The most consequential sentence ever written about the text of Romeo and Juliet was written by a bookseller. It stands on the title page of the second quarto of 1599, directly beneath the title: “newly corrected, augmented, and amended”. Six words of sales copy, set in type by Thomas Creede’s printing house for the publisher Cuthbert Burby, they announce that the book in a buyer’s hand supersedes the quarto of 1597, and they have been believed, qualified, and fought over ever since. Editors built the play’s text on the authority those words proclaim. A. W. Pollard built a category, the bad quarto, on the disgrace they imply for the earlier book. Eric Sams built a counter-theory on their plain meaning, arguing that the words describe a revision and that generations of scholars have explained away a title page that says what it means. The sentence deserves what this article gives it: a trial, word by word, against the collation of the two quartos and the documents of the trade. The verdict can be stated at the outset. “Augmented” is exactly true, and measurable. “Corrected” is half true: the 1599 book rests on a sounder manuscript than the 1597 book, but no one corrected the earlier text; a different and fuller copy replaced it, and for one stretch of some eighty lines the new book simply reprints the old one it claims to correct. “Amended” is false in any sense a bibliographer can test: the second quarto prints one passage twice, in draft and revised forms, keeps its copy’s shifting speech prefixes untidied, and sets part of its most famous speech as prose. The claim is a publisher’s supersession notice, honest about quantity, loose about workmanship, and most revealing where it is silent: it never names the author at all.

‘Newly Corrected, Augmented and Amended’: The Claim Stated

The full page repays reading as a single composed advertisement, because every element of it is doing commercial work. The title itself has swollen since 1597. The first quarto offered “An Excellent conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Iuliet”; the second offers “The most excellent and lamentable Tragedie, of Romeo and Iuliet”, trading the promise of wit, which is what “conceited” advertised, for the promise of pathos, and raising “excellent” to the superlative. Then comes the claim, set as a continuation of the title: “newly corrected, augmented, and amended: As it hath bene sundry times publiquely acted, by the right Honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his Servants”. The imprint completes the page: “London. Printed by Thomas Creede, for Cuthbert Burby, and are to be sold at his shop neere the Exchange. 1599.” Nothing on the page is neutral. The performance line certifies that the text descends from the stage success. The company’s name, updated from the Lord Hunsdon’s servants of the 1597 page to the Lord Chamberlain’s servants, certifies that the copy comes from the play’s owners. The shop address tells a browser exactly where to spend money. And the three verbs tell anyone who already owned the earlier quarto that the earlier purchase is obsolete.

Set the two title pages side by side and the relationship the claim asserts becomes plain. The 1597 page, printed by John Danter, sells a performance: the play “hath been often (with great applause) plaid publiquely”. Applause is its evidence; the book offers the souvenir of a theatrical event. The 1599 page sells a text: corrected, augmented, amended. Its evidence is editorial. The shift from applause to editorship is the whole story of the second quarto in miniature, the moment the play stops being advertised as a night at the theatre and starts being advertised as a book that can be done well or badly, completely or defectively. A study of the first quarto studied whole, as object and problem shows a book proud of the stage it came from. The 1599 page is proud of a desk. That is why the claim matters beyond its truth or falsity: it is the first time anyone framed the two quartos as rivals in correctness, and scholarship inherited the frame from the advertisement.

One absence governs everything else on the page. The author’s name is nowhere on it. Neither quarto names Shakespeare; the first quarto of the play to do so is the third, a decade later. In 1599 the selling points are the story, the company, and the improved state of the text. A surviving copy of the second quarto in Edinburgh carries a reader’s manuscript note beneath the title, “Wil. Sha.”, an owner supplying by hand the attribution the publisher had not thought worth printing. The boast about correction stands where a modern title page puts the author’s name, and occupies more lines than the title’s own subtitle. The claim, in short, is not a colophon or a scholar’s note. It is the headline. It was written to be read by someone deciding whether to buy, and the trial of its three verbs has to remember, at every stage, who wrote them and for whom.

One further asymmetry between the two pages deserves emphasis before the trial opens, because it explains the claim’s long dominion better than any quality in the books. The 1597 page makes a factual claim of its own: the play had been “often (with great applause) plaid publiquely”. Generations of scholars treated that sentence as probable puffery, the kind of thing a pirate says, while treating the 1599 page’s sentence as probable fact, the kind of thing a legitimate publisher reports. The two sentences are the same genre of utterance, commercial assurances printed by rival stationers two years apart, and the difference in their scholarly reception has no basis in the documents. It has a basis in sequence: the 1599 claim arrived second, attached itself to the fuller text, and inherited the fuller text’s authority, so that the advertisement was believed because the book was good and the book was certified good because the advertisement said so. Breaking that circle is the trial’s first task. The applause claim and the correction claim stand or fall by the same standard, evidence outside the title pages, and when both are put to that standard the applause claim, as it happens, holds up well: the play was a repertory success, reprinted four times in quarto within four decades. The correction claim, tried by the same standard in the sections that follow, holds up in part. Symmetry of method, not sympathy for either stationer, is what the evidence asks for.

The claim’s grip on the book’s identity can be measured in the driest place imaginable, the library catalogue. Bibliographers transcribe a title page as the book’s title, and the second quarto is catalogued, in the great collections and in the Folger’s documentary records alike, under a title that runs straight through the boast: “The most excellent and lamentable tragedie, of Romeo and Iuliet: newly corrected, augmented, and amended”. The advertisement is not a wrapper around the edition that scholarship can peel away; it is embedded in the edition’s bibliographical name, the string by which the object is identified in every census and short-title catalogue. A claim that has become part of a book’s name acquires a kind of diplomatic immunity, quoted in full by cataloguers who would never endorse it in prose of their own. Part of the trial’s work is simply to notice how much of the sentence’s authority is of this passive kind, the authority of the letterhead rather than of the argument.

Who Wrote the Title Page? Burby, Creede and the Shop Near the Exchange

Title pages in the Elizabethan book trade were the publisher’s composition, not the author’s. Peter W. M. Blayney’s accounts of playbook publication establish the trade’s division of labour: the stationer who owned the copy and financed the edition wrote or dictated the title page as advertising copy, the printer set what he was given, and the playwright, who had usually sold the manuscript outright to the acting company, had no contractual presence in the book at all. The sentence on trial in this article is therefore Cuthbert Burby’s sentence, in the sense that matters: Burby acquired the copy, commissioned Thomas Creede to print it, stocked it at his shop near the Royal Exchange, and framed the words under which it would sell. Whether Burby drafted the formula himself or took it from the common stock of the trade, a point the next section presses, the claim issues from the selling end of the book business. It is evidence about what a publisher wanted buyers to believe, offered by the one man in the transaction who profited from their believing it.

Burby was no marginal operator. His list in these years was one of the strongest in the play trade: the first quarto of Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1598, the quartos of The Taming of a Shrew, the Edward III quartos, and, in the same year as the Romeo and Juliet second quarto, a busy list of pamphlets and plays. He had also published Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia in 1598, the book whose catalogue of Shakespeare’s plays fixed the dramatist’s reputation in print, which makes his failure to print that dramatist’s name on the 1599 title page a considered commercial judgment rather than an oversight: in 1599, for this play, the corrected text was the attraction, not the writer. Thomas Creede, his printer, kept one of the larger London printing houses and did the mechanical work. The claim’s verbs, corrected, augmented, amended, all describe work that would have been Creede’s or a corrector’s if it happened at the printing house, and work that was the manuscript’s if it happened before the copy arrived. The trial of the verbs is partly a question of assigning them to the right pair of hands.

Did the playwright write a word of the title page?

No word of it can be assigned to the playwright. Title pages were the publisher’s advertising copy, composed at the selling end of the trade after the manuscript had passed out of the author’s hands; the second quarto accordingly names the company, the printer, the publisher, and the shop, and leaves the author out altogether.

One early owner repaired the omission by hand, writing the author’s name beneath the title of a surviving copy; the page itself was not designed for that name to appear on it, and in 1599 it did not need to.

Had Burby used this exact formula before?

He had, the year before, on the book that first put Shakespeare’s name in print as a dramatist. Burby’s 1598 quarto of Love’s Labour’s Lost announces itself as “newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere”: two of the three verbs of 1599 already stand on his 1598 page.

The collocation was his house style for a relaunch, and commentators have even inferred from the formula a lost earlier edition of the comedy that the corrected book replaced.

The Love’s Labour’s Lost parallel disciplines the whole inquiry. If “newly corrected and augmented” was a formula Burby reached for when relaunching a play, then the 1599 sentence cannot be read as a bespoke report on editorial work performed on Romeo and Juliet in particular. Formulas are not perjured; they are conventional, and their truth is the loose truth of the trade. Yet the parallel cuts the other way as well, and fairly. A publisher who reached for the formula twice in two years presumably reached for it when he had, or believed he had, a better and fuller manuscript than the market had seen. The formula is boilerplate; the decision to deploy it was still a decision, taken about a specific copy. What the formula cannot tell anyone, and what only collation can settle, is how much better the manuscript was and in what the betterness consisted. That is the work of the three trials that follow.

