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  3. The New Cambridge Shakespeare: The Early Quartos

The surviving early quartos of Shakespeare's plays are gaining the attention of scholars as authoritative texts with independent integrity. Indispensable to advanced students and textual scholars, up to now they have not been readily available. Alongside standard volumes in the New Cambridge Shakespeare, editions of selected quartos are now published in critical, modern-spelling form, complete with collations, textual notes and substantial introductions.

  • General Editors: Brian Gibbons, University of Münster
  • Associate Editors: A. R. Braunmuller, University of California, Los Angeles

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8 results in The New Cambridge Shakespeare: The Early Quartos

The First Quarto of ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor'
  • Edited by David Lindley
  • Published online:
    18 February 2021
    Print publication:
    17 September 2020
  • The First Quarto of The Merry Wives of Windsor is the most fascinatingly problematic of all the early Shakespearean texts. Was it an authorial first draft? Or a cut-down version of the better-known Folio text designed for acting? Or a text put together from faulty actors' memories? Or a reported text assembled by notetakers from attendance at the theatre? None of these theories, though advanced and interrogated for the last 250 years, is totally convincing. The Introduction to this edition explores the various attempts to make sense of the short version of the play, demonstrating the ways in which preferences for one theory or another reflect the changes in editorial theory and fashion over the centuries. The modernised text and its commentary enable the reader to enter into this ongoing and endlessly intriguing debate.

The First Quarto of King Richard III
  • William Shakespeare
  • Edited by Peter Davison
  • Published online:
    16 August 2019
    Print publication:
    12 September 1996
  • Shakespeare's Richard III presents difficult textual problems. There are 2,000 verbal differences between the text of the first quarto (1597) and the version in the First Folio (1623). Although the narrative of the two plays is virtually identical, each has lines which are not found in the other, parts of the play are arranged differently, and the quarto deploys fewer characters. The text of the quarto is accompanied by a collation of variant readings and substantial textual notes. In a lengthy introduction Peter Davison proposes that Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, used a memorially reconstructed text of Richard III during a touring performance of the play, and that text provided the manuscript for the 1597 quarto. Using examples of touring practice of the past 400 years, Davison shows how the actors' involvement helped to produce the text we have.

The First Quarto of Hamlet
  • William Shakespeare
  • Edited by Kathleen O. Irace
  • Published online:
    16 August 2019
    Print publication:
    09 April 1998
  • The first quarto of Hamlet is radically different from the second quarto and Folio versions of the play, and about half their length. But despite its uneven verbal texture and simpler characterisation, the first quarto presents its own workable alternatives to the longer texts, reordering and combining key plot elements, and even including a unique scene between Horatio and the Queen. This new critical edition is designed for students, scholars and actors who are intrigued by the first printed text of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Although the first quarto has been reprinted many times, there is no other modernised edition in print. Irace's introduction outlines views of its origins, its special features, and its surprisingly rich performance history; her textual notes point out differences between the first quarto and the longer second quarto and Folio versions and offer alternatives which actors or directors might choose for specific productions.

The Taming of a Shrew
  • The 1594 Quarto
  • William Shakespeare
  • Edited by Stephen Roy Miller
  • Published online:
    16 August 2019
    Print publication:
    28 January 1999
  • This is a modernized edition of an anonymous play, long known to scholars, which appears to be an alternative version of Shakespeare's popular comedy, The Taming of the Shrew. Stephen Miller suggests that an anonymous person rewrote Shakespeare's more complicated version, making it shorter, simpler and different in some ways. The main difference between the two plays concerns the framing story of Christopher Sly, the drunk, who disappears early on in Shakespeare's version. A Shrew, as it is usually known, contains additional material for Sly which is familiar to playgoers because it is often included in productions of Shakespeare's play. The Taming of a Shrew, The 1594 Quarto, provides a modernized text based upon a re-examination of the quarto and extensive commentary. Miller's introduction establishes a direct link between A Shrew and The Shrew and includes an illustrated stage history.

The First Quarto of King Lear
  • William Shakespeare
  • Edited by Jay L. Halio
  • Published online:
    16 August 2019
    Print publication:
    26 May 1994
  • This edition of King Lear is based on the first (1608) quarto and represents a significantly different version from that published in the Folio of 1623, which forms the basis of the standard New Cambridge Shakespeare edition. Most scholars now believe that the quarto derives from what was probably Shakespeare's own autograph draft of the play, whereas the Folio derives from a late, revised copy used as the prompt-book. Each has numerous unique passages and hundreds of variant readings, creating differences which affect the structure, characterisation and overall impact of the play. This volume contains a substantial introduction, the text of the first quarto and a collation of variant readings from the second quarto and the First Folio. Passages unique to the Folio are printed separately in an appendix.

The First Quarto of King Henry V
  • William Shakespeare
  • Edited by Andrew Gurr
  • Published online:
    16 August 2019
    Print publication:
    01 June 2000
  • The Quarto text of Henry V is of unique importance. It is the first and probably the only text of a Shakespeare play which provides the playscript corresponding to the version that was actually performed by Shakespeare's own company. It has the authority of being transcribed by actors in the company as a record of their original staging at the Globe in 1599. The quarto version differs radically from the First Folio text which is used as the source for all other editions. Half as long as the Folio, it represents a practical staging text that streamlined the script supplied by Shakespeare. This edition of the Henry V quarto provides a modernized text alongside the extensive commentary. Andrew Gurr examines each variant from the Folio text in detail, shedding new light on what happened to scripts that the Shakespeare company bought from their resident playwright.

The First Quarto of Othello
  • William Shakespeare
  • Edited by Scott McMillin
  • Published online:
    16 August 2019
    Print publication:
    16 August 2001
  • This 2001 book presents the first modernized and edited version of the 1622 Othello. By taking this earliest published version of Othello as a book in its own right, Scott McMillin accounts for the mystery of its thousands of differences from the Folio version by arguing that the Quarto was printed from a theatre script reflecting cuts and actors' interpolations made in the playhouse. McMillin explains that the playhouse script was apparently taken from dictation by a scribe listening to the actors themselves, and thus reveals how Othello was spoken in seventeenth-century performance. This edition, which consists of a detailed introduction, quarto text, select collation and textual notes, is an important book for scholars in Shakespeare and Elizabethan-Jacobean drama, with wide ramifications for other Shakespeare textual studies and for students of early theatre history.

The First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet
  • Edited by Lukas Erne
  • Published online:
    16 August 2019
    Print publication:
    15 February 2007
  • Two different versions of Romeo and Juliet were published during Shakespeare's lifetime: the second quarto of 1599, on which modern editions are usually based, and the first quarto of 1597. The latter version was long denigrated as a 'bad' quarto', but recent scholarship sees in it a crucial witness for the theatrical practices of Shakespeare and his company. The shorter of the two versions by about one quarter, the first quarto has high-paced action, fuller stage directions than the second quarto, and fascinating alternatives to the famous speeches in the longer version. The introduction to this edition provides a full discussion of the origins of the first quarto, before analysing its distinguishing features and presenting a concise history of the 1597 version. The text is provided with a full collation and commentary which alert the reader to crucial differences between the first and the second quartos.