Elizabethan pirated dramas: with special reference to the 'bad' quartos of Hamlet, Henry V, Romeo and Juliet; with an appendix on the problem of The Taming of the Shrew
It is theoretically possible to suppose that someone connected with a company of actors might surreptitiously copy the
prompt -book of a play, and sell his transcript to a publisher.
This would be piracy; yet the published text would, if the scribe
were efficient, present a sound version of the play as acted.
There is thus no necessary relation between the legality or illegality of a publication and the quality of the text which it
contains. It is, however, difficult to imagine such a theft
as practically possible. The work of transcription would take
time; and detection would be virtually certain.Since Professor Pollard's segregation of the first Quartos
of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet and the Quartos of Henry V and
The Merry Wives of Windsor as "bad" Quartos, this class of text
has received much critical attention. Two very important
developments have taken place.Firstly, it has been realised that this category is not
limited to four Shakespeare Quartos: it has been enlarged by the
inclusion of other dramatic texts, Shakespearian and non Shakespearian.Secondly, it has been realised that some "bad" Quartos
present texts which are memorial reconstructions, made for provincial performances by actors who had previously taken part in
the plays concerned, but who no longer had access to the prompt-books.
1
The notion, for long widespread, that pirated editions
of plays were in general to be accounted for as based on the
notes of stenographers sent to performances by thievish publishers has given way to the view that at least a large proportion of the extant Elizabethan and Jacobean "bad" texts are in
fact memorial reconstructions. There is external evidence that
stenographic piracy was a known practice at any rate in the
first part of the seventeenth century; modern scholarship differentiates, therefore, between stenographic reports and memorial
reconstructions