The orthodox view

What is the ‘Bad Quarto’ theory?

Several of Shakespeare’s plays first reached print as short, cheap quarto editions whose texts differ sharply from the longer versions printed later. In 1909 the bibliographer A. W. Pollard grouped the most troublesome of them together as the ‘bad quartos’: corrupt editions, as he saw them, put into print without the consent of the author or his company. The list usually given today is The First Part of the Contention (1594), The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (1595), Romeo and Juliet (1597), Henry V (1600), The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602) and Hamlet (1603).

Hamlet’s first quarto met hostility from the moment it reappeared. Its existence had been unknown for two centuries; when a copy was found in 1823, the first public announcement, in The Literary Gazette of January 1825, greeted it with dismay:

“Every person of literary taste must wonder, and every enthusiastic admirer of Shakespeare be inclined to utter an exclamation of dismay, when we lay before them the contents of this precious book.”

The same notice suggested that the play had been “picked out by hearing it performed, and getting speeches and parts from some of the actors.” That suspicion grew into a theory. To explain how a short text could agree with Shakespeare’s in some places and depart from it in others, scholars proposed that it had been put together by people other than the author:

• Memorial reconstruction: actors who had played in the piece wrote it down from memory, recalling their own parts well and the rest badly. W. W. Greg made this case for The Merry Wives of Windsor in 1910, and G. I. Duthie applied it to Hamlet in 1941.
• Shorthand: a member of the audience took the play down in shorthand during a performance.
• Abridgement: the full play was cut down for touring or for a smaller cast, with a ‘hack poet’ patching the gaps.

Combined, these ideas made the short quartos derivative by definition: corruptions of a single ‘perfect’ original, never earlier drafts of it. Through the twentieth century this became the settled orthodoxy, and most modern editions still describe these texts as reported or adapted versions. It has not gone unchallenged. Since the 1990s scholars such as Laurie Maguire and Paul Werstine have argued that the evidence for memorial reconstruction is far weaker than it was once thought to be, and a minority of critics, Eric Sams most forcefully, have defended the quartos as Shakespeare’s own work. The 200th anniversary of the discovery of Hamlet Q1, in 2023, passed without the consensus moving.

Our view

Why we do not accept it

None of the reporters, shorthand writers or hack poets in the theory is recorded anywhere; they were invented to explain the texts. The texts themselves point another way.

A memory keeps words, not spellings, and a shorthand writer records speech, which has no spelling at all. Yet Hamlet Q1 shares hundreds of Shakespeare’s own peculiar spellings, letter for letter, with the Second Quarto of 1604–5, which everyone agrees was printed from his manuscript, and with the First Folio of 1623. More than that, Q1 sometimes agrees with Q2 against the Folio, and sometimes with the Folio against Q2. That is the pattern of a text that descends from a written original, not one rebuilt from a performance.

We read the short quartos as what the Second Quarto of Hamlet says they are: earlier versions, later “enlarged to almost as much againe as it was.” A Hamlet was already on the stage by 1589, when Thomas Nashe mocked writers of “whole Hamlets”. Orthodox scholarship gives that early play to someone else, usually Thomas Kyd. We think it was Shakespeare’s own, and that the ‘bad’ quartos show us the young Shakespeare at work.