Duplicated Dawn Lines

One passage in Q2 has become the standard exhibit in every account of the edition, because it shows the manuscript behind the print in the very act of being written. At the close of the balcony scene and the opening of the scene that follows, the second quarto prints dawn twice. Romeo, parting from Juliet at the end of 2.2, speaks lines describing the grey-eyed morning; the Friar then enters at the head of 2.3 and speaks, in fuller and finer form, substantially the same dawn: “The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night, / Checkering the eastern clouds with streaks of light, / And fleckled darkness like a drunkard reels / From forth day’s path and Titan’s burning wheels” (2.3.1-4). The two versions are not identical twins but near relations, the second longer, more figured, and better fitted to the solitary herbalist who speaks it. Modern editions print the Friar’s version and drop Romeo’s dawn lines from the end of 2.2, treating them as superseded. The full anatomy of the doublet, its variants, its editorial history, and the case for reading it as revision rather than error is the subject of the dedicated study of the Friar’s duplicated lines and the crux they form, and only its bearing on Q2’s portrait is drawn here.

The bearing is considerable. The standard explanation, given by Gibbons and accepted in substance by Levenson and Weis, is that the playwright first wrote the dawn lines to close the balcony scene in Romeo’s mouth, then, on reflection or in the flow of composition, rewrote and expanded them as the Friar’s entrance speech, intending the first version cancelled. In a fair copy the cancelled version would vanish. In the foul papers both stood, the cancellation missed or never marked, and Creede’s compositors, setting what lay before them, printed both. The doublet is therefore the single most direct piece of evidence that Q2’s copy was a working draft at the moment of writing rather than a document prepared after it. Alternative explanations have been canvassed: a compositor’s eye skipping back, a scribe’s conflation, an actor’s interpolation. Each accounts for a duplication somewhere; none accounts as economically for a duplication whose second form is an evident artistic improvement on the first, placed exactly where a reviser would place it, at the head of the new scene. The dawn passage also disciplines the portrait’s larger claim. Q2’s authority does not rest on the fiction that its copy was finished. It rests on the opposite recognition, that the copy was unfinished in the way drafts are unfinished, and that proximity to the composing hand is worth more to an editor than the polish of any later transcript.

Editorial handling of the doublet shows the tradition learning to see it. Eighteenth-century editions, working from the Folio line where the duplication had already been silently resolved, printed the Friar’s dawn and asked no questions; the doublet became visible as a problem only when editors returned to Q2 itself and found both dawns standing in their copy-text. The modern handling is uniform in text and divided in presentation: the text prints the Friar’s version at 2.3 and excludes Romeo’s dawn lines from the end of 2.2, while the presentation varies, Gibbons and Weis recording the rejected version in their notes and commentary so that a reader can reconstruct exactly what the draft contained. The division is instructive. On the reading itself there is no serious dispute, because the Friar’s version is longer, finer, and positioned where the scene’s design wants it; on the status of the rejected lines there is a live question, whether they count as a discarded draft reading to be archived in notes or as a genuine alternative the author had not finished judging. Editors who print the doublet prominently in commentary, as Weis does, treat the draft’s archaeology as part of the work’s meaning. The portrait sides with that treatment: in an edition whose whole claim rests on draft proximity, the draft’s most eloquent fossil deserves display, not burial.

The mechanics of the doublet’s survival repay a moment’s reconstruction, because they show how a cancellation fails. A compositor setting type from manuscript copy works forward through the leaves; reaching the end of the balcony scene, he sets Romeo’s dawn lines as he finds them, in the ordinary course of his stint. The Friar’s fuller version stands a leaf or two later, at the head of the next scene, and when the compositor reaches it he sets that too, since nothing in his craft charges him with noticing that the author has written the same sunrise twice. Cancellation, to work, must be visible at the point of setting: a line struck through, a marginal instruction, a leaf removed. In the foul papers the revision was apparently effected by writing the new version in its new place and leaving the old, a method natural to a dramatist composing in a continuous draft and fatal under printing-house conditions. The doublet is therefore not evidence that nobody cared about the text. It is evidence of how revision was physically performed in a working draft, and of the precise joint where a private writing practice met an industrial process that could not read its intentions. Few passages in the canon expose that joint so cleanly.

Where the Compositors Stumbled: Q2’s Errors, Cruxes, and Rough Presswork

Authority and accuracy are different virtues, and Q2 possesses the first in far greater measure than the second. Creede’s printing house worked fast, playbooks were cheap goods, and the 1599 volume bears the marks of its manufacture throughout. Verse is mislined, prose is set where verse was written, most famously in the Queen Mab speech at 1.4.53-94, which Q2 prints as a prose block although its rhythms are verse rhythms, an arrangement editors have to unpick before the speech can be read as written. Speech prefixes slip, with the stray Horatio at 1.4 as the emblematic case. Individual words misread the copy’s hand: at 3.2.6 the quarto’s “runaways’ eyes” has provoked centuries of editorial debate, with proposals ranging from a singular runaway to emendations that rewrite the phrase outright, and the reading still stands in modern texts under a cloud of commentary. At 1.5 the guest list read aloud from Capulet’s letter preserves the name Susan Grindstone, a guest who never appears and whose presence in the list editors explain variously as draft informality or compositorial misreading; either way, the name is a fossil of a text not yet tidied for strangers. The pointing is light and erratic, so that the punctuation of any modern edition is largely an editorial gift. The judgement quoted earlier bears repeating in this company: as presswork, Q2 is arguably less careful than the first quarto it superseded, and editors who choose it as copy-text choose it in full knowledge of its faults.

