Mini: Shakespeare's Folios and Quartos

In today's episode, we are exploring the first official publications of Shakespeare's plays: the quartos and the first Folio. What even is a quarto versus a folio? Let's find out!

Kourtney Smith (KS): Welcome to another Shakespeare Anyone mini-episode! In these mini-episodes, we’ll be exploring topics that are related to Shakespeare but aren’t necessarily connected to whatever play we’ve been discussing.

Elyse Sharp (ES): And they’re mini, because, well, they’re shorter than our other episodes. They’re like quartos if the regular episodes are folio editions.

KS: In today’s episode, we’ll be talking about the most famous editions of Shakespeare’s work, the quartos, both good and bad, and the First Folio of 1623.

ES: The reason the modern world is able to read, see, and dissect the works of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries is because of early modern publishing. Plays were published in two formats: the quarto or the folio. “Quarto” refers to the format and size of a book that results from printing four pages on each side of a sheet of paper, front and back. Once printed, the page gets folded twice, each time along the long side. Simply put, the eight pages are a result of printing on, and folding one larger page. A quarto was a conventional format for small publications, including newspapers and pamphlets. A printed work that requires more than one quarto is a quarto playbook.

KS: “Folio” refers to a large book made by folding printed sheets of paper in half just once, with each sheet forming four pages. A folio is larger, sturdier and more expensive than a quarto. Bill Bryson writes that the First Folio of 1623 was very ambitiously priced at £1. A copy of the sonnets, by comparison, cost just 5 pence. Folios were reserved for history, religion or other weighty subjects. About half of Shakespeare’s plays were published in quarto form before the publication of the First Folio in 1623, meaning the First Folio included a whopping 36 plays, 18 of which had never before been published.

ES: If you’re having trouble visualizing the folding of a folio or quarto, take a moment and grab an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper, like from your printer. While the pieces of paper printers used in Shakespeare's time were much larger, let's just use what is most likely on hand! Now, set your paper so that one of the long sides is closest to you. Bring the short side on the left to meet the right, folding the paper in half. Place the folded piece of paper so that the crease you created is on the left, and you can see how a four page "folio" would work. In front of you is page one, open and find pages two and three, and the back is page four. To create a quarto, set your folded paper so that the crease is on your left, then fold the top short edge to the bottom, creating a new crease. Set the crease you just made to your left, and you’ve created a quarto.

KS: If you do not have paper, or would prefer to watch or read instructions, head over to timecode two minutes and forty-two seconds in Dr. Kat’s Reading the Past episode called “Dr. Kat and ‘Bad’ Quartos?” on Youtube. She also folds an octavo, a sixteen-mo, a thirty-two-mo and a sixty-four-mo; but those type settings are unrelated to Shakespeare and we will not discuss them. You can also practice folding a quarto on Folger Shakespeare Library’s “DIY Quarto” page. In addition, you can watch a video demonstrating early modern printing on Folger's “Printing the First Folio” page. We will put the links to these resources in our episode description.

ES: While plays were published during Shakespeare’s lifetime, the number of his plays published, prior to the First Folio, adds up to only about half. This may seem odd to modern dramatists who are used to publishing their plays through publishing companies such as Concord Theatricals or Dramatist Play Service, Inc. so that theatre companies can buy the rights to perform their plays or read their plays. But, early modern playwrights were not concerned with publishing their plays as a form of literature. Plays were intended to be performed and heard upon a stage by actors. In addition, final manuscripts were sometimes kept unpublished so that only that theatre company could perform that play. Dr. Emma Smith, professor of Shakespeare studies at Oxford, estimates that we probably have only about one fifth of the plays that were written and performed in Shakespeare’s time.

KS: Because plays were not commonly published during this era, those unpublished copies of plays were written down in two ways: 1.) cue scripts and 2.) the acting company’s one prompt-book. A cue script was composed of multiple sheets of paper pasted together and held in place with wooden dowels, then rolled up into a scroll. Fun fact: that’s where the word “role” to describe an actor’s part came from! As stated in our Intro Series, cue scripts contained the player’s cue line and their own lines. A prompt book is an annotated copy of a play for the use of a prompter during a performance.

ES: Prior to the First Folio of 1623, all of Shakespeare’s plays were published as quartos. Quartos are controversial because some of them are considered good, and some…bad.

KS: The notion of a “bad” quarto was coined by A. W. Pollard in 1909. He believed these publications were produced without referring to an authorial manuscript. Bad quartos are likely the result of pirate editions written down by an audience member who tried their best to remember and write down what they saw on-stage. This type quarto could account for missing scenes and texts. I mean, could you adequately recount line-by-line a play you’ve just seen? And publishers got away with this because copyright and intellectual property rights would not become law for many years.

ES: But the idea of all quartos being bad is highly contested. Many argue that what Pollard classifies as bad, may, in some cases, simply be an authorized new publication of a play following revisions by the theatre company. I mean, at least twenty-one of Shakespeare’s plays were published as a quarto before the First Folio. Omissions, additions, and alterations to the text, or editorial changes may account for new quartos. Some, like Dr. Kat, are uncomfortable with the term “bad”, as it offers a negative value.

