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authentic text, abandons early in its action the framework device which makes the story of Katherine and Petruccio a play within the play; the quarto continues this framework through the play, and provides an amusing little episode rounding it off. These passages may derive from ones written by Shakespeare but not printed in the Folio: we print them as Additional Passages at the end of the play. In general, we draw more liberally than most previous editors on the reported texts, in the belief that they can help us to come closer than before to the plays as they were acted by Shakespeare’s company as well as by others. However, we are mindful that, no matter what their various origins, these texts constitute distinct versions of the plays.
     

    11. ‘To be or not to be’ as it appeared in the ‘bad’ quarto of 1603

     
    Although in general, companies which owned play scripts preferred not to allow them to be printed, some of Shakespeare’s plays were printed from authentic manuscripts during his lifetime, and even while they were still being performed by his company; these have often been designated as ‘good’ quartos. First came Titus Andronicus, printed in 1594 from Shakespeare’s own papers, probably because the company for which he wrote it had been disbanded. In 1597 Richard II was printed perhaps directly from Shakespeare’s manuscript, minus the politically sensitive episode (in 4.1) in which Richard gives up his crown to Bolingbroke: a clear instance of censorship, whether self-imposed or not. The first play to be published from the outset in Shakespeare’s name is Love’s Labour’s Lost, in 1598. Several other quartos printed from good manuscripts appeared around the same time: I Henry IV (probably from a scribal transcript) in 1598, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, 2 Henry IV , and Much Ado About Nothing (all evidently from Shakespeare’s papers) in 1600. In 1604 appeared a new text of Hamlet printed from Shakespeare’s own papers and declaring itself to be ‘Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much again as it was, according to the true and perfect copy’: surely an attempt to replace a bad text by a good one. King Lear followed, in 1608, in a badly printed quarto whose status has been much disputed, but which we believe to derive from Shakespeare’s own manuscript. In 1609 came Troilus and Cressida, probably from Shakespeare’s own papers, in an edition which in the first-printed copies claims to present the play ‘as it was acted by the King’s majesty’s servants at the Globe‘, but in copies printed later in the print-run declares that it has never been ‘staled with the stage’. The only new play to appear between Shakespeare’s death and the publication of the Folio in 1623 was Othello , printed in 1622 apparently from a transcript of Shakespeare’s own papers.
    Not much money was to be made from printing a single edition of a play, but some of these quartos were several times reprinted. In the right circumstances Shakespeare could be a valuable property to a publisher. He and his company, however, would have benefited only from the one-off return of selling a manuscript for publication. It is not clear why they released reliable texts of some plays but not others. As a shareholder in the company to which the plays belonged, Shakespeare himself must have been a partner in its decisions, and it is difficult to believe that he was so lacking in personal vanity that he was happy to be represented in print by garbled texts; but he seems to have taken no interest in the progress of his plays through the press, and only two plays, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, were printed in debased quartos that were replaced with fuller quarto texts. Even some of those printed from authentic manuscripts—such as the 1604 Hamlet —are badly printed, and certainly not proof-read by the author; none of them bears an author’s dedication or shows any sign of having been