Colour-coded facsimile

Bibliographical DNA in the text of Romeo and Juliet Q1, 1597

David Pizzanelli

This paper presents a digital facsimile of An Excellent Conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Iuliet, printed in 1597, Shakespeare’s First Quarto, with every word coloured according to whether it reappears, spelled letter for letter the same, in the Second Quarto of 1599, in the First Folio of 1623, or in both.

The Second Quarto’s title page calls it “Newly corrected, augmented, and amended”: a revised and expanded text. The spellings that Q1 shares with it, and with the Folio, are the record of a manuscript, not the echo of a performance. They place Q1 within the line of authentic Shakespearean transmission, as an earlier state of the play that the author later augmented.