Burby’s career frames the sentence’s confidence. Apprenticed to the stationer William Wright at Christmas 1584 and freed of the Company eight years later, he built his list through the 1590s on exactly the commodities the decade’s market rewarded: controversy pamphlets from the Nashe and Harvey quarrel in his early years, then plays, poems, and the Meres volume that traded on the London stage’s rising prestige. The Romeo and Juliet second quarto belongs to the top of that arc, a prestige reissue of a proven title by a publisher who understood the play’s value in the market because he had watched the market for it form. His handling of the play’s copy across the following decade completes the portrait of a rights-holder rather than a mere vendor: the copy was his to sell, and in January 1607, months before his death, he transferred it to Nicholas Ling in a batch with Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Taming of the Shrew, three Shakespeare titles moving between stationers as assets on a ledger. The sentence on the 1599 title page was written by a man managing property. That is not a cynical reading of it; it is the reading that explains its precision where property is concerned, the imprint, the shop, the company warrant, and its vagueness where workmanship is concerned. Property can be warranted by the man who holds it. Workmanship, on copy he had bought rather than supervised, could only be asserted, and assertion is the mood of the three verbs from first to last.

Creede’s side of the imprint deserves its sentence as well. Thomas Creede ran one of the busiest printing houses in London, a trade printer who worked for many publishers and whose house set a large share of the period’s play quartos. A house of that scale lived on throughput: copy divided into stints, formes imposed and machined in sequence, sheets perfected and gathered against the next job’s deadline. The title page of such a book was set from the publisher’s draft of it, often among the last leaves to go to press, carrying preliminaries composed when the shape of the edition was already fixed. Nothing in that workflow consulted the title page as a standard for the text; the text had been set weeks earlier, forme by forme, from the manuscript. When the claim and the copy disagreed, as at the patch and the doublet, the disagreement was invisible inside the workflow, because the two parts of the book that might have corrected each other were produced at opposite ends of the job by men answerable to different masters. The book’s divided authorship, publisher above the title, printer beneath it, author nowhere, is the material form of the problem this article has been trying: three agencies, one page of promises, and no mechanism by which the promises could bind the product.

A Formula of the Trade: The Words on Other Books

Before the verbs are tried on the evidence of this play, they should be heard in their native habitat, the title pages of the 1590s, where their meaning was fixed by use. “Corrected” and its companions belonged to the standard rhetoric of the reissue. When a stationer brought a book to market for the second time, the new edition required a reason to exist, and the trade’s vocabulary supplied it in a handful of interchangeable assurances: corrected, amended, augmented, enlarged, perfected, newly set forth. Sermons returned corrected; chronicles returned augmented; manuals of husbandry and devotion returned amended. The words formed a register rather than a report, and habitual buyers discounted them the way habitual readers of any advertising discount superlatives, registering the signal, a new edition claiming descent from and superiority to an old one, without auditing the verbs one by one. Blayney’s studies of the playbook trade place title-page rhetoric firmly in this economy of signals: the page was composed to move a browser to a purchase in a crowded market, and its claims were calibrated to the few seconds a browser gives a displayed book.

The dramatic instances show the register at its most instructive, because plays carried a complication sermons lacked: a play’s text existed in the theatre before it existed in the shop, and a title page had to negotiate between the performed thing and the printed thing. The 1597 Romeo and Juliet negotiates by applause, certifying the performance. Burby’s Love’s Labour’s Lost of 1598 negotiates by editorship, certifying the text, and adds the author’s name as a further certificate. Other publishers struck the balance differently, but the vocabulary of textual improvement recurs wherever a play was relaunched, and it recurs precisely because the reading public for plays was learning, in these years, to think of a playbook as a text that could exist in better and worse states. The formula did not create that idea, but it merchandised it, and the merchandising taught buyers a habit of comparison that bibliographers would later professionalise. When Burby assembled his three verbs in 1599 he was not coining a description of editorial work on one play; he was deploying, in its fullest form, the period’s standard announcement that a text had been relaunched in a better state. The fullness of the form is itself a datum. One verb would have signalled a reprint with corrections; two, the Love’s Labour’s Lost form, signalled correction with addition; three, with “amended” completing the triad, signalled total supersession, a book claiming to beat its predecessor on every axis a buyer could name. The escalation was aimed at a predecessor Burby expected his customers to know well.

The register’s heir, a generation later, shows what the formula grew into when a publisher’s ambitions rose. The First Folio of 1623 opens with its editors’ address scorning the “stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed” that had preceded it and offering the collected plays “cur’d, and perfect of their limbes”. The germs of the whole bad-quarto doctrine lie in that sentence, and the sentence is Burby’s rhetoric promoted to a collected edition: a new book defining itself by the deformity of the books it replaces. For Romeo and Juliet the promotion was, strictly, a fiction, since the Folio text of the play descends from the very quartos the address deplores, but the fiction’s ancestry matters more than its accuracy. Between 1599 and 1623 the trade learned to sell Shakespeare by disparaging earlier Shakespeare in print, and the lesson began on the title page under examination here, where a publisher first discovered that “corrected” could sell a play its buyers already owned.

Corrected Against What? The First Verb on Trial

“Corrected” is a comparative word: it needs an object corrected and a standard against which the correction was made. The title page supplies neither, because the claim works by implication. A buyer in 1599 was meant to understand that the 1597 quarto was the object, and that the new book had been set right where the old one was wrong. Collation, performed in full in the systematic comparison of the two quartos, confirms the implication’s conclusion while destroying its mechanism. The 1599 text is, passage by passage, overwhelmingly the sounder text: longer speeches stand complete, garbled lines resolve into sense, the last acts follow a coherent order of entrances and discoveries where the 1597 text compresses and scrambles. Any reader who set a defective speech in the first quarto beside its second-quarto form, the shortened potion speech of the fourth act, the truncated account the Friar gives the Prince in the fifth, would grant the new book’s superiority at once. If “corrected” means only that the book of 1599 puts right what the book of 1597 had wrong, the verb holds.

But that is not what correction, as a piece of work, consists in, and the difference matters for how the claim should be cited. Nobody sat with the 1597 quarto and emended it into the 1599 text. The second quarto was printed from a different manuscript altogether, on the standard account a set of authorial papers, full, untidy, and independent of the earlier print. The sounder text was not produced by correcting the unsound one; it was produced by going behind it to better copy. The relation between the books is substitution, not emendation. Brian Gibbons, in the introduction to his Arden edition of 1980, states the orthodox reading with unusual bluntness: the title page’s words announce a replacement, a text printed from authoritative manuscript copy set against a corrupt predecessor, and cannot be describing a revision of the 1597 text into the 1599 one. On the mechanism, Gibbons is right, and the physical evidence of the next section proves him more right than his own argument required.

Why does the mechanism matter, if the result is the same sounder book? Because the claim, read as emendation, smuggles in a history: it suggests that the defects of 1597 were identified and repaired, fault by fault, which in turn certifies the repairers’ knowledge of what the faults were. Read as substitution, the claim certifies something narrower and more valuable to a bibliographer, namely that Burby had obtained copy of a different order from Danter’s, copy whose origin lay in the playhouse’s or the author’s papers rather than in the audience’s memory or a shorthand notebook. The one reading makes the title page a report on workmanship; the other makes it a report on provenance. The workmanship reading fails the trials of the third verb below. The provenance reading survives, and it is the reading editors have, at their best, actually used: the title page corroborates, from the trade itself, the conclusion collation reaches independently, that the second quarto’s copy outranked the first quarto’s in authority.

There is a second, quieter sense in which “corrected” must be discounted. Correction implies a standard, and the only standard available to Creede’s house was its copy. Where the copy itself was defective, the printed book faithfully transmits the defect, as the duplicated passage examined below demonstrates. A text can be corrected against a manuscript and still be wrong against the play. The second quarto’s authority, the thing the claim is really selling, is therefore relative all the way down: it is the authority of the best surviving witness, not of a text verified against the author’s intention. The verdict on the first verb follows: corrected in outcome, by substitution; not corrected in process; and silent, necessarily, about the faults its own copy carried into print.

The substitution mechanism can be watched working at the level of the scene. Take the wedding in the Friar’s cell, the close of the second act. The two quartos give materially different scenes: the first is brief, its ceremony and the Friar’s cautions compressed into a fraction of the space, while the second carries the full exchange, Friar Laurence’s warning that “These violent delights have violent ends” (2.6.9) set in its complete context and the lovers’ impatience given room to alternate with the old man’s gravity. Nobody corrected the short scene into the long one. The long scene was already written, in the papers the 1599 house set from, and the short scene is what performance, or report, made of it. Multiply the instance across the last three acts, where the Folger’s introduction to the play’s texts notes that the first quarto’s language varies widely from the later texts and whole speeches appear in abbreviated forms, and the shape of the substitution is unmistakable: the 1599 book does not repair the 1597 book’s sentences; it replaces the stratum of transmission that produced them. Correction, in the title page’s sense, happened wholesale or not at all.

The wholesale character of the substitution also explains a fact the claim cannot: the second quarto’s compositors show no sign, outside the one patch examined next, of having the first quarto open beside the copy. A corrector emending the 1597 text would leave a trail of agreements in error, passages where the new book follows the old book’s faults because the old book was the thing being corrected. Outside the patch, the trail does not exist; the two texts agree in substance because both descend from the play, and diverge in wording because they descend by different routes. Modern editing has ratified the substitution reading with its practice: editors take the second quarto as their base and treat the first as a separate witness to be consulted, which is why the second quarto of 1599, the so-called good quarto, studied as a whole book holds its position as the foundation of the modern text. A corrected edition and its exemplar do not stand in that relation. Two witnesses do.

