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Thirty-six plays appeared in the first collected
edition, put together in 1623 (seven years after
his death) by fellow actors in Shakespeare's
acting company. This
book is now usually called the First Folio: it is a
large, impressive book, printed on sheets of paper
folded only once. Its title page calls it Mr
William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and
Tragedies. | |
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Eighteen of Shakespeare's 37 plays are extant in single-play editions published during his lifetime. These early editions are called quartos, because the printer folded a single sheet of paper into quarters, producing eight sides to print on; the result was a small, relatively cheap book. We do not know how the printers obtained the copy for these quartos. They vary greatly in quality; some seem to be accurate, others wildly inaccurate. But there can be significant differences between even a good quarto and the later Folio text. For a striking example, see the difference (below) between page 1 of the quarto Henry V and the Folio version.
Modern printed editions of the plays derive either from the Folio text, or from quarto and Folio, where both exist. Where there is both a quarto and a folio text, the modern editor often has to choose between different readings of a single word, line, even a whole scene. Sometimes an editor cannot make sense out of a printed word and supplies his or her best guess as to what Shakespeare wrote. In the first line of his first soliloquy, Hamlet wishes "that this too too sullied flesh would melt" (1.2.129). Or so he does in most recent editions. In the quarto (both a "bad" first quarto and a later "good quarto) texts Hamlet wishes that his "too too sallied flesh would melt." Probably a printer's mistake, but a "sally" is an attack in war, and Hamlet might just feel as if enemy forces have been hacking away at him. In the Folio, Hamlet wishes that his "too too solid flesh would melt." That reading too makes perfectly good sense: a thing has to be solid before it can melt. "Sullied" is a modern emendation., an educted guess.
Most modern editors add stage directions which do not appear in the original printed texts, and which do not accurately reflect what an audience would have seen in Shakespeare's theater: these modern additions are placed in square brackets. The editor's effort is to produce an accurate text; but notice, on the basis of what you've just read, that these modern texts involve a certain amount of educated guess-work; and where there's both Q and F, it isn't always clear which, if either, should be privileged.
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