Two consequences follow for anyone who uses the edition. The first concerns the status of its readings. Because the copy was authorial and the printing fallible, an editor’s task divides: preserve the copy’s accidentals and broad readings with fidelity, while standing ready to emend where the press demonstrably mangled the copy, drawing on Q1, on the later quartos, and on conjecture where the tradition offers nothing better. The second concerns the physical witnesses themselves. Copies of Q2 are not identical. Like other hand-press books, the edition exists in variant states because sheets were corrected while printing continued, some copies receiving the corrected forme and others the uncorrected one; the bibliographical method Charlton Hinman perfected on the First Folio applies here in miniature, and a collator comparing copies leaf by leaf will find small differences that no single copy represents completely. The second quarto that scholarship cites is therefore itself an editorial construct at the margins, an ideal copy assembled from surviving witnesses, among them the Edinburgh University Library copy whose title page carries a contemporary manuscript note, “Wil. Sha.,” beneath the title, an early reader supplying the author’s name the printer had omitted. The detail is a fitting emblem of the edition: the book that did most to fix the play’s text left its author’s name to be written in by hand.

One apparent paradox in the record should be faced squarely, because hostile readers of the good-quarto label reach for it first: by the standards of the printing house, the bad quarto is the better-made book. Danter’s and Allde’s pages are cleaner, their verse more regularly set out, their whole execution steadier than the work Creede’s men turned out for Burby in 1599. Bibliographers who have compared the two books as physical objects have registered the contrast, and it is genuine. Its force, however, is nil against the copy-text settlement, because presswork and copy are independent variables. A careful shop can print a corrupt text beautifully, and a hurried shop can print an authorial draft badly; the first quarto pairs respectable manufacture with mediated copy, and the second pairs rough manufacture with authorial copy. An editor choosing a foundation chooses on the copy axis, where Q2’s superiority is the whole argument of this study, and repairs the manufacture axis by emendation, which is correctable, rather than choosing on the manufacture axis and inheriting a mediation, which is not. The paradox thus ends by clarifying the verdict: the good in the good quarto was never a compliment to its printers.

The Copy as Property: Burby, Ling, Smethwick, and the Ownership of the Text

Behind the book stands a property, and the property’s paper trail is unusually complete. In the London book trade a copy was an asset: the stationer who owned it held the right to print it, could sell or bequeath that right, and recorded transfers in the Stationers’ Company’s registers, the closest the period came to a copyright ledger. No entrance of the 1599 edition survives in the Register, so Burby’s acquisition of the tragedy’s copy cannot be watched directly; how a publisher obtained a Chamberlain’s Men play in that decade, by purchase from the company, by arrangement with the author, by taking up a text already in circulation, remains inference. What the record does show is the asset in motion. On 22 January 1607 Burby transferred the copy to Nicholas Ling, a fellow publisher of plays and pamphlets, and on 19 November 1607 Ling transferred it again, as one of sixteen titles in a block, to John Smethwick, in whose hands it remained for the rest of the quarto era. Shakespeare Documented, the Folger-led record of the playwright’s documentary traces, preserves both transfers, and their dates explain the edition sequence at a glance: Smethwick acquired the copy in 1607 and issued his third quarto in 1609, the first fruits of the purchase.

The trail illuminates Q2 from an unexpected angle, the economics of authority. A corrected and augmented edition is expensive to produce: new copy must be obtained, three thousand lines set afresh, paper bought for a full impression. Burby undertook those costs in 1599 for a play already available in a cheaper, shorter book, which means the market was punishing the short book or rewarding fullness, and most plausibly both: the 1597 text’s defects were visible enough to buyers that a demonstrably better text could command the investment. The subsequent transfers price the result. Copies changed hands as going concerns, and the tragedy’s copy retained transferable value through three decades, four further editions, and a change of theatrical regime from the Chamberlain’s Men of the title page to the King’s Majesty’s servants at the Globe whom Q3 names. When the Folio syndicate took up the play in 1623, Smethwick’s ownership of the copy was part of the legal furniture they had to arrange around, one reason the Folio text descends from his Q3 rather than returning to any manuscript. The foundation text, in short, was founded twice over: once in the printing house that set it from the author’s papers, and once in the register that made it a durable, saleable, inheritable thing. Bibliography and book-trade history tell the same story from opposite ends, and their agreement is part of the case for taking Q2’s claims seriously.

The later history of the company’s attitude to print throws a backward light on the whole trail. In 1619 the Lord Chamberlain wrote to the Stationers’ Company forbidding the publication of the King’s Men’s plays without the players’ consent, a letter Paul Werstine cites when questioning how routinely companies guarded their manuscripts. Whatever its force against Greg’s tidier narratives, the letter proves that by 1619 the company treated its playbooks as assets worth a nobleman’s intervention; assets of that order do not materialize from nothing, and the tragedy’s documented career, pirated short text, corrected full text, repeated transfers at value, is the biography of such an asset being built across two decades. Burby’s 1599 investment stands near the start of that building. The property section of the portrait thus ends where the textual section began: the second quarto’s authority was underwritten by money and law as well as by copy, and a text so underwritten is a text the trade had reason to get from the best source available, which is what its pages show.

From the Second Quarto to the Folio: Q3, Q4, Q5, and 1623

Q2’s authority was ratified by its descendants. When the rights in the copy reached John Smethwick, through the two Stationers’ Register transfers of 1607, his shop issued the third quarto in 1609, printed by John Windet. Q3 is a reprint of Q2, page for page in substance, correcting a few of its predecessor’s errors and introducing fresh ones of its own, as reprints do. Its title page repeats the participle trio and updates the company’s style to the King’s Majesty’s servants at the Globe, and it adds one element Q2 lacked: the words “Written by W. Shake-speare,” the first appearance of the author’s name on an edition of the tragedy. The change registers a shift in the book trade’s sense of what sold a play; by 1609 the name had become a property in itself, and Smethwick, later a partner in the syndicate behind the Second Folio of 1632, was well placed to know it. Q3’s textual significance is otherwise derivative but decisive, because it, and not Q2 itself, became the Folio printers’ copy.