A single scene, the last, concentrates the substitution’s evidentiary value, because the final scene is where the first quarto’s derivation shows most plainly and the second’s authority matters most. In the 1597 text the discovery at the tomb is compressed into confusion: entrances crowd, the Friar’s account of the potion plot arrives truncated, and the sequence by which the watch, the Prince, and the families assemble over the bodies loses the deliberate gradation the scene requires. In the 1599 text the scene unfolds at full measure: Balthasar’s testimony, the Friar’s long confession recounting the secret marriage and the failed letter, and the Prince’s distribution of pardon and punishment in its proper order at the close of the fifth act. An editor reconstructing the scene works from the second quarto because the scene exists there as a designed sequence and exists in the first quarto as a report of one. That is the concrete content of “corrected” at the point of highest stakes: not that errors were found and fixed, but that design, illegible in the derivative text, stands legible in the authoritative one. The claim’s first verb is the shadow cast by that legibility, and like a shadow it points back to the object that casts it, the manuscript, rather than to any labour performed in the printing house.

The Eighty Lines Where Q2 Reprints Q1

The strangest fact in the textual history of the play sits inside the book that claims to have corrected its predecessor. For one short stretch, from 1.2.55 to 1.3.37, the second quarto is, in the Folger editors’ summary of the evidence, no more than a reprint of the first quarto. The passage runs from the middle of the scene in which Capulet’s servant goes out with the guest list, across the entrance of Romeo and Benvolio, and into the opening of the scene in Juliet’s chamber where Lady Capulet and the Nurse discuss her age. Through those pages the 1599 compositors were not setting the authorial manuscript at all. They were setting Danter’s printed book, the very text the title page exists to supersede.

The explanations offered for the patch agree on the shape of the event while differing on its cause. The manuscript copy for the second quarto, on the foul-papers account, was a working draft: leaves could be damaged, illegible, or missing, and a stretch covering the end of one scene and the start of another is exactly the kind of loss a bundle of loose papers suffers. Alternatively, the copy may have reached Creede’s house in instalments, and the compositors, unwilling to stand idle, filled the gap from the printed quarto until the manuscript arrived. Either way, the printing house treated the 1597 text as an acceptable stopgap, which it could hardly have done had anyone in St Paul’s Churchyard believed that text to be the worthless travesty of later scholarly rhetoric. The patch is the trade’s own verdict on the first quarto, delivered in type: defective in general, serviceable in particular, and good enough to sell inside the corrected edition when the better copy failed.

For how many lines does the second quarto reprint the first?

For some eighty lines, from 1.2.55 to 1.3.37, spanning the end of the guest-list scene and the opening of the scene between Lady Capulet, the Nurse, and Juliet. Through that stretch the 1599 compositors set their type from the printed 1597 quarto rather than from the manuscript.

The Folger edition of the play acknowledges the dependence in its own text, following the first quarto for that stretch rather than the book whose title page claims to have corrected it.

The patch disciplines the first verb’s verdict from the other side. A book cannot be a correction of a text it reprints. Within the patch, every fault of the 1597 printing that the compositors reproduced stands uncorrected inside the corrected edition, and the boundary of the patch is invisible to a reader: nothing on the page warns that the authority of the text has dropped, for eighty lines, to the level of the superseded book. Nor is the patch a trivial corner. The scene it covers contains the Nurse’s account of Juliet’s childhood and the “Susan Grindstone” reading over which editors still pause, material on which the second quarto’s celebrated authority simply does not operate, because the second quarto there is the first quarto wearing a new title page. When Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine came to edit the play for the Folger Shakespeare, they printed that stretch from the first quarto, following the copy rather than the claim. It is the neatest editorial judgment the claim has ever received: honoured everywhere the manuscript stands behind the print, set aside exactly where it does not.

The patch also refines what the claim reveals about the first quarto. Burby’s sentence frames the 1597 book as the error to be replaced. Creede’s practice frames it as a resource to be used. Both framings are commercial, and both are evidence, but they are evidence of different things: the sentence records how a publisher positioned a product, the practice records how a printing house valued a predecessor at the moment of production. Textual scholarship went wrong, when it went wrong, by reading the positioning as if it were the practice. The collation keeps the two apart, and the remaining verbs are tried by the same rule: not what the sentence announces, but what the compositors demonstrably did.

The patch has a scholarly biography of its own, and the biography is instructive. The dependence of the 1599 text on the 1597 print through those pages was established by the ordinary methods of analytical bibliography, agreement in accidentals and in error where the manuscript tradition could not have produced them, and Gibbons’s Arden introduction sets out the evidence at length in the course of arguing for the second quarto’s manuscript copy. The conclusion the patch forces was absorbed into the orthodoxy without much disturbance, because it could be filed as a printing-house accident, an exception that left the claim’s general truth intact. So filed, its sharper edge was missed. The accident demonstrates that the claim and the book were produced by different processes answerable to different logics: the claim by a publisher positioning a product against a rival, the book by a printing house managing copy, labour, and time. When the two logics conflicted, at the patch, the book’s logic won without a murmur, and no one in Creede’s house reached for the title page to check what the compositors were allowed to do. Bibliography goes wrong in the same way whenever it asks a publisher’s sentence to describe a printer’s behaviour. The sentence describes an intention to sell. The behaviour is recoverable only from the type.

The passage the patch covers deserves a word in its own right, since it is not dead ground. It includes Capulet’s servant sent out with the list of guests and protesting that he cannot read, the comedy of illiteracy that puts the invitation into Romeo’s hands and Romeo on the road to the feast; it includes the talk of Rosaline that frames the entrance; and it opens the chamber scene in which the Nurse, counting back from the earthquake, fixes Juliet’s age at the edge of fourteen. These are load-bearing pages of the play’s machinery, and through them the corrected edition is, in the plainest bibliographical sense, a reprint of the uncorrected one. Editors who print the scene from the first quarto’s authority, as the Folger editors do, are not indulging an eccentricity. They are reading the book that exists rather than the book the title page describes.

Augmented, Measured: Seven Hundred and Seventy-Five Lines

The second verb is the claim’s success, and it can be checked with a ruler. By the line counts editors standardly print, the first quarto contains 2,232 lines and the second 3,007. The difference is 775 lines: the 1599 book is longer than the 1597 book by almost exactly one third of the shorter text. Burby promised an augmented edition, and an augmented edition is measurably what his shop delivered. In a title page full of comparatives that dissolve under inspection, this one hardens. Whatever “augmented” meant to the trade in general, in this instance it meant eight hundred lines of play that a buyer of the earlier quarto did not own, and no honest reading of the claim can take that from it.

Where the augmentation sits matters as much as its bulk, because its distribution is the evidence for what kind of copy produced it. The additions are not trimmings. They concentrate in exactly the places where a performed text is cut and a written text is full. The second Chorus, the sonnet that opens the second act and retells the passing of Romeo’s old desire, stands in 1599 and is absent in 1597, as if the stage had no use for a second fourteen-line summary and the page did. The great set speeches swell to their full dimensions: Juliet’s potion speech in the fourth act, where the 1597 text gives a compressed paraphrase of her terrors and the 1599 text gives the complete aria, “Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again” (4.3.14) and all that follows it; Romeo’s speech to the apothecary in the fifth act, with its anatomy of poverty, “The world is not thy friend nor the world’s law” (5.1.72); the Friar’s long narrative before the Prince in the final scene, which the 1597 text truncates into a summary just where a reader most needs the whole account. The balcony scene expands; the morning parting of the third act expands; the wedding scene in the Friar’s cell differs so thoroughly between the texts that the Folger’s account of the play’s printing describes the 1597 version as radically different rather than merely shorter.

How much longer is the second quarto than the first?

By 775 lines on the counts editors standardly use, 3,007 lines in the second quarto against 2,232 in the first, an increase of about one third. The growth is concentrated rather than spread thin: whole set speeches reach their full length, the second Chorus appears, and the final acts recover the most.

This distribution is the strongest single corroboration the title page ever receives, and it is worth being precise about what it corroborates. A text swollen in its speeches and choruses, thinnest where performance would thin it, is the signature of the relation editors posit between the quartos: a fuller authorial version standing behind 1599, a performance-shaped reduction standing behind 1597. Lukas Erne’s account of the play’s two texts gives that signature its most influential modern reading. In Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, Erne argues that the long second-quarto text behaves like a version meant for readers, preserving material a playing company would predictably cut, and that the short first-quarto text behaves like the play as the stage actually used it. On Erne’s reading, “augmented” undersells what happened: the second quarto is not the first with additions but a differently purposed object, the play at literary length. The evidence of distribution supports the core of that reading. Augmentation in the second quarto is not stuffing; it is the restoration, or the first printing, of the play’s meditative bulk, the parts of Romeo and Juliet that exist for the eye as much as for the ear.

Yet the honest measurement carries a qualification the title page conceals. Augmentation implies that everything in the old book survives inside the new one, enlarged. Collation shows the exchange running in both directions, as the next section sets out: the first quarto keeps a small, stubborn residue of lines and readings the second quarto lacks, some of which every modern edition quietly imports. The 775 lines are a net figure, not a gross one. The second verb survives its trial as the claim’s one exact statement, then, with a rider: the book grew by a third, and growth, here, was also exchange.

