In 1623,
John Heminges and
Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare's friends from the King's Men, published the
First Folio, a collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. It contained 36 texts, including 18 printed for the first time.
[112] Many of the plays had already appeared in
quarto versions—flimsy books made from sheets of paper folded twice to make four leaves.
[113] No evidence suggests that Shakespeare approved these editions, which the First Folio describes as "stol'n and surreptitious copies".
[114] Alfred Pollard termed some of them "
bad quartos" because of their adapted, paraphrased or garbled texts, which may in places have been reconstructed from memory.
[115] Where several versions of a play survive, each
differs from the other. The differences may stem from copying or
printing errors, from notes by actors or audience members, or from Shakespeare's own
papers.
[116] In some cases, for example
Hamlet,
Troilus and Cressida and
Othello, Shakespeare could have revised the texts between the quarto and folio editions. In the case of
King Lear, however, while most modern additions do conflate them, the 1623 folio version is so different from the 1608 quarto, that the
Oxford Shakespeare prints them both, arguing that they cannot be conflated without confusion.
[117]
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