KS: If you are interested in the bad quartos, those includES: the Romeo and Juliet First Quarto of 1597, the Henry V First Quarto of 1600, The Merry Wives of Windsor First Quarto of 1602, the Hamlet First Quarto of 1603 and the Pericles First Quarto of 1609.

ES: Now what about this First Folio of 1623 you’ve been hearing so much about?

KS: In addition to teaching, Dr. Emma Smith is also the author of the book The Making of the First Folio. Through Smith’s extensive work, she offers the first comprehensive biography of the earliest collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays. When analyzing this momentous endeavor, Dr. Smith credits the unification of two groups – the publishers Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount and the two King’s Men actors John Heminge and Henry Condell. Heminges and Condell were the last of the original Chamberlain’s Men. Heminges was the company’s business manager and sometimes-actor who, according to tradition, is said to be the first Falstaff. He listed himself as a “citizen and grocer of London”. Condell was an actor esteemed for his comedic roles. He also invested wisely and was sufficiently wealthy enough to style himself a “gentleman”.

ES: And the connection between the two publishers and the two King’s Men actors can possibly be linked to the Jaggard printshop’s experience publishing playbills for the theaters to advertise theatrical performances. Their printshop was also an official publisher for the city of London, contracted to publish official proclamations for the city.

KS: But without a full and final manuscript, Heminge and Condell had a task ahead of them. They had to rely on their work as actors to compile the folio. Through their performance memory, cue scripts, quartos and possibly Shakespeare’s foul papers, or working drafts, they pieced it together. Author Bill Bryson guesses that these two must have been influenced by the example of contemporary playwright Ben Jonson who issued a folio of his own work in 1616. And Dr. Smith theorizes that this great big expensive book was a commercial risk. The Folio was published seven years after Shakespeare’s death while his reputation was in flux – it was post-mourning and nostalgia and pre-canonization of Shakespeare. These men were creating a marketplace for Shakespeare, not filling it.

ES: But this collected work was no small feat. Getting the rights to publish some of these plays was challenging. In fact, Troilus and Cressida almost didn’t get published because of rights surrounding its 1609 publication. The Stationers’ Company – a professional group of publishers – regulated their own affairs, so the publisher Blount had to get the rights from this group. And, sidenote, what this means is that William Shakespeare did not own his own plays. He was a writer for hire who would write a play which would then become the property of the theater company, and the theatre company would use and license it as they wished. 

KS: Fun fact: the labor-intensive process behind the publication of the First Folio has been dramatized in a play of its own–The Book of Will by Lauren Gunderson, which had its world premiere in 2017 at the Denver Center Theatre and was the recipient of an Edgerton Foundation New Play Award. 

ES: The First Folio of 1623 was published as the definitive collected works of William Shakespeare. Heminge and Condell said so in a letter they wrote at the beginning of the Folio. According to this letter, previously published plays, like quartos, were “surreptitious [and stolen] copies” and the plays were now printed “perfect of their limbs”. Funny enough, the Jaggard publishing print shop was responsible for printing some earlier quartos of Shakespeare plays – the ones that the Folio deemed surreptitious. 

KS: While we don’t know how many prints were in the first run of the First Folio of 1623, it is safe to estimate the run at around 700 to 750 prints. This was a huge technical endeavor that took a twelve-month period – from late 1622 to late 1623. Dr. Smith imagines the publishers were working in a chaotic workshop with papers everywhere! She also explains that some of the copies show the mark of human beings through dirty fingerprints, printer’s fingermarks or hair caught between the type and press.

ES: And those aren’t the only errors in the printed run of the First Folio. The printing process was time-intensive and laborious, with an extraordinary amount of room for error – askew type, cramped pages, letters turned the wrong way up, handwriting misread when transcribing. All these errors are visible in surviving editions. But while human errors were made, the publishers were also quite intelligent, reassessing how they can lose extraneous material on the page. Decision-making was crucial in this profession.

KS: And these seven hundred-or-so individual copies all had varying discrepancies that have led scholars, and even collectors of the First Folios, most notably the Folgers, to attempt to read between each folio to search for the “true text of Shakespeare”. While finding the “true text” seems impossible to accomplish, editor Charlton Hinman used the collection of Folios made accessible to him to investigate the publisher’s proofreading and printing process. He analyzed how different individuals put the book together.

ES: With all of this variety, how do editors and theatre makers choose which edition of Shakespeare’s play to publish or perform? And, in addition, what effect does that have on readers and audiences? Is there really an “authentic” Shakespeare?

KS: We’ve already discussed in our King Lear “Stuff To Chew On” how episode how King Lear’s First Quarto of 1608 and the First Folio of 1623 are, for all intents and purposes, entirely different plays. G. Blakemore Evans cites three different editions of the play, all containing a line that is consistently inconsistent: “My Fool usurps my body”, “My foote usurps my body”, and “My foote usurps my head.” Even though all three of these lines come from a published edition of Lear, it only makes sense as “A fool usurps my bed.” You can see how word choice changes the line’s meaning entirely.