The line continues through the fourth quarto, issued without a date for Smethwick and assigned by the bibliographer R. Carter Hailey to 1623, the Folio year itself; its printers consulted the first quarto for some corrections and word choices, the tradition’s one late glance back at the short text. In 1623 the tragedy entered the First Folio in a text reprinted from Q3 but departing from it, as the Folger editors observe, in ways that exceed what typesetters improvise: the Folio’s copy of Q3 had been annotated, by a hand with access to theatrical knowledge, adding and altering stage directions and readings at a scatter of points. The fifth quarto of 1637, printed by R. Young for Smethwick, carried the quarto line on in parallel, still descending from Q2 through its intermediaries. The full study of the 1623 text, its annotated copy, and its theatrical deposits belongs to the companion portrait of Romeo and Juliet in the First Folio; the point for Q2 is the shape of the stemma. Every early modern text of the tragedy that the tradition actually used descends from the 1599 edition. Q1 founded no line. Q2 founded them all, which is the transmission sense in which it is the play’s foundation text: not the first printing, but the printing from which the play’s printed life proceeds.

The quarto line’s long parallel life deserves its own emphasis, because it shaped how the play was read for two centuries. Smethwick’s shop kept the tragedy before the public in 1609, again in the undated fourth quarto, and again in 1637, each time presenting substantially the text of 1599 in modernized dress, while the Folio line presented the same text at one further remove. A seventeenth-century reader who bought the tragedy bought Q2’s words; a reader who encountered it in the great collected volumes of 1623, 1632, 1663, and 1685 encountered those words filtered through Q3 and the Folio printing house. When the eighteenth century began editing the play in earnest, it edited the Folio-line text it had inherited, and the quartos slept in libraries as antiquarian objects. The foundation text was therefore also, for a long span, a buried one, and its recovery is a distinct chapter in the edition’s biography.

The fourth quarto rewards a closer look, because its untidiness is bibliographically eloquent. Issued without a date, it exists in copies that differ on the title page itself: in some the words “Written by W. Shake-speare” follow the Globe line, and in others, which the nineteenth-century bibliographer Halliwell-Phillipps took to be the later issues, the author’s name does not appear. An edition whose title page varies within its own impression is a reminder that the early quarto tradition was a working trade process, not a sequence of monuments, and that Q2’s descendants inherited its ancestor’s condition of being manufactured under commercial pressure. Hailey’s assignment of the book to 1623, reached by bibliographical analysis of its printing, aligns the last pre-Folio quarto with the Folio year itself, so that in a single year the trade offered the tragedy in Smethwick’s cheap quarto line and in the Jaggard and Blount folio, both texts descending from the 1599 edition by different branches. The stemma has no other shape: every road back from the seventeenth century’s Romeos and Juliets arrives at Creede’s printing house and Burby’s shop near the Exchange.

The Long Eclipse of the Second Quarto and Its Return to Authority

The recovery began when editors started collating rather than merely reprinting. Edmond Malone’s variorum scholarship at the end of the eighteenth century re-established the early quartos as evidence an editor was bound to consult, printing variants and arguing from the early texts’ authority in ways that made the Folio line’s monopoly untenable. The nineteenth century turned consultation into restoration. When Clark and Wright prepared the Cambridge Shakespeare in the 1860s, they went behind the Folio tradition to the quartos and pronounced the second quarto, in the phrase quoted earlier, unquestionably the best authority for the tragedy’s text; the judgment of two cautious editors, working before the New Bibliography had a name, marks the moment Q2 resumed the throne it has not since lost. Their transcript theory of its copy, examined in the foul-papers section, shows the restoration was critical rather than credulous: they crowned the edition while doubting the directness of its descent, a combination that anticipated the mature position by the better part of a century.

The twentieth century supplied the theory and the vocabulary for what the Cambridge editors had done by instinct. Pollard’s good and bad quarto labels of 1909 gave the contrast a permanent shorthand; McKerrow’s Prolegomena and Greg’s bibliographical writings supplied the model of copy, draft, fair copy, promptbook, print, against which Q2’s features could be systematically read; Greg’s rationale of copy-text then converted the model into an editorial rule with the second quarto as one of its standing examples. Dover Wilson’s 1955 edition applied the full apparatus to the tragedy, and every major edition since has worked inside the settlement, disputing readings, refining the account of the copy, qualifying Pollard’s labels, but never seriously proposing a different foundation. Jay L. Halio’s parallel-texts edition, printing the two quartos side by side, represents the settlement’s mature confidence: the first quarto can be honoured as a version worth reading in full precisely because the second quarto’s priority is no longer in practical dispute. Eclipse and return together make the portrait’s historical point. Q2’s authority is not an inherent property of the book; it was lost for two centuries to a derivative tradition and recovered by bibliographical argument, which is why the argument, and not mere seniority, is what the verdict below rests on.

