Folio and Quarto Texts Of Shakespeare's Plays

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Folio and Quarto Texts Of Shakespeare's Plays

• William Shakespeare and other authors of his time
  wrote their plays for acting companies whose
  primary purpose was to stage plays rather than
  publish them.
• To print and sell a play in book form was to give
  rival acting troupes and theatergoers access to
  the script, thereby diminishing its potential to
  profit from stage performances. 

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• Nevertheless, unscrupulous publishers sometimes
  bought copies of plays from equally unscrupulous
  actors who had obtained a handwritten copy of the
  play or had written it down from memory.
• Occasionally, a publisher attended a play and
  copied the script himself while actors performed
  their parts. For example, publisher John Danter,
  hoping to make money by selling Romeo and Juliet,
  used notes taken during a 1597 performance of the
  play to piece together a copy of it for public
  sale. 

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• These methods of acquiring a copy often resulted
  in the publication of scripts with many errors.
• To preserve the integrity of a play, the acting
  company that owned the script sometimes made its
  own arrangements to publish the text.
• Consequently, different printed versions of the
  play--some accurate, some inaccurate--were in
  circulation.
• There were two publishing formats quarto and
  folio, which are explained below.

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• The plays containing errors generally were in
  quarto form, although some good copies were
  published in this format.
• In 1623, friends and admirers of Shakespeare
  compiled a reasonably authentic collection of 36
  of Shakespeare's plays in a folio edition of more
  than 900 pages that was entitled Mr. William
  Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories Tragedies.
• The printer and publisher was William Jaggard,
  assisted by his son Isaac. This edition became
  known as The First Folio.
• Because of the presumed authenticity of this
  collection, later publishers used it to print
  copies of the plays. Other folios were printed in
  1632, 1663 and 1685.

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Quarto and folio

• Quarto
• A quarto is sheet of printing paper folded twice
  to form eight separate pages for printing a book.

• Folio
• A folio is a sheet of printing paper folded once
  to form four separate pages for printing a book. 

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Act/Scene Division
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Acts

• A major division in a play.
• Often, individual acts are divided into smaller
  units ("scenes") that all take place in a
  specific location.
• Originally, Greek plays were not divided into
  acts. They took place as a single whole
  interrupted occasionally by the chorus's singing.
  
• In Roman times, a five-act structure first
  appeared based upon Horace's recommendations.
  This five-act structure became a convention of
  drama (and especially tragedy) during the
  Renaissance. (Shakespeare's plays have natural
  divisions that can be taken as the breaks between
  acts as well later editors inserted clear "act"
  and "scene" markings in these locations.)

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Acts

• Though modern editions nearly always divide
  Shakespeare's plays into acts, among the early
  texts, only the First Folio has act divisions,
  and does not use them consistently.
• It is very doubtful that Shakespeare thought of
  his plays as having a five-act structure, or
  composed them in acts.

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• The Folio's use of Latin titles (e.g. Actus
  Secundus, scaena prima for Act Two, Scene One) is
  a reminder that act division is a feature that
  makes these English plays more "classical" and
  makes the Shakespeare Folio look more like an
  edition of Roman plays, such as, for example, the
  Renaissance editions of the Latin comedies of
  Terence.

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Scenes

• Sometimes the First Folio also marks scenes.
• However, not all scenes are marked explicitly as
  shown.

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Scene divisions

• Unlike acts, scenes are important subdivisions of
  Shakespeare's plays if they are understood as
  units of action during which one set of
  characters enters and leaves the stage.
• In this sense, most scenes are generally marked
  in the early editions, beginning with 'Enter' and
  ending with 'Exit' or 'Exeunt'.