Talk:Bad quarto

message: The article says: "He focused on four early quartos: Romeo and Juliet (1597), Henry V (1600), The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602), and Hamlet (1603). His reasons for citing these three texts(...)" Is 'three' a mistake there or is something missing in this paragraph? (forgot to login, sorry) --LodeRunner 03:50, 10 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: Yes, "three" was a mistake. Ugajin 03:27, 11 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Response

message: The bad quartos are a problem throughout Elizabethan drama, not a special Shakespearean issue. Greene's Orlando Furioso, Marlowe's Massacre at Paris, Marlowe's Dr. Faustus (1604), Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster (1620), Peele's Edward I and the anonymous The True Tragedy of Richard III are all examples of non-Shakespearean bad quartos. Also The Taming of a Shrew is not usually considered an example of a bad quarto. And there is no mention of Leo Kirschbaum's work on the subject, which given his importance in the field, seems a glaring oversight, especially as Hardin Craig is mentioned, whose work was much less influential.
While my personal sympathies are with the POV expressed in this article, it does seem to me to be slanted against the standard mainstream view of the subject (or at least what was the standard mainstream view when I was in school). Torkmusik (talk) 08:26, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: — I added a paragraph to give at least an acknowledgement of the non-Shakespearean bad quartos. How detailed a treatment of the matter do you think is needed? Ugajin (talk) 10:29, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Missing Information

message: I have two problems with this article.
:1. There are very few sources within the article, however as this is a low priority article, this is not exactly a pressing issue in my opinion.
:2. This is my main problem. The article needs "dumbed down," so to speak. Quite honestly, it currently reads as though someone used a thesaurus even when there was no need for one. I understand that someone with a large amount of knowledge on this particular subject could have written the article, however it is not accessible to the average person (without a dictionary) who may have, like me, clicked on the article link out of curiosity and would like to learn more about it. I am uncomfortable editing this article because I fully admit that in certain parts, I am completely unsure about what the original author was talking about. On a similar note, do we really need that many semicolons?
TheNewKarl (talk) 04:04, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cleanup 

message: The concept obviously apply beyond the Bard's plays, but surely his are a topic relative to which other BQs are am obscure sidelight: his can be discussed without any reference, other than a hatnote, to theirs, and theirs can profitably be shortened by saying that many considerations relevant to his are applicable to theirs, listing only those that apply with at most slight modification to theirs, and explaining in detail those that are irrelevant to his or that fail to parallel the pattern in his.--Jerzy•t 07:06, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Split 

message: The article already contains a summary of some leading sources which oppose the bad quarto theory of 1909. The alternative explanations being offered include the suggestion that Shakespeare revised his plays, leading to the Folio of 1623 differing from the earlier Quartos (something which I will discuss in a moment), and the suggestion that he abridged his plays for performance by a reduced cast (something else which needs further discussion).
The article doesn't appear to consider as significant the fact that, although the folio is a printed text, these are plays for performance; and it is a striking failing (not of the article but of the scholarship on which it reports) that a lack of attention has been given to the fact that the text of 1623 is ipso facto the publication of these plays in only their latest form, and which therefore must not be treated as if the text was that of a novel: it is not unchanging, because it is a performance-based entertainment, subject to continuous development in performance, and which evolved over the course of many performances.
The most important point to be made is that, in the theatre, a play can never (unlike a novel) be said to have a fixed and immutable form. When written down, the most that can be said of a play is that this is a snapshot of its text, as it stands at that moment: one which has been contributed to by the actors - no doubt unintentionally as much as deliberately - and that it is an on-going collaboration between the author and his cast. Shakespearean scholars have, unimaginatively, treated the Folio as if it was a novel, written down on a once-for-all basis, as a product of one man. In theatrical terms, that is a nonsense. Theatrical performance is inevitably a collaboration, and there is nothing at all unexpected to see that a snapshot of Hamlet, as written down in 1603, in a Quarto, is significantly different to the form in which it was being performed in 1623, 20 years later, as recorded in the Folio. 
Too much literary "scholarship", too little understanding of the theatre, has been the governing principle in this field. It took 300 years to come up with the absurd idea, in 1909, that in 20 years of performance between 1603 and 1623 the text of the play, as performed, would not have changed (in an age in which, most likely, none of the cast could read or write, so had to carry 4 hours of dialogue in their memory). In the modern theatre, today, actors develop their part over a long run, changing lines here and there, and over a few short weeks can end up with a much altered (and improved) production.
The bad quarto theory, reluctantly giving ground to the notion that Shakespeare did some re-writes, continues to ignore the reality that he most likely could not read nor write (but dictated his dialogue to a clerk), and that the changes would have evolved in performance (since his cast could not read either, so could not be given pink pages of script revisions).
The bad quarto theory is simply a bad theory. But there are still too many academics treating play scripts as if they were holy writ, which were only writ down after the fact: ex post facto. Stephen Poppitt 08:58, 15 April 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Revisionist theory and Abridgement