Why Editors Print the Second Quarto: Copy-Text and the Greg Rationale

The reason modern editions descend from Q2, rather than merely resembling it, is a theory. In “The Rationale of Copy-Text” (1949), W. W. Greg argued that an editor should choose as copy-text the witness standing closest to the author’s hand, follow that witness for the accidentals of spelling and punctuation, and admit emendation, including readings from other witnesses, only where the copy-text’s substantives are judged corrupt. The theory was designed for exactly the situation the tragedy presents: several early texts of unequal authority, one of them printed from copy of authorial character. Applied here, it yields the editorial settlement that has held for generations. The Folger editors record that recent editors have been virtually unanimous in selecting the second quarto as the basis of their editions. Dover Wilson’s New Shakespeare text of 1955, Spencer’s Penguin of 1967, G. Blakemore Evans’s Riverside text of 1974 and Cambridge edition of 1984, Gibbons’s Arden of 1980, Levenson’s Oxford of 2000, and Weis’s Arden of 2012 all stand on Q2, differing in how far each emends and in how much each takes from Q1 and the Folio at particular points. The modern text of the tragedy is thus a Q2 text under editorial management, and understanding Q2 is the precondition of understanding every reading in it.

Where does Q2’s authority stop and an editor’s judgment begin?

The boundary falls where the press can be shown to have mangled the copy. Authority covers Q2’s words, lineation, and accidentals as the draft’s own presentation; judgment begins at demonstrable misprints, at nonsense readings, at the Queen Mab passage set as prose, at stray prefixes such as the Horatio of 1.4, and at the duplicated dawn lines.

How does a reader cite the second quarto’s text in a modern edition?

Citation runs through the edited text, not the quarto page. A reader quotes the modern edition’s words and cites act, scene, and line in that edition’s numbering, checking the textual notes where a reading matters, since the notes record every departure from Q2 toward the first quarto, the Folio, or an editor’s emendation.

The settlement has one more component that readers seldom notice: because Q2’s copy was a draft, its text includes passages the playhouse may never have performed at the length the draft allows, and editors who print Q2 whole are choosing the author’s fullest text over the theatre’s practical one. Levenson’s Oxford edition is the clearest case of an editor embracing that choice while also printing the first quarto’s version as a version, on the argument that the two early texts record different states of the work, each worth a reader’s attention. The choice does not demote Q2. It clarifies what Q2 is: the fullest authorial state of the play, edited as such, with the shorter text preserved alongside as evidence of what performance and transmission did to it.

The Oxford Complete Works of 1986, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, tested the settlement from a revisionist direction and left it standing. Wells and Taylor’s project questioned inherited copy-text choices across the canon, printing two texts of King Lear where the tradition had conflated one, yet for the tragedy they too founded their text on the second quarto, since no rival witness survives the comparison. The episode is worth recording because it marks the difference between a habit and a conclusion: editors who set out to challenge the tradition’s foundations re-derived Q2’s priority from the evidence and kept it. Levenson’s Oxford single-play edition of 2000 then carried the argument one step further in presentation, treating Q1 as a version to be read rather than a corruption to be mined, while still editing the play from Q2. The foundation held under the strongest pressures the late twentieth century applied to it, which is the practical meaning of the near-unanimity the Folger editors record.

Greg’s distinction between accidentals and substantives does quiet, continuous work inside every Q2-based edition, and one illustration shows how. Where Q2’s pointing is tolerable, editors from Gibbons to Weis keep much of its rhythmic pointing rather than repunctuating wholesale into grammatical modern prose rhythm, because the draft’s light pointing often marks delivery rather than syntax: a comma where a breath falls, a colon where an antithesis balances. Where Q2’s substantives fail, the same editors emend without ceremony, since a compositor’s misreading has no authority to preserve. The settlement therefore produces texts that look modern and sound early, an outcome sometimes mistaken for inconsistency by readers who expect an edition to be either a facsimile or a rewrite. It is neither. It is the 1599 book edited under a stated theory of what in it deserves trust, and the theory’s name for the book’s role, copy-text, is the precise term for the foundation standing this study has claimed for it.

The Scholars’ Quarrel Over the Copy Behind Q2

Two challenges to the portrait drawn so far deserve direct engagement, because each has been pressed by a serious scholar and each, properly weighed, refines rather than overturns the verdict. The first is methodological. Paul Werstine, in “Narratives About Printed Shakespeare Texts: ‘Foul Papers’ and ‘Bad’ Quartos” (Shakespeare Quarterly, 1990) and in “Hypertext and Editorial Myth” (1998), argued that the foul-papers category itself is an editorial construction with no surviving exemplar: no extant manuscript can be demonstrated to match Greg’s profile of an authorial draft, and the one substantial playhouse-era manuscript complex that does survive, the multi-author Book of Sir Thomas More, displays cancelled and replacement passages carrying inconsistencies of exactly the kind the theory confines to foul papers. On Werstine’s showing, editors who announce the copy behind a printed text are telling disciplined stories, narratives whose tidiness says more about editorial desire for an authorial archetype than about the documents. Gabriel Egan answered in 1999 that the More evidence does not do the work asked of it: the replacement passages there cannot be shown to be stages toward a tidier theatrical document, so their roughness does not disprove the distinction between drafts and playhouse papers. The exchange left the category bruised and usable. Werstine’s caution is absorbed into responsible practice, which now speaks of Q2’s copy as authorial draft with the inference acknowledged, while the positive identification survives because Q2’s cluster of traits, fluctuating prefixes, descriptive directions, authorial spelling habits, the reprinted patch, and the unrevised doublet, converges on a composing author’s papers as no alternative document type converges.

