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create scripts for other companies, perhaps purely for publication. Some of the plays were printed in shorter editions in some of which the text is variously adapted, paraphrased, and garbled. It has been argued that they have been subject to ‘memorial reconstruction’—put together by actors—though the extent to which the reporters’ defective memories gave rise to the peculiar features of these texts has been much disputed. They make up an unstable grouping often referred to as the ‘bad’ quartos: bad not because they were, necessarily, badly printed or surreptitiously published, but because the quality of the text is different from, and by and large inferior to, that of the alternative versions. The term has become contentious, as it places texts of different character and possible provenance under a single pejorative label. The earliest texts of The First Part of the Contention and Richard Duke of York (usually known by the titles under which they were printed in the First Folio—2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI) appeared in 1594 and 1595 respectively; they may well be reported texts, but the reports seem to have been based on an earlier version of the plays as Shakespeare wrote them. Also in 1594 appeared The Taming of A Shrew, perhaps better described as an imitation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (the titles may have been regarded as interchangeable) than as a detailed reconstruction of it. The 1597 edition of Richard III is perhaps the best of these heavily variant texts; it seems to be closely based on a performance version. The text of Romeo and Juliet , as printed in the same year, may have been put together by a few actors exploiting a popular success, though some critics regard this too as an acceptable theatre version of the play. The 1600 quarto of Henry V may present a text made for a smaller company of actors than that for which it had been written; here again theatrical adaptation seems to have played a major part in its evolution. The Merry Wives of Windsor of 1602 seems to derive largely from the memory of the actor who played the Host of the Garter Inn—perhaps a hired man no longer employed by Shakespeare’s company. Worst reported of all is the 1603 Hamlet , which also appears to derive from the memory of one or more actors in minor roles. Last printed of the ‘bad’ quartos is Pericles, of 1609, where there are strong indications of memorial reporting even in the absence of a fuller text with which to compare it.
    The worst of these reported texts have many faults. Frequently they garble the verse and prose of the original—To be or not to be; ay, there’s the point‘, says the 1603 Hamlet ; usually they abbreviate—the 1603 Hamlet has about 2,200 lines, compared to the 3,800 of the good quarto; occasionally they include lines from plays by other authors (especially Marlowe); sometimes they include passages clearly cobbled together and in distinctly un-Shakespearian language to supply gaps in the reporter’s memory. For all this, they are not without value in helping us to judge how Shakespeare’s plays were originally performed. As the fuller texts may have been too long for performance, the shorter versions potentially offer an indication as to how the plays were reshaped for the Shakespearian stage. Their directions may give us more information about early performances than is available in other texts: for instance, the reported text of Hamlet has the direction ‘Enter Ofelia playing on a lute, and her hair down, singing ‘—far more vivid than the good Quarto’s ‘ Enter Ophelia’, or even the Folio’s ‘Enter Ophelia distracted’. Because these are post-performance texts, they may preserve, in the midst of corruption, authentically Shakespearian changes made to the play after it was first written and not recorded elsewhere. A particularly interesting case is The Taming of the Shrew : the play as printed in the Folio, in what is clearly, in general, the more