#bad folio my chaotic beloved

[hamletthedane]

The other source of “unauthorized” Elizabethan theater was minor actors recreating the scripts and publishing unauthorized version of them from memory. Except that it seems like Shakespeare’s minor actors were only given the scripts for the scenes they were actually in, so the rest of the play gets really messy really fast.

The funniest example is the probable origin of the (in-)famous “bad quarto” of Hamlet - published very shortly after the play’s first run, nearly 20 years before the “authorized” first folio was produced. It’s believed that this version was created by the actor who played Marcellus, an extremely minor role in the play.

We think this because the scenes in which that character is in (+ the Mousetrap, in which the actor probably played one of the in-universe performers) are pretty close to the “official” version of the play, with almost all of Marcellus’ lines exactly correct.

But the rest of the play….uh…well…

“Official” Version - First Folio Facsimile of Hamlet:

The “Bad Quarto” Version:

One of my favourite bits of media history trivia is that back in the Elizabethan period, people used to publish unauthorised copies of plays by sending someone who was good with shorthand to discretely write down all of the play's dialogue while they watched it, then reconstructing the play by combining those notes with audience interviews to recover the stage directions; in some cases, these unauthorised copies are the only record of a given play that survives to the present day. It's one of my favourites for two reasons:

It demonstrates that piracy has always lay at the heart of media preservation; and

Imagine being the 1603 equivalent of the guy with the cell phone camera in the movie theatre, furtively scribbling down notes in a little book and hoping Shakespeare himself doesn't catch you.