The second challenge comes from the opposite direction and concerns the title page. Eric Sams, in a quatercentenary reappraisal of the first quarto, argued that the words “newly corrected, augmented, and amended” should be taken at face value as the record of an author’s revision: on his account Q1 prints Shakespeare’s own first version of the tragedy and Q2 his revised and enlarged second version, so that the differences between the texts chart a revising dramatist rather than a memorial reconstruction corrected from manuscript. The thesis has the merit of reading the title page at face value, and it draws support from the observation that Q1’s verse is often too good, and too specifically inventive, for the traitor-actor fable that Hoppe’s account invites. It has not persuaded the editors who must choose copy. Gibbons’s Arden introduction reads the title-page formula as a publisher’s replacement notice rather than a revision record; Levenson and Weis alike base their texts on Q2 while treating Q1 as a text mediated by performance and report; and the Folger editors follow the same settlement. The adjudication that fits all the evidence is narrower than either pole. Whatever Q1’s genesis, and that question belongs to its own study, the manuscript behind Q2 was an authorial draft containing at least one unrevised doublet, which means revision is documented inside Q2’s copy whether or not the whole of Q1 is explained by it. Sams is right that the play’s author revised; the doublet proves revising activity in the papers behind the good quarto. Hoppe’s heirs are right that Q1, as a witness, cannot be trusted as the draft’s equal. The foundation standing of Q2 survives both corrections.

The settlement’s current form carries one irony too pointed to omit. The Folger Shakespeare, the edition through which the widest modern readership meets the play, is edited by Barbara A. Mowat and by Paul Werstine, the same Werstine whose critique of foul-papers narratives anchors the challenge above. The Folger text of the tragedy follows Q2 throughout, departing to Q1 only for the reprinted patch, on a fresh examination of the early texts; its introduction states the foul-papers assumption as the received account while its co-editor’s scholarship supplies the standing warning against receiving any such account too confidently. Practice and critique thus coexist in a single edition, and the coexistence is the mature state of the question. Editors can hold, simultaneously, that Q2’s copy behaves exactly as an authorial draft behaves and that the category of the authorial draft is an inference to be handled with care. The portrait adopts both halves of that position. What the quarrel changes is the epistemic register of the verdict, from certainty to warranted confidence; what it does not change is the verdict, because the convergent evidence assembled in the sections above is untouched by the warning against over-tidy stories. Q2 remains the foundation text, now with its foundations honestly described as inferred rather than excavated.

Reading the Play from Q2: What the Foundation Text Does to Its Readers

The foundation metaphor has a readerly consequence that completes the portrait. Because every standard edition rests on Q2, the words of the tragedy fixed in cultural memory, the lines quoted at weddings and in films, the sentences school readers underline, are the second quarto’s words. The balcony scene audiences carry in their heads is Q2’s long version, with the vow-swapping and the parting sorrows at full length; the Queen Mab they admire is Q2’s, relineated from its prose block; the ending whose shape feels inevitable is Q2’s ending, with the Friar’s full narrative and the Prince’s sentence restored. Had the tradition founded itself on the 1597 text, the play in memory would be a shorter, swifter, stranger object, and no argument from performance can recover what that object would have meant to four centuries of readers, because the experiment was never run. Burby’s commission of 1599, a commercial decision taken in a bookseller’s shop near the Exchange, determined the verbal substance of the most famous love tragedy in the language. Textual scholarship rarely gets to point at so concrete a hinge.

Reading Q2 itself, rather than an edition of it, is a distinct experience that the facsimiles and digital copies now make ordinary, and the experience teaches the edition’s character faster than any summary. The long s and the black-letter-free roman type slow the eye; the spellings, Iuliet for Juliet, souldiers, suddaine, restore a strangeness that modernized editions launder away; the wandering prefixes make the page feel handwritten at one remove, which is exactly what it is. Most instructive is the absence of the familiar furniture: no act and scene headings to segment the flow, no line numbers, no quotation marks tidying the speeches, so that the play reads as a continuous current of dialogue and direction, closer to a performance’s unfolding than to a textbook’s grid. Readers who spend an hour in the facsimile return to their editions with a sharpened sense of what editing adds and what it costs, and with the portrait’s central claim converted from doctrine into perception: the modern text is a seventeenth-century draft, mediated by a busy printing house, managed by four centuries of editors, and the management, however skilled, never quite hides the draft. That perception is the practical reward of the bibliographical argument, and it is available to any reader willing to open the 1599 book.

What the Second Quarto Cannot Tell Us

A portrait that argues a verdict owes its subject the limits of the evidence, and Q2’s limits are as definite as its strengths. The second quarto cannot tell its readers how the play was performed. A draft predates the playhouse’s working decisions, and where the staging of the first productions is the question, the mediated first quarto, with its performance-born directions and its record of what a reduced company actually did, sometimes answers better than the foundation text; editors borrowing directions from Q1 for scenes Q2 leaves bare acknowledge the limit in practice. The second quarto cannot date the play’s composition, since a printed date of 1599 bounds only the draft’s readiness for the press and says nothing about when its scenes were written or in what order. It cannot guarantee that every word it prints was intended to survive: a draft contains false starts and superseded matter alongside finished writing, and the duplicated dawn passage is the standing proof that Q2 preserves at least one passage its author had, in effect, already discarded. It cannot speak for the fair copy or the promptbook, documents that once existed and would have shown the play regularized for use, because neither survives for comparison.

None of these limits demotes the edition, because authority was never the claim that one book answers every question. They define the shape of its authority instead. Q2 is the supreme witness to the play as written, an imperfect witness to the play as printed, and a partial witness to the play as performed, and a reader who keeps the three competences separate can use the edition without being used by it. The limits also explain the shape of modern editing, which is eclectic in spite of its copy-text loyalty: directions imported from Q1, readings adopted from the Folio’s annotated line, the patch re-edited from the first quarto, all register points where the foundation text runs out and the editor must build with other materials. The book’s greatness and its insufficiency are the same fact viewed from two sides: it is a draft, with a draft’s proximity to creation and a draft’s want of finish, and the whole editorial tradition is the long negotiation between those two properties.

