Printing Problems in Shakespeare’s Texts Printing Problems in Shakespeare’s Texts Author Matthew Davies Supervising Editor Kate McPherson Editor Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globablink Research Internship

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

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Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Matthew Davies, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

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This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Editor A person, family, or organization contributing to a resource by revising or elucidating the content, e.g., adding an introduction, notes, or other critical matter. An editor may also prepare a resource for production, publication, or distribution. For major revisions, adaptations, etc., that substantially change the nature and content of the original work, resulting in a new work, see author. LEMDO uses the general term editor only in edition metadata and only to indicate when a person is responsible for editing all parts of an edition. Otherwise, use the more granular terms to describe the precise nature of the editorial role. Supervising Editor An editor who supervises the work of a student editor. Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Literature and the Arts First Folio (1623) Publication Quartos Published file. Updated metadata proofed Created File. Review of article finished. Michael Best Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

 Matthew Davies Matthew Davies

Matthew Davies was a student at Utah Valley University.

 Leah Hamby Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

 Navarra Houldin Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

 Kate McPherson Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

 LEMDO Team The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/

Although William Shakespeare was a successful playwright in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, about half of his plays were not printed during his life, leading scholars to the conclusion that the printed versions of his plays were likely produced without his direct supervision. One theory on how some of his plays made it into print is called the Memorial Reconstruction Theory. It suggests actors who performed the original play recalled their lines or audience members transcribed performances. Scholars point to the inconsistencies between the First Folio of 1623, which was a supervised publication overseen by key members of the theater company of which Shakespeare was a founding member, and other quartos printed prior to the Folio. Often, these quartos serve as proof of the inaccuracy in early printed Shakespeare texts.

Memorial Reconstruction

Scholars believe Shakespeare did not have direct involvement with the printing of any his dramatic works; it is possible he oversaw the publication of some of his narrative poems, such as Venus and Adonis in the 1590s. They theorize that actors or audience members may have transcribed plays from memory. This form of creating the script of a play for publication compromises the reliability of the text. Did the actors accurately remember what they performed as Shakespeare acted alongside them or supervised from backstage, or did they invent entire lines or passages to fill the gaps in their memory? Could a member of the audience have taken notes accurately enough during the rapid dialogue of a play to reflect the author’s words?

The biggest argument for this theory has been the key differences between the texts of about half the plays in The First Folio, compiled by John Heminges and Henry Condell roughly seven years after the death of Shakespeare and the early quartos of some of Shakespeare’s works. These versions of the plays differ in length, language, grammar, and more.

An example of this can be found when looking at The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York which were both printed pre-1595 as plays exploring the history of King Henry VI, while the play in the First Folio entitled Henry VI was printed in 1623. Both The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York were not attributed to Shakespeare when initially printed and were shorter in text than Henry VI in The First Folio. Disputes exist on both sides of the argument as to which is the more accurate version of the story, or if one is just a revision of the other. However, regardless of how scholars see the problems in these texts, readers now can never be certain what Shakespeare intended.

Bad Quartos

Early publications of Shakespeare’s plays were printed as quartos: small, single-play texts about the size of a modern paperback book. A number of Shakespeare’s early printed plays have been labeled bad quartos. A bad quarto can be something as simple as bad printing (misalignments on the page, obvious misspellings, etc.). It is possible they were the result of audience members or actors from rival companies at his plays, transcribing dialog and actions from the play as it was performed and publishing the transcription as their own or selling it to other theatres. These bad quartos offer a window in early modern printing practices and also into the evolution of Shakespeare’s plays

The Example of Hamlet

Hamlet presents a significant puzzle for the modern editor trying to determine what Shakespeare wrote. Hamlet exists in three significantly different versions: the bad quarto of 1603 the authorized quarto which followed (1604); most modern versions of the play rely extensively on this edition the Folio text of 1623

In both the first and second quartos, the first line in Hamlet’s first soliloquy reads, O, that this too, too sallied flesh would melt. The Folio substitutes sallied for the seemingly more logical word, solid. But sallied occurs elsewhere as a variant spelling of the word sullied (dirty, sinful, or corrupted). Could it be that the earlier versions are right, and that Hamlet imagines himself, like trodden snow, dirtied and capable of purification only if his flesh goes through the cycle of thawing, evaporating, and condensing into dew? Of course, Shakespeare may also have revised the play between its first printing as a quarto and his death, leading his colleagues to publish the updated text in the First Folio. So which is most accurate?

Determining Accuracy

Scholars question the printings from the so-called bad quartos because they were created from the potentially inaccurate ear of an actor or audience member. They have argued extensively over differences in text from the quartos and the First Folio for not just Hamlet, but also King Lear. Many have concluded that although the First Folio can not guarantee every bit of dialog written is Shakespeare’s, it is one of the most accurate records we have of his writing because it was supervised by his colleagues who performed alongside him for many years.

Key Print Sources Bourus, Terri. The Good Enough Quarto: Hamlet as a Material Object. Critical Survey vol. 31, no. 12, Mar. 2019, p. 72. Hosley, Richard. The Corrupting Influence of the Bad Quarto on the Received Text of Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare Quarterly vol. 4, no. 1, 1953, pp. 11–33. Kim, Heejin. The Memorial Reconstruction Theory and Chronicles: The <title level="m">Henry VI Plays. Shakespeare vol. 15, no. 4, 2019, pp. 356–378. Lesser, Zachary. <title level="m">Hamlet After Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Menzer, Paul. The Hamlets: Cues, Qs, and Remembered Texts. University of Delaware Press, 2008.
Key Online Sources Best, Michael. Printing, and Problems in Shakespeare’s Text. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria, 4 Jan. 2011. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/literature/publishing/problems.html. Accessed 11 Feb. 2026. Mowat, Barbara, and Paul Werstine. An Introduction to This Text: <title level="m">Hamlet. Folger Shakespeare Library. https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/hamlet/an-introduction-to-this-text/. Accessed 7 Jul. 2025.