A Century of "Bad" Shakespeare Quartos

Abstract

0 READERS OF DRAMA at the end of the twentieth century, A. W Pollard may be most familiar as the character in Tom Stoppard's the Invention of Love who, in contrast to the intense and brilliant A. E. Housman, regards textual criticism as a joke.1 Nevertheless, the historical Pollard, through an invention of his own, continues to exert enormous influence on Shakespeare textual criticism and editing. Soon after the turn of this century, in Shakespearefolios and quartos, Pollard invented the bad Shakespeare quartos. He generously shared the credit for his work with W W. Greg: In some sections of this study Mr Greg and I have been fellowhunters, communicating our results to each other at every stage, so that our respective responsibilities for them have become hopelessly entangled.2 Greg published his results on the topic a year later in an edition of the 1602 Quarto of the Merry Wives of Windsor, one of Pollard's bad quartos. There Greg asserted that the quality of the Quarto's correlation with the Folio version's dialogue varies strikingly in connection with the Host's entrances and exits. Greg inferred that these variations indicate involvement in the Quarto's composition by the actor who personated the Host. This actor, according to Greg, was attempting to reconstruct a text of the play from memory and was doing considerably better with some of the dialogue he had heard while onstage than he was with the rest of the play.3 For much of this century Greg's insight and inferences about the Host in Wives have inspired followers to extend the memorial-reconstruction hypothesis to other early printings of Shakespeare plays. These include the rest of Pollard's bad quartos-the 1603 Hamlet, the 1597 Romeo and Juliet, the 1600 Henry V, and the 1609 Pericles-as well as 1590s printings of versions of 2 and 3 Henry VI, and even the 1608 KingLear and the 1597 Richard III, and many other suspect texts of plays attributed to Shakespeare and to others.4 To apply Pollard's label bad to a play has often been