A scene-by-scene walk through the growth sharpens the point. In the balcony scene, the first quarto offers a recognisable skeleton of the exchange the world knows, Romeo’s addresses and Juliet’s answers in compressed and sometimes transposed forms; the second quarto unfolds the full architecture, from “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?” (2.2.2) through the name speech and the exchange of vows to the parting calls from the window, at a length the shorter text nowhere attempts. In the third act’s morning scene, the aubade debate, “Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day” (3.5.1), stands fuller in 1599, and the scene’s second movement, Capulet’s rage at Juliet’s refusal of Paris, expands with it, giving the old man’s threats their full, frightening crescendo. In the fourth act, the scene of Juliet’s supposed corpse brings the musicians and Peter, whose comic wrangle over “Heart’s ease” the first quarto cuts to a shadow; the second quarto keeps the whole deflating coda, the play’s breath of tavern air between the lamentations and the funeral. Comedy, chorus, meditation: the augmentation follows the taste of a reader rather than the economy of a stage, which is Erne’s argument in its most concrete form. A company cutting a play for performance cuts exactly these things, the repeatable jokes, the explanatory chorus, the long solo arias of fear and resolve. A publisher augmenting a book for readers, from copy that preserved them, restores exactly these things. The 775 lines are not randomly distributed ore; they are the play’s literary stratum, and the claim’s one exact verb turns out to describe the transfer of that stratum from manuscript to print.

One more measurement disciplines the enthusiasm. Length is not authority line by line, and the longer book is not the better book at every point, as the preceding sections have shown: the second quarto’s lines include the doublet’s waste, the patch’s borrowed pages, and errors of its own manufacture. Nor does the first quarto’s shortness convict it of derivation at every point, since a performance text is short by design and its shortness is evidence about its purpose, not merely about its corruption. The measurement vindicates the verb “augmented” and nothing beyond the verb. What the augmentation was, whether the fuller state of the text represents the play as first written, the play as expanded for readers, or the play as revised across its first theatrical years, is a question the count cannot answer and the title page does not ask. It is the question on which Sams and the orthodoxy divide, and it is taken up with the claim’s afterlife below.

Two growth points reward a closer look, because they show augmentation operating as restoration of design rather than mere addition of lines. The second Chorus is the first. The play opens with a Chorus sonnet that frames the action; the second act, in the fuller text, opens with its answering sonnet, in which the Chorus reports Romeo’s old desire dead and the new one enthroned, a hinge of commentary that turns the plot from Rosaline to Juliet in fourteen lines. The first quarto omits the hinge entirely, passing from the first act’s close to the street scene without ceremony, because a playing text can dispense with a summary of what the audience has just watched. The second quarto’s inclusion of it is a reader’s feature, architecture visible only on the page, and its presence in 1599 and absence in 1597 states the two books’ purposes in a single variant. The second growth point is Romeo’s death. In the tomb, the second quarto gives him the complete arc of the final speech, the poison bought, the apothecary dismissed, the reflections over Paris’s body and Juliet’s beauty, closing on “Thus with a kiss I die” (5.3.120); the first quarto hurries him to the cup. The difference is not bulk but finish: the fuller text lets the play’s most famous death assemble itself at the pace its rhetoric was built for. Where the augmentation concentrates, in choruses that frame and speeches that culminate, it behaves exactly as the residue of an uncut authorial draft should behave, and the verb that announces it earns its keep a second time.

What the First Quarto Keeps That the Second Quarto Loses

The claim’s architecture is a one-way street: the old book defective, the new book complete. Collation finds traffic moving the other way at several points, and each point is small enough to be a footnote and sharp enough to cut the claim’s logic. The clearest stands at the entrance to the Capulet ball. Modern editions print, at 1.4.7 to 8, Mercutio’s joke about the prologue, the promise that the maskers shall have no “without-book prologue, faintly spoke / After the prompter” for their entrance. Those lines exist in no copy of the second quarto. They survive only in the first, in its rougher spelling, and editors from the eighteenth century onward have lifted them out of the supposedly worthless book and set them in the good text, where they now sit invisibly. A corrected and augmented edition that requires supplementation from the text it replaced is a more interesting object than the title page advertises: it is a witness, not a terminus.

The pattern repeats in kind. In the Friar’s cell, where Romeo waits for Juliet in the second act’s closing scene, the first quarto gives him entrance lines in a form the second quarto prints differently, “So light of foote nere hurts the troden flower” standing against the second quarto’s “O, so light a foot / Will ne’er wear out the everlasting flint” (2.6.16 to 17). Eric Sams made this couplet the emblem of his revision theory: read without prejudice, he argued, the change looks like an author improving a phrase at second thought, discarding “troden” because the word connotes injury, which is what a reviser does and not what a forgetful actor does. His reading of this particular exchange is considered again below, where the disagreement is adjudicated; here its simpler force matters. Whichever direction the change travelled, the first quarto preserves a genuine alternative state of the text, the kind of survival that makes it a document in its own right rather than a heap of errors awaiting correction. At the tomb, similarly, the first quarto’s bystanders cry out in a choral line, “dead, lost, undone”, that has no counterpart in the second quarto: not better, not worse, but other, and gone from every text that descends from 1599 alone.

The stage directions complete the case. The first quarto’s directions, naming the actor Will Kempe in one entrance and describing business the second quarto leaves unspoken, record the play in performance with a specificity the fuller text never attempts, and editors have mined them for centuries to stage the second quarto’s words. The memorial reconstruction debate, weighed whole elsewhere, turns on how that performance record reached print; for the trial of Burby’s verbs, the prior point suffices. A book that the corrected edition must still consult, for lines, for variants, and for the staging of its own scenes, was not corrected out of existence. It was demoted by an advertisement and retained by the evidence.

The wedding scene supplies the counter-case in its most developed form. The Folger’s account of the play’s early texts remarks that the first quarto’s version of the scene in the Friar’s cell is radically different from the later texts, not abbreviated from them so much as built otherwise, with its own disposition of the ceremony and the Friar’s warnings. A corrupt copy of a scene is a damaged version of the scene; the first quarto’s wedding is an alternative version, coherent on its own terms, shorter, and playable exactly as it stands. Such states of a text are the small change of theatrical life, where a scene is fitted to a company and an afternoon, and they resist the title page’s moral bookkeeping altogether. The 1597 book is not the 1599 book with faults. In places like this it is a different settlement of the same material, and the scholarly vocabulary that calls one settlement corrected and the other corrupt is describing the settlement of 1599 from inside its own advertisement.

The directions make the same point from the production side. Where the second quarto’s directions are frequently the bare entrances of a draft, the first quarto’s specify the action: who carries what, who is discovered where, how a fight is staged, which actor, in the case of Will Kempe, walks on. Editors staging the fuller text reach for the shorter text’s directions because the shorter text remembers the theatre the fuller text only implies. None of this rehabilitates the first quarto as a reading text for the play’s language; its verse is too often garbled, its last acts too compressed, for that office, and the trial of “corrected” has already awarded the palm where it belongs. The point is jurisdictional. Burby’s sentence claims every dimension of superiority at once, textual, theatrical, and commercial, and the dimensions do not travel together. On the page, the second quarto wins. From the stage, the first quarto still testifies. A claim that cannot distinguish those victories is not a finding about the books; it is a poster above them.

Amended? The Passage Q2 Prints Twice

The third verb makes the largest promise and keeps the least of it. To amend a text is to work on it: to find its faults and set them right by deliberate alteration. Correction might happen by substitution, as the first verb’s trial showed; amendment cannot. An amended book is a book somebody has gone through. The second quarto, examined as a physical and textual object, shows no evidence that anybody went through it at all, and positive evidence that nobody did. Its copy went to the compositors in the state in which the authorial draft left it, and the compositors set what they found, marvels and mess together.

The decisive exhibit is the passage the second quarto prints twice. Where the balcony sequence hands over to the scene in the Friar’s cell, the manuscript behind the 1599 print contained a passage in two states: an original wording and the author’s revision of it, the first attempt left standing in the papers rather than struck through. A corrector preparing an amended text deletes one state and prints the other. Creede’s compositors printed both, one after the other, and the second quarto accordingly hands its readers the same lines twice in different words, a doppelgänger passage that every editor since has had to disentangle by hand. No single fact about the book speaks more clearly against its title page. The unrevised survival of the doublet is not a blemish on the amendment; it is the proof that the amendment, as a process, never took place. What reached the printing house was an unedited draft, and what left it was the draft in type.

The smaller evidence runs the same way. The second quarto’s speech prefixes fluctuate as its copy’s did, Romeo shrinking to Rom and Ro, Juliet to Iuli and Iu, Tybalt to Tib, Tyb, and Ti within a few pages, the untidiness of a writing desk transmitted faithfully to the printed page. Eric Sams catalogued those fluctuations to argue that the copy was Shakespeare’s own manuscript, an argument about provenance that succeeds; but the same catalogue convicts the title page, since an amended edition is precisely one in which such inconsistencies have been regularised before the compositors start. Verse fares no better under the claim. Part of the Queen Mab speech, the set piece beginning “O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you” (1.4.53), stands in the second quarto set as prose, its lineation collapsed, in the very book that advertises its own amendment. The compositors’ errors, misreadings, and turned letters accumulated through the edition stand in the textual notes of every modern printing of the play, each one a small unamended fault in the amended text. Greg’s doctrine, examined in the next section, taught editors to prize the second quarto as copy-text while emending it continuously; the practice of three centuries of editors, who have corrected the “amended” quarto in thousands of places, is the longest-running refutation of the third verb.

What stands twice in the second quarto that an amended text would print once?

A passage at the junction of the balcony sequence and the Friar’s cell scene stands in the 1599 print in two successive wordings, the author’s first attempt and his revision, both set because neither had been cancelled in the copy. An amended text exists to remove exactly this kind of survival.

Its presence here is the physical proof that no amending hand prepared the manuscript for the press: the draft went to the compositors with its second thoughts still showing, and the compositors printed what they found.

