Quarto and Folio

There are two texts of Much Ado which an editor has to consider: the Good Quarto of 1600 and the Folio text of 1623. Fortunately all scholars are now agreed as to their general relationship, which, briefly stated, is as follows. Between 1600 and 1623 a copy of the Quarto was used as a prompt-book by Shakespeare's company; during this period certain alterations were made upon it by someone in the theatre, presumably the prompter; and finally this prompt-book, or another copy of the Quarto collated with it, was delivered to the printers in 1623 and used by them for the production of the Folio. Substantially then the Folio version is a reprint of the Quarto, and if it were not that it bears traces of the prompter's pen we might dismiss its variant readings without more ado as the mistakes of a careless compositor. But since some of the changes in the Folio are demonstrably derived from the theatre, the question arises as to how far this influence extends and even whether one or two of the more attractive alterations were made with the approval of Shakespeare himself or of his company, as by adopting them not a few editors have tacitly assumed.

The Folio variants fall under two heads: (a) Differences in the stage-directions, which undoubtedly originated in the theatre.