The Authority of the 'bad' quartos of Romeo and Juliet and Pericles Amelia Coen College

“The parallel-text ‘good’/’bad’ investigations which characterise textual approaches to Shakespeare cause as many problems as they solve” (MAGUIRE 1996: 14).Investigating the authority of the first quartos of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Pericles

This essay shall argue for the integrity and authenticity of the first quartos of Periclesand Romeo and Juliet. It is a problematic and out-dated view to label these texts ‘bad’, as Pollard does, in relation to the first folio texts (Pollard 1909: 24, 58). Edmund Malone, an 18thcentury editor who produced a ten-octavo edition of Shakespeare’s works using a thorough editorial method, shall be discussed, using his versions of the texts as a control to gauge the authority of the first quartos of Pericles andRomeo and Juliet. This essay shall assert that Malone’s reliance on the first quarto texts suggests their authority and authenticity. In Shakespearean Suspect Texts, Laurie Maguire argues that critics have previously been too quick to dismiss these suspect texts as ‘memorial reconstruction’, thus compromising the text’s integrity; Maguire suggests that the first quarto of Romeo and Juliet was not memorially reconstructed (Maguire 1996: 15). Comparison between the first quarto...