Discount “amended”, then, to the trade sense the word could carry on a title page: improved, in the loose commendatory register in which stationers praised any new edition over its predecessor. In that register the word is puffery, and puffery is not perjury. But the claim’s modern readers have rarely granted themselves that discount. Editors and bibliographers quoted the triad as a bibliographical finding, and a word that began as commendation hardened into a description of process. The third verb’s trial therefore ends with a split verdict: as advertising, unremarkable; as a statement about the making of the book, false, and falsifiable from the book itself. The doublet alone decides it. An edition that prints its copy’s rough draft, doublets and all, was set in type. It was not amended.

The period did possess a machinery of amendment, and its absence from the playbook trade is telling. Learned books, Bibles, statutes, and scholarly editions passed through the hands of correctors, readers employed to check copy, revise proofs, and answer for the state of the text; a title page that promised correction in those worlds pointed at identifiable labour by identifiable men. No such machinery served the play quartos. A play manuscript arrived at a printing house as copy, was cast off, divided among compositors, and set at piece rates against the clock; the house’s interest lay in a legible, saleable book produced quickly, not in a collated one. The second quarto’s physical character is exactly the character of that system: generally competent, intermittently careless, and wholly unrevised at the level where revision would have required someone to read the whole text against an intention. Its famous untidinesses are not scandals within the system; they are the system, photographed. What is genuinely unusual about the book is not that it escaped amendment but that its copy was good enough, and its claim loud enough, to make posterity expect amendment of it.

The expectation distorted even the description of the book’s faults. Because the second quarto was the good quarto, its errors were long treated as puzzles demanding deep explanations, authorial afterthoughts, theatrical interpolations, press variants of significance, where the first quarto’s errors were treated as the natural produce of a bad book. The doublet is the clearest casualty of the double standard: a duplicated passage in the 1597 text would have been entered as one more proof of memorial chaos, while the duplicated passage in the 1599 text was handled, for generations, with a delicacy that bordered on reverence, as though an amended book’s accidents must be meaningful. Restoring the two books to a single standard of judgment is the precondition of trying the claim at all, and the claim, once tried by that standard, convicts itself: whatever process produced the second quarto, it was the ordinary process of the Elizabethan printing house, applied to extraordinary copy.

One literal act of correction can be proved for the 1599 edition, and its scale is the verdict on the verb in miniature. Surviving copies of the second quarto do not read identically in every particular, because the press was stopped at points during the printing and individual pieces of type were corrected between impressions, leaving earlier and later states of the same sheet bound indifferently into different copies. That is correction as the printing house practised it: a turned letter righted, a wrong word spotted at the proof and replaced, the maintenance of the type rather than the improvement of the text. It touched dozens of words across the edition and no passages, and it is the only amending hand the book can be shown to have felt. Between that hand’s work and the title page’s “amended” lies the whole distance between a printing house and an editor’s study, and the claim’s third verb lives in the gap, drawing on the credit of a process, scholarly, deliberate, and witnessed, that the playbook trade did not operate. The verb was not lying about the existence of correction in the trade. It was borrowing the prestige of the learned corrector’s desk for a book that had passed only under the compositor’s eye.

The architecture of the printed book tells the same story at a glance. The second quarto presents the play as a continuous script without the articulated act and scene divisions every modern edition supplies, its breaks marked irregularly or left for the reader to infer, exactly as a bundle of foul papers would present it and exactly as no amended edition, prepared by a hand concerned for the reader’s navigation, would leave it. Its stage directions are of the same unprepared character, descriptive where the draft describes, silent where the draft is silent, rich in the entrances the author happened to note and bare where he relied on the company’s knowledge. An amended text is, among other things, a text made navigable, and the 1599 quarto is navigable only because four centuries of editors have since supplied the signposting its own pages lack, the divisions, the locations, the regularised entrances and exits that readers now mistake for features of the play. The amendment the title page advertised in 1599 was eventually performed, in full and at great labour. It was performed by Capell, by Malone, by the Cambridge editors, by Gibbons, Levenson, and Weis, across two hundred and fifty years of editions, and the bill for it is still being paid in every modern textual note. Burby’s verb was a promissory note. The profession has been redeeming it ever since.

The Warranty Beneath the Claim: Sundry Times Publiquely Acted

The three verbs do not stand alone on the page, and the clause that follows them in the title sentence has its own part in the trial, because it supplies the claim’s warranty. “As it hath bene sundry times publiquely acted, by the right Honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his Servants”: the sentence first asserts an improved text and then names the body whose performances guarantee it. The logic is the logic of provenance again. A corrected text might come from anywhere; a corrected text warranted by the playing company that owned the play comes, by implication, from the company’s own papers, and the implication is the strongest argument the page makes, stronger than the verbs, because it identifies a channel by which authoritative copy could reach a publisher. The first quarto’s page had warranted itself by its company too, the Lord Hunsdon’s servants, the same organisation under its earlier style, so the 1599 page is also updating a credential: the company had changed its name with its patron, and the new edition presents the new name like a corrected entry in a ledger. Even the page’s warranty, in other words, performs a small correction of its predecessor.

The warranty’s limits are the claim’s limits in miniature. It certifies performance, which the text’s state does not simply follow from, since a company could act a play for years from a promptbook no stationer ever saw; and it certifies the company as the play’s proprietor, which is a statement about the stage, not about the manuscript Creede set from. Between the company’s performances and Burby’s copy lies the transaction the page does not describe, the acquisition of the manuscript, about which the documents are silent and the theories, foul papers reaching the trade through channels unknown, are inference built on the text’s internal character. Read strictly, the whole title sentence is two assertions and a name: the book is improved, the play was acted, the company is the company’s. The connection among the three, that the improvement descends from the company’s authoritative papers, is supplied by the buyer’s inference, guided by the page’s layout. Advertising rarely argues; it juxtaposes. The enduring scholarly habit of treating the page as an argument, with premises and a conclusion about the copy, repeats the browser’s guided inference at the level of doctrine, and the trial of the verbs has to decline the guidance in both places. What remains when the juxtaposition is unpicked is still considerable: a publisher in possession of superior copy, a company whose name sold books, and a public expected to connect them. The connection, in this instance, happens to be true, on the independent evidence of the text’s character. It is true the way the claim is true throughout, by outcome rather than by demonstration.

Even the performance warranty has been edited between the two pages, and the edit is diagnostic. The 1597 page boasts that the play had been acted “often (with great applause)”; the 1599 page says only that it had been acted “sundry times”. The applause is gone, the frequency cooled from a boast to a formality. The change runs against the grain of advertising, which inflates, and it makes sense only as part of the second page’s larger repositioning: applause is the currency of the theatre, and the 1599 book is selling escape from the theatre’s terms into the study’s, where value is measured in correctness rather than clapping. A text “sundry times acted” is a text with a pedigree; a text acted “with great applause” is a souvenir. Burby’s page systematically demotes the stage in favour of the desk, in its warranty as in its verbs, and the demotion is the earliest move in the long process by which the play’s printed form learned to condescend to its performed one. The first quarto, souvenir and all, is the rebuttal that process never answered: the applause it advertised was real, the performances it recorded were the play’s life, and the corrected book that superseded it has been borrowing the souvenir’s stage directions ever since.

How a Buyer in 1599 Was Meant to Read the Claim

Every statement tried so far was addressed, in the first instance, not to scholars but to a person standing in a bookshop with money in hand, and the claim recovers its proportions when it is read as that person read it. Title pages in the period did the work of the poster and the handbill as well as the title: displayed in stationers’ shops and posted to advertise stock, they were the book’s public face before a single copy sold, as Blayney’s work on the playbook trade has established. The audience for “newly corrected, augmented, and amended” was anyone who might buy a playbook in the Paul’s Churchyard trade, and its subgroups can be distinguished by what each was being told.

The first subgroup owned the 1597 quarto, and the claim speaks to owners directly. A corrected, augmented, amended edition tells a previous purchaser that the book on the shelf at home is defective in three named ways and that its replacement is at hand. This is the rhetoric of supersession, and it presupposes the earlier book’s success: there is no commercial point in correcting a text nobody bought. Read in this direction, the boast is the best surviving evidence that the first quarto sold well enough to be worth displacing, and that its readers were expected to compare the two books, since a comparison is what the verbs invite. The second subgroup knew the play from the stage. For them the operative line is the one beneath the claim, “As it hath bene sundry times publiquely acted, by the right Honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his Servants”: the book is warranted by the performances and issued under the company’s updated name, a certificate that the text for sale is the company’s own play and not a pirate’s reconstruction of it. The third subgroup, the trade itself and the rival stationers around the churchyard, read the imprint: printed by Creede, for Burby, sold at his shop near the Exchange, a statement of ownership as much as a direction, warning the market whose property the improved text was.

Where could the book be bought?

At Cuthbert Burby’s own shop near the Royal Exchange, as the imprint states: printed by Thomas Creede, published by Burby, and sold at his premises in the commercial heart of the City. The address is part of the advertisement’s machinery, directing buyers to the one shop where the corrected edition could be found.

The imprint converts the title page from a description of the book into a set of directions, and the profit on the edition travelled the same route as the directions pointed.

Notice what the claim does not attempt. It does not name the play’s author, because in 1599 the author’s name was not yet the selling point for this play, whatever the same publisher’s Love’s Labour’s Lost page had done the year before in printing “by W. Shakespere” beneath the same formula. It does not promise a text prepared by the company or supervised by anyone connected with the writing. It does not mention the first quarto by name, date, or printer: the rival is everywhere implied and nowhere identified, an act of competitive discretion that also kept the claim safely unfalsifiable in the shop. A buyer could verify “augmented” only by buying both books and counting, and “amended” not at all. The claim was calibrated, in other words, to be believed rather than checked, which is the ordinary calibration of advertising in any century. The scholarly error, when it came, was to keep believing it in a context, the study, whose whole method is checking.

