ABSTRACT
The question sounds insulting. But as we find out increasingly more about editorial processes in the period 1600-1623, it needs to be asked. Correctors (Bland), scribes (Honigmann), theatre-related workers in printing houses (Jowett 1998), have recently been added to compositors as important agents in the textual transmission of playtexts. These additions offer complexity to the production of the printed texts that matches a similar development in studies of the collaboration among writers and theatre workers in the production of the performed texts. In the process of answering the question here, it becomes apparent that all the early quartos of Romeo and Juliet, Quarto One (Ql: 1597), Quarto Two (Q2: 1599), Quarto Three (Q3: 1609) and Quarto Four (Q4: 1616-26), have been intelligently edited, and S.W. Reid (1982) has suggested an intelligent hand in the production of the Folio (F: 1623) as well. This essay will focus on the editing of Q3 and Q4, but it has to be said that Romeo and Juliet received remarkable attention while it was being printed for successive audiences over the first twenty-five to thirty-year period of its history in print.
