Bad Quarto - Bad Quartos of Other Playwrights

Bad Quartos of Other Playwrights

Though the bad quarto concept originated in reference to Shakespearean texts, scholars have also applied it to a range of non-Shakespearean play texts of the English Renaissance era. In 1938 Leo Kirschbaum published "A Census of Bad Quartos" that included 20 play texts. Laurie Maguire's 1996 study examines 41 Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean editions that have been categorised as bad quartos, including the first editions of Arden of Feversham, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, and Fair Em, plays of the Shakespeare Apocrypha, plus George Chapman's The Blind Beggar of Alexandria, Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and The Massacre at Paris, Part 1 of Heywood's If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, and Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy, among others.