The commodity itself explains the calibration. A play quarto was a small, cheap book, sold unbound for a few pence, more pamphlet than volume, bought to be read, lent, marked, and used up; the survival of only a handful of copies of each early edition of this play, five of the first quarto, measures how completely the class of object was consumed. Buyers of such books were not collectors of record but readers of appetite, and the lists of play quartos compiled by the courtier Sir John Harington around 1609, preserving the shape of one gentleman’s working collection, show the appetite at its most systematic: quartos gathered by the dozen, a private library of the drama in its cheapest form. To such buyers the title page spoke in the few seconds of a browser’s attention, and its superlatives were priced accordingly, as the seasoning on a purchase already half decided by the story’s fame. Burby’s claim was not fraudulent in that setting; it was proportionate, the amount of assurance a sixpenny buyer required. The disproportion entered later, when scholars began quoting the seasoning as though it were the substance, and built a discipline’s founding distinction on a sentence composed for a browser’s glance.

The claim also addressed a readership beyond the first buyer, and a history of the book that priced it must reckon with circulation. A play quarto was lent, borrowed, read aloud in company, resold, and bound up years later with other quartos into the composite volumes in which so many surviving copies reached libraries. Every hand it passed through met the title page again, and the page’s work renewed itself with each reader: the book carried its own certificate of superiority pasted, in effect, to its forehead, into households and collections where the 1597 quarto was a rumour rather than a rival on the shelf. Supersession rhetoric is usually addressed to the moment of purchase; print gives it a longer life than its author intended, and the 1599 sentence was still performing its office, demoting a book few of its readers had ever seen, when the scholars of the nineteenth century took the demotion up as a premise. The claim’s afterlife among editors, traced in the next section, begins here, in the sociology of a cheap book’s circulation: an advertisement that outlives its market becomes, by default, a historical source, and is read with a trust its composition never earned. The corrective is not to discard such sources but to cross-examine them, which is the whole method of the present article, and the reason a bookseller’s sentence has been put through several thousand words of trial rather than dismissed in a footnote.

The Claim’s Second Life: Editors, Pollard and the Bad Quarto

The claim outlived its shop. The second quarto was reprinted as the third in 1609 and again in later quartos, and its text, descending into the First Folio, became the play the eighteenth century inherited. Editors who worked from those descendants received the 1599 ranking as part of the furniture: the later text was the text, and the 1597 quarto, when it was examined at all, was examined as a corruption of it. Edward Dowden’s introduction to his edition of 1900 shows the frame still governing at the century’s end, in a sentence that takes the title page’s side twice over: Q1 is “an imperfect representation, piratically issued, of the same play which is given fully and, in the main, aright in Q2”, and “before Q2 appeared Shakespeare had revised the play, and had rewritten a few passages”. Piracy, imperfection, fullness, revision: the whole vocabulary of Dowden’s textual history is the vocabulary of Burby’s advertisement, systematised by three centuries of assent.

A. W. Pollard gave the frame its permanent name. In Shakespeare Folios and Quartos of 1909, working from the First Folio editors’ address to the reader with its scorn for “stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed”, Pollard sorted the early quartos into the honest and the bad, and the Romeo and Juliet of 1597 entered the bad list with its character pre-written by the book that displaced it. The labels “good quarto” and “bad quarto”, still in daily use, are the title page’s verdict translated into bibliography: 1599 called itself corrected, and scholarship obligingly called 1597 incorrect. W. W. Greg then supplied the method that made the hierarchy respectable. In his rationale of copy-text, the second quarto’s authority was regrounded in its copy: a text printed from the author’s foul papers carries an authority no reported text can match, and editors were to take it as their base and emend from it. Greg’s doctrine is the claim grown rigorous. The advertisement said the book was better; Greg specified wherein the betterness consisted, in the nature of the manuscript behind the print, and on that question the succeeding century has broadly sustained him.

The counter-attack came from two directions. Laurie E. Maguire’s Shakespearean Suspect Texts of 1996 subjected the diagnostic features of memorial reconstruction, the theory built to explain books like the 1597 quarto, to statistical test across forty-one suspect texts, and found the features failing to discriminate the guilty from the innocent. The bad-quarto category, and with it the disgrace Burby’s sentence had pronounced, lost much of its evidentiary base: the claim had been treated for centuries as a witness to the earlier book’s character when it was an interested party in a trade dispute. Eric Sams attacked from the opposite flank, not by discounting the title page but by insisting on it. In The Real Shakespeare and his essays on the quartos, Sams argued that “newly corrected, augmented, and amended” means what it plainly says: the 1599 book is the author’s revision of his own earlier version, the version printed in 1597, and that the orthodox reading survives only by refusing the words their sense. He quoted Gibbons’s flat statement that the words cannot mean revision as the orthodoxy’s founding evasion, and marshalled the first quarto’s excellences, its unique lines, its dense and inventive vocabulary, against the picture of it as actors’ debris. The vocabulary evidence deserves its weight stated plainly, since it is the strongest card in his hand. On Sams’s counts, the second quarto deploys some 3,881 distinct words, about 16 percent of its total length, while the much shorter first quarto deploys some 3,272, nearly 19 percent of its length: the shorter text is, word for word, the lexically richer of the two. A paraphrase from failing memory should flatten a text’s vocabulary, substituting the common word for the rare one at every lapse; a text that keeps its rare words at a higher density than the full version resists that account, and Sams is entitled to press the resistance hard. The answer available to the orthodoxy is real but narrower than its confidence: abridgement also concentrates vocabulary, since cutting removes connective and expository tissue while the set speeches, where the rare words live, survive, and a performance reduction of an authorial text would show exactly the lexical profile Sams measures. The statistic therefore cannot distinguish his first draft from the orthodoxy’s cut-down performance text, and where a statistic cannot discriminate, the physical evidence must rule. The patch and the doublet are physical. They are also, between them, decisive against the strong form of his thesis, as the adjudication below sets out.

The disagreement between Sams and the Gibbons orthodoxy is the genuine one the brief for this article demands, and the collation adjudicates it in parts. Sams wins the semantic point. A title page’s words cannot be ruled out of their plain meaning because the meaning is inconvenient, and “augmented” in particular describes exactly what a reviser produces; Gibbons’s “cannot” is stronger than his evidence. But Sams loses the documentary point, and loses it on the two physical facts established above. A revised edition is not printed, for eighty of its lines, from the unrevised edition’s pages when its own copy runs short: the patch shows Creede’s house treating the 1597 print as copy, which places the two books in a printer’s relation, not an author’s line of descent from draft to revision in the form Sams requires. And a revision prepared for the press does not leave its own doublet standing: the unrevised passage printed twice in 1599 shows the copy reaching the compositors as working papers, unmediated by any amending intelligence, the author’s or another’s. What the evidence supports is the position neither party quite states: the 1599 book was set from authorial papers that represented a fuller and in places reworked state of the play than the state behind the 1597 print, papers whose reworkings happened at the writing desk at unknown dates and for unknown occasions. Burby’s verbs compress that untidy history into a sales line. They are true the way a sales line is true, in outcome and in tendency, and the scholarly mistake, Sams’s included, is to ask them for a precision no advertisement carries.

One document measures the claim’s success more neatly than any commentary. The copy of the play passed from Burby to Nicholas Ling in January 1607 and from Ling to John Smethwick within the year, and when Smethwick issued the third quarto in 1609, printed by John Windet, the title page dropped the corrected, augmented, and amended formula entirely. In its place stand the attractions of a new decade: the play as acted by the King’s Majesty’s Servants at the Globe, and, for the first time on this play’s title page, an author’s name, “Written by W. Shake-speare”. The boast had completed its work. By 1609 the 1599 text no longer needed to argue its superiority, because it had become, unchallenged, the text of the play; the argument was over, and the advertisement could retire. Claims that win are the ones later ages mistake for descriptions. Burby’s is the type specimen.

The nineteenth century added the instrument the claim had always feared: systematic comparison. Edward Capell, in the middle of the eighteenth century, had been the first editor to collate the early editions of the plays as a matter of method, and the discipline he founded matured into the parallel-text printings of the Victorian period, including the 1874 edition that set the first and second quartos of this play face to face on the page. Facing pages are unforgiving to advertisements. A reader with the two texts open side by side could see the augmentation, count it, locate it, and could equally see the places where the shorter text preserved what the longer lacked, the longer text duplicated what it should have cancelled, and the shorter text turned out to be standing inside the longer one across the patch. The claim did not collapse under the comparison; it shrank to its defensible core, which is the history this article has traced in reverse, from taxonomy back to salesmanship. Modern scholarship’s best instruments repeat the pattern at higher power: the parallel-text presentations of the Oxford editors, Jill Levenson’s edition with its full collation, and Lukas Erne’s edition of the first quarto as a document in its own right, published in 2007, all proceed by making the two books confront each other rather than by repeating the sentence that ranked them.