A further limit is built into the name itself. When editors cite Q2 they cite an ideal copy, a reconstruction assembled from variant states of surviving exemplars, and behind that reconstruction stands a copy that was itself composite, authorial draft for most of its length and printed patchwork for one stretch. The siglum Q2 therefore names a scholarly object at two removes from any single physical thing a buyer carried out of Burby’s shop in 1599. The remove does not weaken the edition’s authority, but it disciplines the language used about it: claims that Q2 reads thus or prefixes so are claims about a consensus text of the bibliographers, stable in the overwhelming majority of its words and negotiable at its margins. Readers who understand this hold the foundation text at the right firmness, neither doubting it wholesale because its edges are reconstructed nor citing its margins with a confidence the witnesses cannot support. Maturity in using Q2 is knowing which of its readings are bedrock and which are the editors’ well-marked fill.

The InsightCrunch Q2 Fact Sheet

The facts assembled through this study are gathered below as the InsightCrunch Q2 fact sheet, the quick reference for the edition’s date, makers, copy, and authority. Readers preparing a seminar presentation from the sheet can open it through a presentation viewer for slide-based study, which keeps each row’s evidence beside the claim it supports.

Each row of the sheet is stated at the strength the evidence supports: dates, printers, and publishers are documentary; the line count follows the standard bibliographical tally; the copy-text row records the editorial consensus together with its one documented exception, the reprinted patch; and the faults row lists only defects any reader can verify against a facsimile. Where the scholarship divides, as it divides over the foul-papers inference, the sheet records the majority position and the quarrel section above records the dissent, so that the summary never claims more than the portrait has argued. The sheet is designed for citation in essays, editions workshops, and reading groups, where the edition’s facts are most often needed in compressed and checkable form. Its rows also serve as the article’s own checklist: a reader who can verify the sheet against the sections above has verified the portrait, and a reader who finds a row unsupported has found the place where the argument must be pressed hardest in return.

Fact	The record
Edition	Second quarto (Q2) of the tragedy, London, 1599
Title as printed	The Most Excellent and lamentable Tragedie, of Romeo and Iuliet
Title-page claim	“Newly corrected, augmented, and amended”
Printer	Thomas Creede
Publisher	Cuthbert Burby, sold at his shop near the Royal Exchange
Company named	The right honourable the Lord Chamberlain’s servants
Author named on title page	None; the name first appears on the third quarto of 1609
Extent	92 pages; about 3,007 lines of verse by the standard count
Copy-text inferred	The author’s foul papers, with the first quarto consulted and reprinted for one short stretch (1.2.55-1.3.37)
Principal evidence for the copy	Fluctuating speech prefixes, descriptive stage directions, authorial spelling habits, the unrevised duplicated dawn passage at 2.2 and 2.3
Known faults	Rough presswork, mislineation, the Queen Mab speech set as prose, the stray Horatio prefix at 1.4, cruxes such as “runaways’ eyes” at 3.2.6
Immediate descendant	Third quarto, 1609, printed by John Windet for John Smethwick
Line of descent	Q2 to Q3 (1609) to Q4 (undated, assigned to 1623) and to the First Folio (1623, from annotated Q3); Q5 followed in 1637
Editorial standing	Copy-text for the Folger, Arden (Gibbons, Weis), Oxford (Levenson), Cambridge, and Penguin editions
Nickname	The good quarto, Alfred W. Pollard’s label, against the bad quarto of 1597

Verdict: How Authoritative Is the Good Quarto?

The verdict the evidence supports is a layered one. As a witness to the words the playwright wrote, the second quarto stands alone among the early editions: fullest in extent, closest in copy, and the ancestor of every text the tradition used. As a piece of printing, it is careless work, and no editor reproduces it uncorrected. As a document, it is more revealing than a clean text would be, because its draft character preserves the play in the state nearest composition, prefixes unsettled, directions imagined rather than staged, one passage standing in two forms where revision overtook cancellation. Pollard’s label, the good quarto, survives because the comparison it encodes is just: measured against the short, mediated text of 1597, the 1599 book is the good one. The label misleads only when goodness is confused with finish. Q2 is authoritative the way a draft is authoritative, by proximity to the hand that made the work, and its quirks, the prose Mab, the stray Horatio, the doubled dawn, are not blemishes on that authority but its credentials. Every modern edition is a negotiation with this book. Readers who know the book know what their edition is made of.

One sentence of summary fixes the portrait for reference. The second quarto of 1599, printed by Thomas Creede for Cuthbert Burby from copy that the convergent evidence identifies as the author’s foul papers, is the fullest early text of the tragedy, the ancestor of the third, fourth, and fifth quartos and, through the third, of the First Folio text, and the copy-text of the modern editorial tradition; its faults are those of a hurried press working difficult copy, and its supreme documentary value is that it preserves the play at the point nearest its composition, revision, duplication, untidiness and all. That is the foundation on which the play in print stands, and no rival witness supports an alternative.

Frequently Asked Questions

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

The second quarto, cited as Q2, is the second printed edition of the tragedy, published in London in 1599, and the fullest and most authoritative of the play’s early texts. Printed by Thomas Creede for the publisher Cuthbert Burby, it presents the play at roughly three thousand lines, far beyond the shorter first quarto of 1597, and bibliographers judge that its compositors set type from a manuscript of the author’s own draft. Alfred W. Pollard’s nickname for it, the good quarto, records its standing against the 1597 book. Nearly every modern scholarly edition is based on Q2, so the text most readers study is, at one remove, the text of this edition.

Q: Who printed and who published the second quarto?

Thomas Creede printed the second quarto and Cuthbert Burby published it, selling the book from his shop near the Royal Exchange in London. The division of labour was the trade’s normal one: Burby owned the copy, financed the edition, and took the commercial risk, while Creede’s printing house supplied the presswork, the type, and the compositors who set the manuscript page by page. Burby was an experienced publisher of plays whose list included the first quarto of Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1598. The imprint’s precision, printer, publisher, and shop address all named, makes Q2 unusually well documented among play quartos of the decade.

