The First and Second Quartos of Romeo and Juliet
For my senior thesis work, I am editing my own parallel text of the first and second quartos of Romeo and Juliet. When I mention this, I get a lot of questions.
The most frequently asked question is probably, "Huh?"
Huh?
"Quarto" simply refers to the format of a book: in a quarto, sheets of paper are folded into quarters to make the pages. (Try folding a sheet of paper into quarters. You will have in your hands something resembling a double-thickness greeting card. Now cut the top edge off the card, and you will have a mini-book of four leaves.)
In the Renaissance, quarto books were often the smaller, relatively cheap ones, while the big expensive editions were usually folios. Many of Shakespeare's plays were first printed in relatively cheap quarto editions, then later collected in a book known as the First Folio (or F1 for short).
So what about Romeo and Juliet?
There were five early quarto editions of Romeo and Juliet, known as the first quarto, second quarto, and so on, or Q1, Q2, etc to those of us in the biz. Basically speaking, all editions of Romeo and Juliet from Q3 onward, including the F1 version and the modern edition you read in ninth grade, derive from Q2, which is considered highly "authorial," that is, very close to what Shakespeare wrote when he put pen to paper. Q1 is quite a different story.
What's different about Q1?
The first thing you'll notice about Romeo and Juliet Q1 is that it is considerably shorter than Q2: it's only about 75 percent as long. Q1 omits many lines from what we know as the standard text, and in some places it reduces length by summarizing. As a result, the action of Q1 is quicker. The tradeoff is a loss of Q2's poetic refinement. In addition to the sometimes clumsy summary, Q1 "roughens" some of the poetry with small variations that make it unmetrical. Q1 has a tendency to favor plot advancement over literary concerns, and its frequent omission of lines which repeat or expand on the ideas stated in other lines prevents those ideas from being amplified as they are in Q2.
Q1 has some virtues as an acting text: the tempo of its action is quick, and it includes fuller stage directions than Q2. The literary faults of Q1, however, have led many critics to label it "corrupt" and classify it as a "bad quarto."
Why is Q1 so different from Q2?
Q2 is generally believed to have been set up from Shakespeare's "foul papers" or rough draft of Romeo and Juliet. Nobody knows for certain how Romeo and Juliet Q1 came into being. There are three main theories: revision, memorial reconstruction, and adaptation.
The revision theory was discarded earlier this century, but recently a very small number of critics have returned to it. According to the revision theory, Q1 represents Shakespeare's "first thoughts," a draft even earlier than the text behind Q2. Like the majority of scholars, I find the revision theory doubtful: Q1 seems to me like a cut-down version of Q2 rather than a skeleton on which Q2 was built up.
By far the most popular theory, and the one which has been dominant for the last several decades, is the theory of memorial reconstruction. In a memorial reconstruction scenario, actors who have played parts in a production of Romeo and Juliet go to a printer and recite the entire play from memory. Naturally they forget some lines and have to paraphrase others. The printer then prints and sells the corrupt text: Q1, an inaccurately reconstructed version of a playtext very close to Q2. The memorial reconstruction theory is supported by the fact that some parts of Q1 are much closer to Q2 than others. The lines spoken by Romeo, Paris, and Mercutio correlate strongly, and lines spoken by other characters while Romeo, Paris, or Mercutio is onstage also correlate better than lines from scenes which do not involve any of those three characters. Therefore it is usually suggested that the actors playing Romeo, Paris, and Mercutio (or just Romeo and Paris) reconstructed the play from memory.
A third theory to account for the state of Q1 is adaptation. According to this theory, the lines missing from Q1 (as compared to Q2) were not necessarily forgotten by a reporter but may have been deliberately cut out by someone who was adapting or abridging the play for stage. Modern stage productions of Shakespeare's plays routinely cut lines, so why shouldn't a Renaissance-era production have done so as well? Proponents of the adaptation theory point out that many of Q1's omissions are in the form of neat cuts from passages which otherwise accurately reproduce the Q2 text, and that these cuts are not haphazard but have the effect of quickening stage action. The neatness and consistent effect of the cuts point towards deliberate adaptation.
To me, the best explanation of Q1's differences from Q2 is a combination of the memorial reconstruction and adaptation theories. Evidence within the Q1 text supports both theories, and I am not the first person to suggest that Romeo and Juliet Q1 may be either a memorial reconstruction of an abridged version of the play or an abridged version of a memorial reconstruction.
So if Q1 is "corrupt," why should we be interested in it?
Romeo and Juliet Q1 will never replace Q2 as the basis for the standard version of the play, and anyone looking to guess what was on Will Shakespeare's mind in the mid-1590s would do better to consult Q2 than Q1. Still, Q1 is interesting as a historical artefact because it may preserve some information about the Renaissance theater. If you went to see a production of Romeo and Juliet in 1596 or 1597, what would you have seen and heard? If you were outside of London, you might very likely have heard the lines and seen the action preserved in Q1's dialogue and stage directions--or something very close to them. Q1 offers practical performance solutions to a few problems in the Q2 text, so Q1 may suggest performance options to modern directors and actors. Finally, Q1 itself makes for some fun, engaging theater: I know because I have seen a production of Romeo and Juliet which used the Q1 text. It went off smashingly well, except when Mercutio got a real bloody nose in the course of his last fight scene. On the bright side, he sounded very convincing when delivering his dying curse . . .
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