second quartos of Richard II, Richard III, and 1 Henry IV are the earliest to indicate his authorship, the first quartos of these plays being anonymous. Otherwise Shakespeare is marked as the author in the first and all subsequent editions.
The Folio, with all its faults, is a better printed book than the average of the quartos. For twenty of the plays it is, as said, our sole authority. For the other sixteen plays[1] the Folio sometimes follows an entirely independent and superior manuscript, as in Richard III, Henry V, and Merry Wives; but more often shows that it was printed from one of the quarto editions, with the text corrected, expanded, or cut for the actors’ needs. Where a number of quarto editions had appeared (e.g. Romeo and Juliet and 1 Henry IV), it was one of the later and typographically less correct ones which was so used. The chief textual embarrassments of Shakespeare students arise from these cases, where the ‘good’ quartos and the Folio offer alternative readings. Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV, Hamlet, Lear, Troilus and Cressida, and Othello are the plays in which this conflict of authority is most apparent.
- ↑ The Folio does not include the Poems, Sonnets, or Pericles.
