Book contents
- Frontmatter
- The Challenges of Romeo and Juliet
- The Date and the Expected Venue of Romeo and Juliet
- The ‘Bad’ Quarto of Romeo and Juliet
- Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: The Places of Invention
- ‘Death-marked love’: Desire and Presence in Romeo and Juliet
- Carnival and Death in Romeo and Juliet: A Bakhtinian Reading
- Ideology and the Feud in Romeo and Juliet
- Bawdy Puns and Lustful Virgins: The Legacy of Juliet’s Desire in Comedies of the Early 1600s
- Picturing Romeo and Juliet
- Nineteenth-Century Juliet
- ‘O, what learning is!’ Pedagogy and the Afterlife of Romeo and Juliet
- The Film Versions of Romeo and Juliet
- The Poetics of Paradox: Shakespeare’s Versus Zeffirelli’s Cultures of Violence
- ‘Lawful deed’: Consummation, Custom, and Law in All’s Well That Ends Well
- ‘Have you not read of some such thing?’ Sex and Sexual Stories in Othello
- French Leave, or Lear and the King of France
- The Actor as Artist: Harold Hobson’s Shakespearian Theatre Criticism
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 1994–1995
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles, January-December 1994
- Critical Studies
- Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- Editions and Textual Studies
- Books Received
- Index
The ‘Bad’ Quarto of Romeo and Juliet
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
- Frontmatter
- The Challenges of Romeo and Juliet
- The Date and the Expected Venue of Romeo and Juliet
- The ‘Bad’ Quarto of Romeo and Juliet
- Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: The Places of Invention
- ‘Death-marked love’: Desire and Presence in Romeo and Juliet
- Carnival and Death in Romeo and Juliet: A Bakhtinian Reading
- Ideology and the Feud in Romeo and Juliet
- Bawdy Puns and Lustful Virgins: The Legacy of Juliet’s Desire in Comedies of the Early 1600s
- Picturing Romeo and Juliet
- Nineteenth-Century Juliet
- ‘O, what learning is!’ Pedagogy and the Afterlife of Romeo and Juliet
- The Film Versions of Romeo and Juliet
- The Poetics of Paradox: Shakespeare’s Versus Zeffirelli’s Cultures of Violence
- ‘Lawful deed’: Consummation, Custom, and Law in All’s Well That Ends Well
- ‘Have you not read of some such thing?’ Sex and Sexual Stories in Othello
- French Leave, or Lear and the King of France
- The Actor as Artist: Harold Hobson’s Shakespearian Theatre Criticism
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 1994–1995
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles, January-December 1994
- Critical Studies
- Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- Editions and Textual Studies
- Books Received
- Index
Summary
The view that the first quarto of Romeo and Juliet (1597) is a memorial reconstruction of Shakespeare’s play, published by the printer, John Danter, without the authority of its owners, is still the current orthodoxy. It has had the sanction (mutatis mutandis) of such distinguished scholars as E. K. Chambers and W. W. Greg and it is endorsed widely in modern scholarship, by Brian Gibbons, for instance, in the Arden edition (1980), and in the Oxford Complete Works edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (1986). One of the most recent endorsements comes in a detailed study, supported by computer analysis, of the so-called ‘bad’ quartos by Kathleen Irace. The most detailed account of how such a text might have come into being is to be found in H. R. Hoppe’s The Bad Quarto of Romeo and Juliet, A Bibliographical and Textual Study, and this account is the foundation on which modern orthodoxy is largely based. Similar assumptions about other so-called ‘bad’ quartos have recently come under scrutiny, notably the recent stylometric study by Thomas Merriam and Robert Matthews of the ‘bad’ quartos of 2 and 3 Henry VI and the doubts expressed about the origins of the first quarto of Hamlet by some of the contributors to the collection of essays, The Hamlet First Published. It seems worthwhile, therefore, to re-examine the Romeo and Juliet first quarto to see how secure the foundations of the orthodox view are.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespeare Survey , pp. 27 - 44Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996
- 4
- Cited by