Shakespeare

The “inhibition” upon playing in London was lifted in October, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men returned to the Curtain. It may have been in this season that “Curtaine plaudeties”⁴ were heard for performances of Romeo and Juliet, which was one of three plays by Shakespeare published this year in volume form. They were three of his most popular dramas, and it is likely that they were all being performed in this period. Publication would then be a way of exploiting their success in a different market. In August The Tragedie of King Richard the Second appeared on the book stalls. It proved such a success that two further editions were published in the succeeding year. It was followed in October by The Tragedy of King Richard the Third. This play was reprinted four more times in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Then in the following month Romeo and Juliet appeared in volume form.

There is a difference, however, in the nature of the publications. The first two were published by Andrew Wise and printed by Valentine Simms, but An Excellent Conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet was simply printed by John Danter without a named publisher. Earlier that year Danter’s presses had been raided by the authorities and Danter charged with printing The Jesus Psalter “and other things without aucthoritie.” ⁵ This edition of Romeo and Juliet was one of those printed without requisite authority. Two years later another edition appeared under the title of The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedie, of Romeo and Iuliet with the addition, “Newly corrected, augmented, and amended.” This amplified edition was printed from the text used by the playhouse – there is a direction for “Will Kempe”-which may imply that the author did not have his own version of the play. Danter’s premises were raided in the spring of 1597, and it seems very likely that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men then gave Richard II and Richard III to Andrew Wise as a way of pre-empting any other possible thefts. In subsequent years they employed a printer, James Roberts, to place “blocking” entries in the Stationers’ Register; he would register a manuscript with the proviso that it could not be printed “without licence first had from the right honorable the Lord Chamberlain” or some such wording.

It seems likely that the version of Romeo and Juliet used by Danter was a corrupt or maimed text. It could, for example, have been the product of a hack writer working with someone who knew the play well and who had seen it many times in performance. Such a person might have been Thomas Nashe, who was associated both with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and with the printer John Danter.⁶ Another candidate as midwife for the corrupted text is Henry Chettle, the dramatist who had clashed with Shakespeare over Greene’s remarks about the “upstart Crow.” Chettle participated in the writing of forty-nine plays in the course of his short life; he was one of a number of Elizabethan writers who lived literally from hand to mouth, working incessantly for the voracious medium of the public theatre. A contemporary traveller remarked that “there be, in my opinion, more Playes in London then in all the partes of the worlde I have seene,”⁷ and it is calculated that between 1538 and 1642 some three thousand plays were written and performed.

There are six editions of Shakespeare’s plays that have been described by some textual scholars as “bad quartos”-The Contention, The True Tragedy, Henry the Fifth, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and the first quartos of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. They are significantly shorter than the versions eventually published in the Folio or collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays that was published after his death. In these quartos lines are paraphrased, characters are omitted, and scenes are placed in a different order from other versions. It may be that an adapter shortened them, for purposes now unknown, and that adapter may even have been Shakespeare himself. It is generally agreed that the Folio edition is transcribed from Shakespeare’s “foul papers” or manuscripts, however, while the shorter quartos reflect an actual performance of the play; the stage-directions are often unusually full and vivid. In the same spirit of performance the cuts in the shorter quartos are designed to add pace and simplicity to the plot, removing undue complexity or awkwardness of staging. The poetry goes, where it is not germane to the story, and extraneous dialogue or characterisation is also removed.