Q: What exactly does the second quarto’s title page claim?

The title page claims that the text is “newly corrected, augmented, and amended,” and that the play had been sundry times publicly acted by the Lord Chamberlain’s servants. Above those claims it styles the piece “The Most Excellent and lamentable Tragedie, of Romeo and Iuliet,” and below them it gives the imprint of Thomas Creede and Cuthbert Burby with the date 1599. The three participles were a publisher’s formula, used by Burby on other title pages, but collation shows the claims were accurate for this book: the 1599 text corrects the 1597 text’s garbling, augments it by hundreds of lines, and amends hundreds of local readings.

Q: Why is the second quarto called the good quarto?

The nickname comes from Alfred W. Pollard, whose Shakespeare Folios and Quartos (1909) divided the early play quartos into good texts, printed from manuscripts of authority, and bad quartos, texts that reached print through some corrupt channel such as actors’ memories. The second quarto earned the good label because its copy stood close to the author’s draft and its text is correspondingly full and coherent. The labels are shorthand, and later scholarship has qualified both, but the contrast Pollard named is real: against the short and derivative 1597 text, the 1599 edition is the witness editors trust, and the nickname survives because the trust is justified.

Q: How long is the second quarto, in lines?

By the standard count the second quarto contains 3,007 lines, against the first quarto’s 2,232. Counts vary slightly between bibliographers, since part-lines, prose passages, and stage directions can be tallied differently, but the proportion is constant: Q2 is roughly a third longer, an excess of some 775 lines. The additional material is not padding. It concentrates in the play’s great set pieces, the Queen Mab speech, the balcony duet, the Friar’s entrance soliloquy, Juliet’s potion speech, and the tomb scene, restoring the full rhetorical architecture that the shorter text compresses. In bulk the book runs to ninety-two pages.

Q: From what sort of copy was the second quarto printed?

The consensus of editors from John Dover Wilson through René Weis is that the second quarto was printed from the author’s foul papers, his working draft of the play. W. W. Greg’s term denotes the manuscript in which a play was composed, before any fair copy was made for the playhouse: a document carrying composition’s own untidiness, including unsettled speech prefixes, descriptive stage directions, and passages revised but not cancelled. The Folger editors record that this was the widely held assumption through the later twentieth century, and the one stretch where the assumption fails, the short passage reprinted from the first quarto around 1.2 and 1.3, is the exception that maps the copy’s limits.

Q: What do Q2’s variable speech prefixes reveal about its copy?

The variable prefixes reveal a composing hand rather than a theatrical document. Within short spans the second quarto labels its speakers inconsistently: Romeo appears as Romeo, Rom., and Ro.; Juliet as Iuliet, Iuli, and Iu.; Tybalt under three forms; the Friar as Frier and Fri; the Nurse as Nurse, Nurs, and Nur. A scribe making a fair copy, or a bookkeeper preparing a promptbook, settles each character’s label and keeps it, because other people must work from the document. A dramatist drafting at speed abbreviates as the pen moves, since the speaker is present to his mind. The fluctuation is therefore among the strongest internal signs that an authorial draft stood behind the print.

Q: What are the duplicated dawn lines in the second quarto?

At the end of the balcony scene the second quarto gives Romeo a short passage describing the dawn, and then opens the following scene with the Friar speaking substantially the same dawn description in a fuller and finer form, “The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night” (2.3.1). Editors read the doublet as a trace of revision inside the copy: the playwright first wrote the lines for Romeo, then rewrote and expanded them as the Friar’s entrance speech, and the superseded version was never cancelled in the draft, so the compositors printed both. Modern editions keep the Friar’s version and omit Romeo’s dawn lines from the close of 2.2.

Q: Does the second quarto name Shakespeare on its title page?

No early edition of the tragedy names its author before the third quarto. The second quarto’s title page advertises the play, the acting company, and the corrected state of the text, but no writer; early play quartos commonly sold the story and the company rather than an author. The author’s name enters the tragedy’s print history on the third quarto of 1609, whose title page adds “Written by W. Shake-speare.” A contemporary reader of one surviving copy of Q2, now at Edinburgh University Library, supplied by hand what the printer omitted, writing “Wil. Sha.” beneath the title, a small manuscript protest against the book’s anonymity.

Q: What is the third quarto of 1609, and how does it descend from Q2?

The third quarto of 1609 is a reprint of the second quarto, issued by John Smethwick and printed by John Windet after the copy’s rights passed to Smethwick through two transfers in 1607. Q3 follows Q2 in substance, correcting some of its errors and introducing others, and it repeats the title-page claim of correction, augmentation, and amendment while updating the company’s style to the King’s Majesty’s servants at the Globe and adding the author’s name. Its importance is positional: the First Folio’s printers worked not from Q2 but from a copy of Q3, so the 1609 reprint is the bridge across which the 1599 text passed into the collected edition of 1623.

Q: How did the second quarto’s text reach the First Folio?

The second quarto’s text reached the First Folio through the third quarto. The chain runs Q2 in 1599, reprinted as Q3 in 1609, and in 1623 the Folio’s printing house set the tragedy from a copy of Q3 that had been annotated by a hand with theatrical knowledge, adding stage directions and altering readings at points beyond what typesetters improvise. A fourth quarto, assigned by R. Carter Hailey to the same year, and a fifth in 1637 continued the line in parallel. No early modern text of the play in actual use descends from the first quarto; the whole tradition flows from 1599.

Q: What is a copy-text, and why do editors choose Q2 as the copy-text for this play?

