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

Abstract

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