ES: Word choice also affects Othello’s First Quarto in 1622 and the First Folio of 1623. There is a one-word change in a line from Othello’s final speech in Act 5 scene 2 that has prompted debate between scholars and editors. The Quarto reads “Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away/ Richer than all his tribe.” The Folio, however, reads “Like the base Judean, threw a pearl away/ Richer than all his tribe.” The inconsistency may be due to misreading handwriting… but Indian and Judean are not the same.

KS: Now, let’s talk about perhaps the most infamous instance of inconsistent publications in Shakespeare’s canon: Hamlet. There were three publications of Hamlet in the seventeenth century: the First (or “bad”) Quarto of 1603, the Second (or “good”) Quarto of 1604, and the First Folio of 1623. Now, most scholars and editors agree that, if you don’t want to qualify the First Quarto as “bad”, the First Quarto is, at the very least, the most markedly different from the other two publications. This version is little more than half as long as the others. Some of the characters have different names; for example, Polonius is called Corambis and his servant Reynaldo appears as Montano. The action of the play also varies considerably. Most scholars have found many passages in this version extremely difficult to read and have concluded that it is so full of errors that it is generally unreliable as a witness to what was written for the stage.

ES: And even though the Second Quarto and First Folio are more alike than either are to the First Quarto, they are, still, quite different from each other. The Folio play has some eighty-five or so lines not found in the Second Quarto; but the Folio lacks about two hundred of the Second Quarto’s lines. These two versions also differ from each other in their readings of hundreds of words. For editors, it is impossible in any edition to combine the whole of these two forms of the play because they often provide alternative readings that are mutually exclusive. Like King Lear, editors must choose whether to be guided by the Quarto, by the Folio; or leave them separated.

KS: Just for giggles, we’ll share how extreme the differences in a quarto or a folio can be on the play. In Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech, the First Folio is like everyone recognizes from high school: “To be, or not to be, that is the question:/ Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer/ The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles/ And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep/ No more.”

ES: Now that we’ve refreshed your memory, let’s look at this bad First Quarto. The First Quarto begins like the First Folio, but somewhere along the way from the stage to the publishers, something went wrong. Rumor has it the First Quarto printed a manuscript put together from memory by a small-part actor who had a role in the play when it was performed outside London. And, no offense to this quarto, but that certainly could be plausible when you read the beginning of the “To be or not to be” speech herES: “To be, or not to be; ay, there's the point./ To die, to sleep—is that all? Ay, all.”

KS: But, in all fairness to the quartos, the Folio, Heminges and Condell’s “true” collected works, is not perfect itself. Let’s stick with Hamlet. Some scholars have reasons to believe that the “bad” First Quarto may actually most closely represent the play as performed. Moreover, Ann Thompson at King’s College in London points out, the “Bad” Quarto places Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in a different, better place, where suicidal musing seems more apt and rational. And, if we look at Much Ado About Nothing, there are lines for Dogberry and Verges that abruptly cease being prefixed by the characters’ name and instead become prefixed “Will” and “Richard”, the names of the actors who took the parts in the original production. 

ES: So between the Folio, Quarto, or some edition in-between, it’s hard to discover the “authentic” Shakespeare. Dr. Kat argues that the only authentic final manuscript of any of Shakespeare’s plays, agreed upon by his playing company and Shakespeare himself, probably only exists in performances on the Elizabethan or Jacobean stage.

KS: And that’s the Quarto and Folio!

ES: Thank you for listening to this episode. 

Quote of the Episode:

ES: From As You Like It, act four, scene three, said by Rosalind, “But for the bloody napkin?”

Shakespeare Anyone? is created and produced by Kourtney Smith and Elyse Sharp.

Note: When this episode was recorded, Kourtney Smith was "Korey Leigh Smith".

Episode written and researched by Kourtney Smith.

Music is "Neverending Minute" by Sounds Like Sander.

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Works referenced:

“An Introduction to This Text: Hamlet.” Edited by Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, Folger Shakespeare Library, Folger Shakespeare Library, Accessed on 1 Feb. 2022, from https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/hamlet/an-introduction-to-this-text/. 

Bryson, Bill. “Ch. 8 Death.” Shakespeare: The World as Stage, Harper Perennial, New York, NY, 2007, pp. 156–165.

“DIY Quarto: Printing Quartos in Shakespeare’s Time.” Edited by Kathleen Lynch and Justine DeCamillis, Folger Shakespeare Library, Folger Shakespeare Library, Accessed on 1 Feb. 2022, from https://www.folger.edu/publishing-shakespeare/diy-quarto. 

Marchant, Kat. “Dr Kat and Holinshed's Chronicles.” YouTube, YouTube, 13 Nov. 2020, Accessed 1 Feb. 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WBw3XB-qyo.

Paul, Richard. Shakespeare Unlimited Podcast, performance by Dr. Emma Smith, et al., episode 47, Folger Shakespeare Library, 3 May 2016. Accessed 31 Jan. 2022.

“What Is a First Folio?” Folger Shakespeare Library, Accessed 1 Feb. 2022, from https://www.folger.edu/shakespeare/first-folio/faq.