preview

William Shakespeare 's Romeo And Juliet

Better Essays

The task of editing Romeo and Juliet has become even more daunting of late. Not only is there the vast critical and performance history of one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays to present intelligibly to modern readers. But new regard for the first quarto 1 (1597), has also complicated the relationship with the longer quarto 2 (1599), on which all modern editions are based In Shakespeares day, there was no ‘correct’ way to punctuate, just as there was no ‘correct’ way to spell. Moreover, it is very important to remember that Shakespeare was not an author but a playwright. He wrote plays intended to be spoken and acted before an audience, not books intended to be read quietly to oneself. Shakespeare employed not grammatical but …show more content…

Some editors believe that the first quarto gives the author 's first draft of the play, and the second the form it took after he had revised and enlarged it; but the majority of critics agree that the first quarto was a pirated edition, and represents in an abbreviated and imperfect form the play subsequently printed in full in the second. The former was "made up partly from copies of portions of the original play, partly from recollection and from notes taken during the performance;" the latter was from an authentic copy, and a careful comparison of the text with the earlier one shows that in the meantime the play "underwent revision, received some slight augmentation, and in some few places must have been entirely rewritten." The third quarto (1609) was a reprint of the second, from which it "differs by a few corrections, and more frequently by additional errors." It is from this edition that the text of the first folio is taken, with some changes in the punctuation and the stage directions. The earliest reference to the play in the literature of the time is in a sonnet to Shakespeare by John Weever, written probably in 1595 or 1596, though not published until 1599. After referring to Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, Weever adds: Romeo, Richard, more whose names I know not, Their sugred tongues and power attractive beuty Say they are saints... No other allusion of earlier date than the publication of the first quarto has been discovered. S.D.] Romeo doesn 't enter at

Get Access