There is a final irony in the afterlife, and it belongs to the claim’s victim. The sentence that demoted the first quarto in 1599 is also the reason the first quarto was preserved as an object of study. A merely superseded edition might have vanished from the record; a convicted one remained interesting, and the bad quarto’s disgrace kept scholars returning to the book they despised, counting its lines, cataloguing its directions, and slowly discovering its virtues. Erne’s edition and the Folger’s patch-following text are the late fruits of that attention. Burby wrote the first quarto’s death warrant and, in the same six words, its letter of safe conduct through four centuries of scholarship. No verdict on the claim is complete that omits its unintended mercy.

The Greg tradition, which gave the claim its methodological afterlife, deserves one paragraph of close reading, because it is the version of the title page’s authority that survives this article’s trial most nearly intact. Greg’s copy-text doctrine, as his successors codified it, held that an editor should choose the text closest to the author’s papers and emend it sparingly, and for this play that text was the second quarto, on the ground that it was printed from foul papers, the playwright’s working draft with its revisions, cancellations, and inconsistencies still in it. The doublet, the shifting prefixes, and the prose-set verse, the very features that convict the third verb, are precisely the features Greg’s doctrine reads as credentials, since a transcript that had been tidied would have lost them. In that framework the claim’s verbs are transposed into a new key: “augmented” becomes the fullness of the draft, “corrected” becomes the substitution of draft for report, and “amended” drops out altogether, replaced by the frank admission that the draft was never amended at all. The doctrine’s durability rests on its honesty about that last point. Greg’s heirs do not pretend the book was improved by a corrector; they argue it needs no corrector, because its faults are the fingerprints of its origin. The Oxford Shakespeare’s treatment of King Lear as two plays, its quarto and Folio texts printed as distinct versions rather than fused into one, carried the same honesty to its logical end for another play, and Romeo and Juliet’s scholarship has moved in that direction at the level of practice, with the first quarto’s separate edition standing beside the second quarto’s as a text rather than beneath it. René Weis’s Arden edition of the play, published in 2012, embodies the mature settlement: the second quarto as copy-text, the first quarto’s stage directions and unique readings consulted where they clarify, and the title page’s claim cited as corroboration of the copy’s character rather than as the argument for it. That is the proper place for Burby’s sentence in a modern edition’s apparatus, after the evidence, not before it.

The InsightCrunch Title-Page Reading

The table below, the InsightCrunch title-page reading, audits the page element by element: what each part promises a buyer, what the documents and the collation actually show, and the verdict each element earns. Teachers and editors assembling the evidence for a seminar can lay the rows out with a presentation tool such as the ReportMedic PPT Viewer, since the reading is built to be checked line by line against a facsimile of the page itself.

Element of the page	What it promises	What the documents show	Verdict
“The most excellent and lamentable Tragedie”	A greater and sadder play than the “excellent conceited” tragedy of 1597	The title recasts the appeal from wit to pathos over a fuller text of the same play	Framing, broadly honest
“Newly”	Fresh editorial work in 1599	The edition was new; its copy was an authorial draft of earlier, uncertain date	True of the book, not of the text
“Corrected”	The 1597 text’s faults set right	A sounder manuscript substituted for the earlier copy, not an emendation of it	Half true: outcome yes, mechanism no
“Corrected”, within 1.2.55 to 1.3.37	The corrected text throughout	The 1599 compositors reprinted the 1597 quarto for that stretch	Fails on its own terms in the patch
“Augmented”	More of the play than the old book holds	775 net lines added, concentrated in set speeches, the second Chorus, and the final acts	True, and measurable
“Amended”	A text worked over and improved before printing	A doublet printed twice, fluctuating speech prefixes, verse set as prose	False as process; puffery as advertising
“Sundry times publiquely acted”	A stage success behind the book	The play was a repertory success; the 1597 page made the same appeal	True, and shared with the rival
“By the Lord Chamberlaine his Servants”	Copy warranted by the owning company	The company named is the play’s own company under its updated style	A plausible warranty the page cannot prove
The author’s missing name	Nothing; the space is given to the claim instead	Burby’s Love’s Labour’s Lost page had printed the author’s name the year before; a reader added “Wil. Sha.” by hand to one copy	The page sells the text and the company, not the author
“Printed by Thomas Creede, for Cuthbert Burby, to be sold at his shop neere the Exchange”	Directions to the one seller of the improved text	Burby held the copy until he transferred it to Nicholas Ling in January 1607	Trade fact, exactly verifiable

One mechanism of the claim’s persuasion remains to be named, because it explains why this advertisement, among thousands, was believed for centuries by people trained to check. The claim is partly verifiable at the point of sale, and the verifiable part verifies gloriously. A browser who picked up the 1599 quarto held a visibly, heftably larger book than the quarto of 1597: more sheets, more pages, a thicker gathering of paper in the hand, with the extra bulk corresponding to real play, hundreds of lines of it, in exactly the scenes a returning reader would sample. “Augmented” passed the heft test on the spot. Human judgment, in a bookshop as in a study, extends credit from the verified to the unverified claims that travel in the same sentence, and the sentence was engineered, whether by instinct or design, to exploit the extension: the verb that could be checked by hand stood first in the buyer’s experience of the book, and the verbs that could not be checked without a library rode on its credit. Scholarship repeated the shopper’s error at scale, confirming the augmentation by collation and then admitting the correction and the amendment on the strength of the company they kept. The trial’s discipline, separating the verbs and trying each on its own evidence, is simply the refusal of that extension of credit, applied four centuries late.

Verdict: One Verb True, One Verb Half-True, One Verb False

The trial ends where it began, with the sentence read as what it is. “Newly corrected, augmented, and amended” is the most successful piece of textual criticism of the sixteenth century, if success is measured by assent: it fixed the relative standing of two books for four hundred years, supplied the good quarto with its character and the bad quarto with its name, and taught editors to begin from the conclusion it announced. Against the evidence, its three verbs divide. “Augmented” is a fact with a number on it, 775 lines, distributed exactly where a fuller authorial text should add them. “Corrected” is a true conclusion attached to a false process: the 1599 book is the sounder text because its copy was sounder, not because anyone corrected the 1597 print, which the new book, at its moment of need, was content to reprint. “Amended” is trade commendation contradicted by the object itself, by the doublet no amender would have passed, the prefixes no amender would have left, and the prose no amender would have set from verse copy.

What the claim finally reveals is therefore double, and both halves matter. About the second quarto, it reveals less than editors once hoped and more than sceptics allow: no process, but a provenance, the trade’s own corroboration that the 1599 copy outranked its predecessor before a single scholar collated them. About the first quarto, it reveals the opposite of its intention. A publisher does not advertise correction against a book that failed; he advertises it against the book his customers already own and value. Burby’s sentence is the first quarto’s certificate of success, issued by its executioner. The cliché about the two quartos ignores the title page and so inherits its ranking unexamined. Restoring the page to view restores the ranking to its proper status: not a finding of bibliography, but a bookseller’s argument, brilliant, interested, one third exact, and still, after four centuries, waiting to be read as an argument rather than obeyed as a fact.

The trial’s practical yield, for anyone who cites the early quartos, is a rule of evidence. Quote the title page for what a publisher announced and for what the announcement presupposes, a rival edition in circulation, a public learning to compare texts, a company warranting its play. Prove the state of the texts from the texts, their agreements and divergences, their physical manufacture, their copy’s fingerprints in prefix and doublet. Between those two jurisdictions the whole of the play’s textual scholarship arranges itself, the Greg tradition honouring the boundary when it grounds the second quarto’s authority in its manuscript rather than in its marketing, the Sams tradition honouring it in reverse when it demands that the marketing be allowed its plain meaning and then tested. The sentence survives both treatments, diminished from a verdict into a document, which is the most useful thing a document can be. Burby, who wanted only to sell a book in the winter of 1599, would have recognised the sentence’s fate as a commercial success beyond his dreaming: his six words are still in print, still argued over, and still, on the evidence assembled here, one third exact.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is the InsightCrunch title-page reading, and what pattern does it expose?

The InsightCrunch title-page reading is a word-by-word audit of the second quarto’s title page, testing each element of the publisher’s advertisement against the collation of the quartos and the records of the book trade. The pattern it exposes is a consistent split between quantity and workmanship: every claim on the page that can be counted, the added lines, the seller’s address, the copy’s ownership, checks out exactly, while every claim that describes editorial labour, correction as a process and amendment as a process, dissolves under inspection. The reading’s lesson generalises across early title pages: a stationer’s verifiable facts are usually accurate, and a stationer’s commendations are usually weather.

Q: What did “corrected” promise a buyer who already owned the 1597 quarto?

It promised that the earlier purchase was defective and that its defects had been put right. “Corrected” is a comparative word aimed at a known rival: it told an owner of the first quarto that the text at home contained faults, unspecified and therefore boundless, and that the new book on the counter was the same play with the faults removed. The promise carried an implied rebuke and an implied saving at once, the saving being that a single new purchase replaced a faulty old one. Collation shows the outcome was real, a sounder and fuller text, but the mechanism was substitution of better copy, not repair of the old book.

Q: What did the word “amended” mean in the book trade of the 1590s?

In the trade’s commendatory register, “amended” meant improved, and it belonged to a stock vocabulary of relaunch: corrected, augmented, amended, enlarged, and perfected recur on the title pages of reissued books of every kind, plays, sermons, and manuals alike. The word certified that the new edition was better than whatever had gone before without specifying a single act of improvement, and buyers schooled in the register read it as praise rather than as a process report. Its looseness is precisely why scholars err when they cite the 1599 title page as evidence of editorial work: the word never promised any.

Q: Why does the title page say “newly” when the play itself was not new?

