I would fain leave the paper; only one thing afflicts me, to think that scenes, invented merely to be spoken, should be enforcively published to be read, and that the least hurt I can receive is to do myself the wrong. But since others otherwise would do me more, the least inconvenience is to be accepted. I have myself, therefore, set forth this comedy; but so, that my enforced absence must much rely upon the printer's discretion: but I shall entreat slight errors in orthography may be as slightly overpassed, and that the unhandsome shape which Pirated Editionsthis trifle in reading presents, may be pardoned for the pleasure it once afforded you when it was presented with the soul of lively action.
The only form in which any of Shakespeare's plays found their way into print during his lifetime was that of small pamphlets, called Quartos, which were sold at sixpence each.[7] In the case of five of these there is general agreement that they came to the press by the surreptitious method of reporting described by Heywood: the first Quarto versions of Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, The Merry Wives, Hamlet, and Pericles. All of these bear clear traces of the effects of such mutilation as would naturally result from the attempt to write down the dialogue during the performance, and patch up the gaps later. The first Quartos of Richard III and King Lear, though much superior to the five mentioned, yet contain so many variants from the text of the Folio which seem to be due to mistakes of the ear and to slips of memory on the part of the actors, that probably they should also be included in the list of those surreptitiously obtained.
Redress for such pirating as is implied in these publications was difficult on account of the absence of a law of copyright. The chief pieces of legislation affecting the book trade were the law of licensing and the charter of the Stationers' Company. According to the first, all books, with a few exceptions, such as academic publications, had to be licensed before publication by the Bishop of London or the Archbishop of Canterbury. This was an unworkable provision, and in fact the responsibility for all books not likely to raise political or theological controversy was left to the Stationers' Company. This close corporation of printers and publishers exercised its powers for the protection of its members rather than of authors. A publisher wishing to establish a monopoly in a book he had acquired entered it on the Stationers' Register, paying a fee of sixpence, and was thereby protected against piracy. When the copy so registered was improperly acquired, the state of the case is not so clear. At times the officials showed hesitation about registering a book until the applicant "hath gotten sufficient authoritye for yt," and As You Like It, for example, appears in the Register only "to be staied," which it was until the publication of the first Folio. Further, the pirated Romeo and Juliet and Henry V were never entered at all; the pirated Hamlet and Pericles were entered, but to other publishers, who in the case of Hamlet brought out a more correct text in the following year; the pirated Merry Wives was transferred from one publisher to another on the day of entry, and actually issued by the second. Thus this group of plays does not support the view that the Stationers' Company stood ready to give perpetual copyright to their members even for obviously stolen goods. It is to be noted, too, that the previous publication of these surreptitious copies formed no hindrance to the later Publisher's Copyrightissue of an authentic copy. The second Quarto of Hamlet, printed from a complete manuscript, followed, as has been said, the first the next year, and the same thing happened in the case of Romeo and Juliet.
On the other hand, the great majority of the Quartos printed from playhouse copies of the plays were regularly entered, and the rights of the original publisher preserved to him. The appearance of groups of plays in the market following interference with theatrical activity such as came from the plague in 1594, from the breaking up of companies, or from Puritan attempts at restriction, confirm the belief that these better Quartos were honorably acquired by the publishers from the companies owning them, when the actors thought that there was more to gain than to lose by giving them to the press.
The accompanying "Table of Quarto Editions" gives the names of all the Shakespearean plays issued in this form before the publication of the collected edition in 1623, known as the First Folio. In the cases of Romeo and Juliet, 1 Henry IV, Love's Labour's Lost, Merchant of Venice, Much Ado, A Midsummer-Night's Dream, and Richard II, a Quarto, usually the most recent, provided the text from which the version in the Folio was printed. Hence, though in several cases the copy of the Quarto thus employed seems to have been one used by the actors and containing corrections of some value, the extant Quarto rather than the Folio is the prime authority for the text to-day. The same is true of Titus Andronicus, except that in this case the Folio restores from some manuscript source a scene which had been dropped from the Quarto. If, as some hold, the Folio texts of Richard III and King Lear were printed from Quartos, there must have been available also a manuscript version, which is so heavily drawn upon that the Folio text virtually represents an independent source, as it does in the case of four of the five plays acknowledged to be due to surreptitious reporting. Pericles, the fifth of these, was first admitted to the collected works in the third Folio, and is the only "reported" text forming our sole authority.[8]
TABLE OF QUARTO EDITIONS BEFORE 1623
| Entries in Stationers' Register | Dates Of | Source of Q Text | Source of F1 Text | ||||||||||
| Q1 | Q2 | Q3 | Q4 | Q5 | Q6 | ||||||||
| T. A. | Feb. 6, 1594 | 1594 | 1600 | 1611 | Playhouse | Q3 completed and corrected | |||||||
| R. II | Aug. 29, 1597 | 1597 | 1598 | 1608 | 1615 | Playhouse | Q4 corrected | ||||||
| R. III | Oct. 19, 1597 | 1597 | 1598 | 1602 | 1605 | 1612 | 1622 | Disputed | Disputed | ||||
| R. J. | No entry | 1597 | 1599 | 1609 | n.d. | { | Q1 Reported Q2 Playhouse | Q3 from Q2 | |||||
| 1 H. IV | Feb. 25, 1598 | 1598 | 1599 | 1604 | 1608 | 1613 | 1622 | Playhouse | Q5 corrected | ||||
| L. L. L. | No entry | 1598 | Playhouse | Q1 | |||||||||
| Merch. | July 22, 1598 (conditional) | ||||||||||||
| Oct. 28, 1600 | 1600 | { | 1600 or 1619 | Playhouse | Q1 (Heyes) | ||||||||
| H. V. | [Aug. 4, 1600] "to be stayed" | 1600 | 1602 | { | 1608 or 1619 | Reported | Independent | ||||||
| M. Ado | [Aug. 4, 1600] "to be stayed" Aug. 23, 1600 | 1600 | Playhouse | Q1 corrected | |||||||||
| 2 H. IV | Aug. 23, 1600 | 1600 | Playhouse | Independent | |||||||||
| M. N. D. | Oct. 8, 1600 | 1600 | { | 1600 or 1619 | Playhouse | Q2 corrected | |||||||
| M. W. | Jan. 18, 1602 | 1602 | 1619 | Reported | Independent | ||||||||
| Hml. | July 26, 1602 | 1603 | 1604,5 | 1611 | { | Q1 Reported Q2 Playhouse | Independent | ||||||
| Lear | Nov. 26, 1607 | 1608 | { | 1608 or 1619 | Disputed | Disputed (Q1 in several states) | |||||||
| T. C. | Feb. 7, 1603 (conditional) Jan. 28, 1609 | } | 1609 | Playhouse | Independent (Q1 in two issues) | ||||||||
| Per. | May 20, 1608 | 1609 | 1609 | 1611 | 1619 | Reported | Not in F1 F3 from Q4 | ||||||
| Oth. | Oct. 6, 1621 | 1622 | Playhouse | Independent | |||||||||
The First FolioWe come now to the publication of the First Folio, the most important single volume in the history of the text of Shakespeare. On November 8, 1623, the following entry occurs in the Stationers' Register: