LENE B. PETERSEN, Shakespeare's Errant Texts: Textual Form and Linguistic Style in Shakesperaean 'Bad' Quartos and Co-authored Plays.
T. Merriam · Notes and Queries · 2012
IT would be hard to exaggerate the importance of this book in broadening the scope of textual analysis of early modern plays. The work has two distinct parts: the first is a detailed study of the characteristics of oral transmission and their inevitable role in association with literary drama. The study casts doubt on the hypothesis of memorial reconstruction as a major means of accounting for the inferior ‘bad quartos’. In a word, oral transmission in folk lore and in transmission of spoken texts tends to shorten, simplify, and move the earlier versions closer to a ‘basic’ or skeletal rendering of the tale. In extraordinary detail, the author follows the elements of repetition and formulaic phrases in the shorter versions of the Shakespeare Folio plays. In so doing the publication dates, as it were, are ‘reversed’. The 1623 Folio Hamlet of over 30,000 words is reduced to a derivative 1603 Q1 version of less than 20,000, implying that the first quarto postdates the anterior version of the First Folio. This is more than possible, but it challenges the knee-jerk habit of historical source dating, as well as the nomenclature of the ‘first’ quarto printed before the second quarto of 1604–05.