“Newly” dates the edition, not the play. The tragedy had been on the stage for years and in print since 1597, and the title page itself says so in its next breath, advertising a play “sundry times publiquely acted”. What was new in 1599 was the book: a new setting of type from new copy, issued to displace an existing edition. The adverb belongs to the grammar of reissue, where “newly” marks the moment a familiar commodity returns to the shop in improved dress. Its quiet work is urgency: a merely corrected book might wait, while a newly corrected one asks to be bought before the impression sells through.

Q: Who was Cuthbert Burby, and what else did his shop publish?

Cuthbert Burby was the London stationer who published the second quarto, commissioning Thomas Creede to print it and selling it at his shop near the Royal Exchange. He was among the strongest play publishers of the decade: his list held the first quarto of Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1598, the quartos of The Taming of a Shrew, the Edward III quartos, and Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia, the critical catalogue that fixed Shakespeare’s early reputation in print. He held the copy of Romeo and Juliet until January 1607, when he transferred it to Nicholas Ling; he died the same year.

Q: Why is the author’s name missing from the second quarto’s title page?

Because the page was selling the text, the company, and the story rather than the writer. Neither of the play’s first two quartos names Shakespeare, and the omission was a commercial judgment, not an oversight: the same publisher had printed “by W. Shakespere” on the Love’s Labour’s Lost title page the year before, when the name served that book’s pitch. For Romeo and Juliet in 1599 the advertised attractions were the improved state of the text and the warrant of the Lord Chamberlain’s servants. The play’s third quarto of 1609 was the first to name its author.

Q: What did an early owner write by hand on one surviving copy?

A reader wrote “Wil. Sha.” beneath the title, supplying by hand the attribution the printed page omits. The manuscript note survives on the copy of the second quarto held by Edinburgh University Library, and it is a small, complete history of the book’s early reception in itself: the text circulated as an improved commodity before it circulated as an author’s work, and its owners repaired the title page’s silence in ink. The note also marks the direction of travel in the play’s marketing, since the next edition, the third quarto of 1609, prints the author’s name as a selling point in its own right.

Q: How had the same publisher used the same formula the year before?

Burby’s 1598 quarto of Love’s Labour’s Lost announces itself as “newly corrected and augmented”, two of the three verbs of 1599 already in place, with the addition “by W. Shakespere” beneath. The parallel proves that the collocation was the publisher’s house style for relaunching a play rather than a bespoke report on work done on Romeo and Juliet, and commentators have even inferred from the comedy’s formula a lost earlier edition that its corrected book replaced. Boilerplate is not perjury, but the precedent forbids reading the 1599 sentence as a unique editorial confession: Burby reached for this sentence when he had a relaunch to sell.

Q: Where in the play does the second quarto’s extra material chiefly sit?

The extra material sits in the play’s set speeches, its choruses, and its final acts. The second Chorus, absent from the first quarto, appears at the head of the second act; Juliet’s potion speech in the fourth act and Romeo’s apothecary speech in the fifth expand from compressed paraphrase to full arias; the Friar’s closing narrative before the Prince reaches its full length; and the balcony scene, the morning parting, and the wedding scene all stand fuller or substantially different. The distribution is the signature of a written text restored beyond playing length: what performance trims, the second quarto keeps.

Q: Which lines survive only in the first quarto and stand in modern editions?

The entrance joke at 1.4.7 to 8, promising that the maskers shall have no “without-book prologue, faintly spoke / After the prompter”, survives only in the first quarto. Modern editions print the lines as Shakespeare’s, lifted from the supposedly corrupt book into the good text, where they now sit invisibly in every reading copy of the play. The survival matters beyond its two lines: it demonstrates that the first quarto preserves genuine material the corrected edition lacks, and that editors, whatever their declared allegiance to the second quarto, practise a quiet eclecticism the title page’s ranking forbids.

Q: Why does a passage printed twice in the second quarto disprove “amended”?

Because amendment is deletion’s twin: an amended text is one from which superseded material has been removed. Where the balcony sequence hands over to the Friar’s cell scene, the second quarto prints a passage twice, in the author’s first wording and in his revised wording, because the copy carried both states and no hand cancelled either before the compositors began. The doublet is therefore not an error within an amended text but evidence that no amending took place: the manuscript passed to the printing house as working papers and was set as it stood. One unrevised survival outweighs the title page’s verb.

Q: What do the second quarto’s shifting speech prefixes reveal about its copy?

They reveal copy in the author’s working state. Within a few pages the second quarto’s prefixes shrink Romeo to Rom and Ro, Juliet to Iuli and Iu, and Tybalt to Tib, Tyb, and Ti, fluctuations no corrector preparing copy for the press would have transmitted and no compositor would have invented at random. Eric Sams catalogued the variants as fingerprints of a single idiosyncratic hand, evidence that the copy was the playwright’s own draft. The same catalogue serves the opposite side of the trial as well: an edition advertised as amended regularises such inconsistencies, and this one faithfully preserves them.

Q: How did Edward Dowden’s edition of 1900 repeat the title page’s verdict?

Dowden’s introduction adopts the advertisement’s ranking as the frame of the play’s textual history. The first quarto, for Dowden, is “an imperfect representation, piratically issued, of the same play which is given fully and, in the main, aright in Q2”, and he adds that before the second quarto appeared “Shakespeare had revised the play, and had rewritten a few passages”. Imperfection, piracy, fullness, revision: each term answers to a word or an implication of Burby’s sentence, three centuries after the sentence was written to sell a book. Dowden is the claim’s afterlife in a single editor, assent so complete it no longer notices itself.

Q: What part did the claim play in Pollard’s naming of the bad quarto?

It supplied the verdict the naming ratified. When A. W. Pollard sorted the early quartos in Shakespeare Folios and Quartos of 1909, the 1597 Romeo and Juliet entered his bad list carrying a character its successor’s title page had written for it: because the 1599 book announced itself as corrected, the 1597 book stood convicted as the uncorrected original, the error the correction existed to replace. The Folio editors’ scorn for “stolne, and surreptitious copies” gave Pollard his moral vocabulary, but for this play the specific sentence of disgrace was Burby’s. The labels good quarto and bad quarto are the advertisement translated into taxonomy.

Q: How did Maguire’s audit weaken the claim’s scholarly authority?

Laurie E. Maguire’s Shakespearean Suspect Texts of 1996 tested the diagnostic features by which supposedly reported texts, the 1597 quarto among them, were identified, across forty-one suspect texts and their controls. The features failed to discriminate: the marks of memorial reconstruction appeared where no reporting was suspected and absented themselves where it was. The audit’s effect on the title page is indirect and severe. The claim’s authority had always been borrowed from the theory that explained the earlier book’s badness; once the diagnostics collapsed, the claim stood exposed as what it had been from the start, a seller’s characterisation of a rival, cited for centuries as though it were a witness’s.

Q: What does Eric Sams take the three verbs to prove?

Eric Sams takes them at face value, as the author’s bibliography in miniature: corrected, augmented, and amended describe, for Sams, what a revising playwright does to his own first version, so the 1599 book is Shakespeare’s revision of the version printed in 1597. He supports the reading with the first quarto’s excellences, its unique lines and dense vocabulary, and with single variants such as the light-foot couplet of the Friar’s cell scene, where the change of wording looks like second thought rather than forgetting. His polemic’s target is the orthodoxy’s refusal, as he presents it, to let the words mean what they say.

Q: Why does the Folger edition print one stretch of the play from the first quarto?

Because for that stretch the second quarto is the first quarto. From 1.2.55 to 1.3.37 the 1599 compositors, their manuscript copy failing or not yet arrived, set their type from the printed 1597 edition, so the second quarto’s authority there is borrowed wholesale from the book its title page supersedes. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, editing the Folger Shakespeare, follow the copy rather than the claim and print those lines from the first quarto. The decision is the claim’s most elegant editorial judgment: honoured wherever the authorial manuscript stands behind the print, set aside at exactly the point where it does not.

Q: What replaced the boast on the third quarto’s title page of 1609?

The author’s name replaced it. When John Smethwick issued the third quarto in 1609, printed by John Windet, the corrected, augmented, and amended formula disappears, and the page instead advertises the play as acted by the King’s Majesty’s Servants at the Globe and, for the first time on this play’s title page, “Written by W. Shake-speare”. The disappearance measures the boast’s success: by 1609 the 1599 text had become simply the text of the play, its superiority no longer required argument, and the selling point of an edition had migrated from the state of the text to the name of its author.

Q: If the claim is an advertisement, why can scholars still use it as evidence?

Because advertisements are evidence of the right things when read for what they are. The title page proves that a publisher in 1599 possessed copy he believed, or wished buyers to believe, outranked the 1597 edition; that he expected buyers to know and compare the rival book; and that textual quality had become a selling point for playbooks at all. It corroborates, from inside the trade, the conclusion collation reaches independently about the second quarto’s copy. What it cannot evidence is process: how the better copy came to exist, whether by revision, report, or replacement. Used within its competence, the claim is a good witness; the historical error was swearing it in on every question.

Q: Which of the three verbs survives collation intact?

“Augmented” alone survives intact. The 775 net lines by which the second quarto exceeds the first, 3,007 against 2,232, are a matter of count rather than interpretation, and their distribution, set speeches at full length, the second Chorus restored, the final acts unabbreviated, matches the fuller authorial copy the claim implies. “Corrected” survives as a conclusion with its mechanism replaced, substitution doing the work the word assigns to repair, and fails outright across the eighty lines the new book reprints from the old. “Amended” does not survive at all: the doublet, the prefixes, and the prose-set verse stand against it in the book’s own type.