Of Quartos and Folios

     Many print versions of Shakespeare today are filled with footnotes labeled "Q" or "F," for quarto and folio, respectively. But what exactly are quartos and folios, and how do they relate to Shakespeare?

What is a quarto?

    A quarto is a format and size of book in which eight pages of text are printed on one sheet of paper. Quartos are about 30 cm tall. In a quarto, each sheet of paper is folded in half twice, and text appears on both sides of each quarter of each sheet. Printers producing works in quarto format must estimate the amount of text that would fit on one page of the book, and print the pages out of order and in different orientations. The double folding pattern puts the pages in the correct order and orientation. Quartos use a minimum of sheets of paper, allowing printers to save resources and authors, charged per the sheet of paper used, to save money.

How are quartos relevant to Shakespeare?

    Quartos are the earliest printed forms of Shakespeare's plays. About half of Shakespeare's plays, including Titus Andronicus (1594), Henry VI Part 2 (by its modern name, 1594), Richard III (1597, 1598), and Henry IV Part 1 (1598, 1599), were first printed in the quarto format. Each quarto only contained one play. Many of the quartos do not list Shakespeare's name, but the name of the first acting company to perform the play; in fact, the first year Shakespeare's name was printed in quarto was 1598, with the publication of Love's Labor's Lost and two editions of Richard II. Different editions and lost fragments of the quartos make it very difficult to piece together an authoritative copy of Shakespeare's plays. To make matters more complicated, quarto editions of Shakespeare's plays continued to be published in the late 1600s (after the restoration of the English monarchy), with significant changes to make the plays more palatable to the changing political climate in England.

What is a folio?

    A folio is a format and size of book in which four pages of text are printed on one sheet of paper. Each sheet of paper is folded in half once, and text appears on both sides of each half. Because they use more paper and are sturdier, folios are much more expensive (and, by extension, more likely to survive and more prestigious) than quartos.

How are folios relevant to Shakespeare?

    Shakespeare's Folios, all posthumous, are compilations of his plays. Shakespeare's First Folio, published in 1623, is the most significant. The First Folio is comprised of thirty-six Shakespearean plays, eighteen of which never before appeared authoritatively in print: All's Well That Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, Henry VI Part 1, Henry VIII, Julius Caesar, King John, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Timon of Athens, Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Winter's Tale. The First Folio categorized Shakespeare's plays into comedies, histories, and tragedies for the first time. After the publication of the First Folio, three more Shakespearean folios were published: the Second Folio in 1632, the Third Folio in 1663, and the Fourth Folio in 1685. Both the Third and the Fourth Folios included new plays which scholars do not believe were written by Shakespeare.

The First Folio of William Shakespeare

What did the quartos and folios look like?

    The text of Shakespeare's plays are considerably different among the quartos and folios––most modern print editions use both forms of text and mark any textual ambiguities with footnotes. Even among First Folios, copies differ: some copies have notes or drawings in the margins, some are missing pages, and some copies were proofread in production, while some were not (so the text and spelling of words may be different among copies). But the quartos and folios did not look quite like our modern prints: act and scene divisions, exits and entrances, and lists of characters were added by editor Nicholas Rowe in 1709.

Are those all of Shakespeare's plays?

    Besides the 36 plays in the First Folio (some of which were printed early in quarto format), scholars believe that Shakespeare wrote three other plays: Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen with playwright John Fletcher, and Cardenio––which is now lost. In Shakespeare's age, playwrights often collaborated with one another, so it is possible that Shakespeare worked on some other plays as well.