Early Texts of Shakespeare's Works - Quartos

Quartos

18 of the 36 plays in the First Folio were printed in separate and individual editions prior to 1623. Pericles (1609) and The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634) also appeared separately before their inclusions in folio collections (the Shakespeare Third Folio and the second Beaumont and Fletcher folio, respectively). All of these were quarto editions, with one exception: The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, the first edition of Henry VI, part 3, was printed in octavo form in 1594. In chronological order, these publications were:

• Titus Andronicus, 1594, 1600, 1611
• Henry VI, part 2, 1594 (The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster), 1600, 1619
• Henry VI, part 3, 1595 (The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York), 1600, 1619
• Romeo and Juliet, 1597, 1599, 1609
• Richard II, 1597, 1598, 1608, 1615
• Richard III, 1597, 1598, 1602, 1605, 1612, 1622
• Love's Labor's Lost, 1598
• Henry IV, part 1, 1598, 1599, 1604, 1608, 1613, 1622
• Henry IV, part 2, 1600
• Henry V, 1600, 1602, 1619
• The Merchant of Venice, 1600, 1619
• A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1600, 1619
• Much Ado About Nothing, 1600
• The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1602, 1619
• Hamlet, 1603, 1604, 1611
• King Lear, 1608, 1619
• Troilus and Cressida, 1609
• Pericles, Prince of Tyre, 1609, 1611, 1619
• Othello, 1622
• The Two Noble Kinsmen, 1634.

Six of these were classified "bad quartos" by Alfred W. Pollard and other scholars associated with the New Bibliography. Popular plays like 1 Henry IV and Pericles were reprinted in their quarto editions even after the First Folio appeared, sometimes more than once.

Shakespeare's poems were also printed in quarto or octavo form:

• Venus and Adonis, Q1—1593, Q2—1594 (with later editions in octavo);
• The Rape of Lucrece, Q—1594 (with later editions in octavo);
• The Phoenix and the Turtle, Q1—1601, Q2—1611 (in Robert Chester's Love's Martyr);
• The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint, Q—1609.

Differing from the quartos of the plays, the first editions of Shakespeare's narrative poems are extremely well printed. "Richard Field, Shakespeare's first publisher and printer, was a Stratford man, probably a friend of Shakespeare, and the two produced an excellent text." Shakespeare may have had direct involvement in the publication of the two poems, as Ben Jonson exercised in reference to the publication of his works, but as Shakespeare clearly did not do in connection with his plays.

John Benson published a collected edition of Shakespeare's Poems in 1640; the poems were not added to collections of the plays until the 18th century. (The disputed miscellany The Passionate Pilgrim was only printed in octavo: twice, apparently, in 1599, with an O3 in 1612, all by William Jaggard.)