A copy-text is the early witness an editor follows for a work’s spelling, punctuation, and general readings, emending it only where it is judged corrupt. W. W. Greg’s “The Rationale of Copy-Text” (1949) argues that the copy-text should be the witness printed from copy closest to the author’s hand, since its accidentals best preserve the author’s own presentation. For this play that witness is the second quarto, set from the author’s draft, while the first quarto is mediated and the Folio is a reprint at two removes. The Folger editors note that recent editors have been virtually unanimous in the choice, and the Arden, Oxford, Cambridge, and Penguin texts all rest on Q2.

Q: Which modern editions of the play are based on the second quarto?

The standard modern editions are all based on the second quarto. John Dover Wilson’s New Shakespeare edition of 1955 set the pattern; T. J. B. Spencer’s New Penguin text of 1967, G. Blakemore Evans’s Riverside and Cambridge editions, Brian Gibbons’s second-series Arden edition of 1980, Jill L. Levenson’s Oxford edition of 2000, René Weis’s third-series Arden edition of 2012, and the Folger Shakespeare text all take Q2 as copy-text. They differ in how boldly they emend and in how much they admit from the first quarto and the Folio at particular passages, but the foundation is constant: open any of them and the text being read is the 1599 text under editorial management.

Q: Why do editors still emend the second quarto if it is the authoritative text?

Editors emend the second quarto because its authority belongs to its copy, not to its presswork, and the presswork was fallible. Thomas Creede’s compositors misread the manuscript’s hand, mislined verse, set the Queen Mab speech as prose, attached a prefix naming Horatio to lines of Mercutio’s at 1.4, and printed both versions of the duplicated dawn passage. Where a reading is demonstrably a printing fault, editors correct it from the first quarto, the later quartos, the Folio, or reasoned conjecture, and their textual notes record each departure. Authority in Greg’s sense was never a claim that the chosen witness is perfect; it is a claim about which witness an editor must answer to.

Q: Does the second quarto divide the play into acts and scenes?

Not systematically. The second quarto’s copy and its compositors provided no regular scheme of act and scene headings across the play; the two chorus sonnets mark the great structural joints, and entrances and cleared stages do the rest of the work a modern reader expects headings to do. The familiar grid of five acts and their numbered scenes was regularized across the following century by the Folio tradition and the eighteenth-century editors, and modern editions print it as a finding device. Anyone citing 2.3.1 for the Friar’s entrance is using a map drawn later over the quarto’s terrain, indispensable, accurate in the main, and not part of the 1599 book itself.

Q: What is the Susan Grindstone crux in the second quarto?

Susan Grindstone is a name in the guest list that Capulet’s servant carries in 1.5, where the second quarto’s text of the letter names “Susan Grindstone and Nell” among the invited. No Susan Grindstone appears in the play, speaks, or is mentioned again, and the name has attracted editorial attention out of proportion to its size because such details diagnose copy. A tidied theatrical document would be expected to regularize the list; a working draft can carry a name the author noted and never used. Editors therefore cite the crux as a small fossil of the draft behind Q2, while allowing that a compositor’s misreading of the manuscript’s hand cannot be ruled out.

Q: Do all surviving copies of the second quarto read identically?

No. Hand-press printing corrected sheets while an edition was still on the press, so individual copies of the second quarto differ in small readings, some preserving a forme’s uncorrected state and others its corrected one. Bibliographers call the differences press variants, and the method for detecting them, systematic collation of many copies against one another, is the method Charlton Hinman developed for the First Folio. The practical consequence is that the Q2 cited in scholarship is an ideal text assembled from the surviving witnesses, no one of which contains every corrected reading. A facsimile reproduces one copy, variants and all; an edition silently reconciles them.

Q: Why do some scholars question the foul-papers account of Q2?

Paul Werstine has questioned the account at its root, arguing in Shakespeare Quarterly in 1990 and in “Hypertext and Editorial Myth” that the foul papers are an editorial ideal rather than a documented kind of manuscript: no surviving manuscript matches W. W. Greg’s profile, and the one large manuscript complex that does survive, the collaborative Book of Sir Thomas More, shows inconsistencies in passages of every status. Gabriel Egan replied that the More evidence cannot bear the weight placed on it, since its replacement passages cannot be shown to move toward theatrical tidiness. The caution stands in modern practice, which treats foul papers as the best-supported inference about Q2’s copy rather than as a directly observed fact.

Q: Does any part of Shakespeare’s own manuscript for the play survive?

No manuscript of the play survives in any hand, the author’s or another’s. The papers from which the second quarto was set, the foul papers of the scholarly account, were printing-house copy, and printer’s copy was ordinarily discarded, reused, or lost once an edition was through the press; the same fate met the playhouse’s own documents. What survives of the author’s handwriting in dramatic manuscripts at all is confined to the three pages in the Book of Sir Thomas More widely attributed to him, which are not connected with this play. For the tragedy, the second quarto is the nearest approach to the lost draft: the manuscript’s character must be read off the printed page that consumed it.

Q: Where can the second quarto be seen and read?

Surviving copies of the second quarto are held by major research libraries, and the edition is widely available in facsimile and digital form. The Folger Shakespeare Library makes its early texts, including the 1599 quarto, explorable through its digital collections; the British Library’s Treasures gallery has long displayed the edition; and Shakespeare Documented records individual copies with their copy-specific details, among them the Edinburgh University Library copy whose title page bears the manuscript note “Wil. Sha.” The Shakespeare Quartos Archive project gathered digital facsimiles of the early quartos for side-by-side study. A reader with library access can therefore inspect Q2 page by page, prefixes, misprints, duplicated dawn and all, without travelling further than a reading room screen.