ABSTRACT
William Shakespeare's plays and poems have a textual history of almost unrivalled complexity. His works survive in multiple, often contradictory or spurious, editions; and around half of the plays were published after his death in versions possibly altered by the playwright himself, more often by another hand. Shakespeare's textual has therefore separated play manuscripts into three categories: author's "foul papers," theatrical books (promptbooks), and other copies. Shakespeare's earliest published plays appeared in quarto, where four pages are printed on each side of a sheet of paper, which, when folded, leads to eight pages of a book around five inches by seven inches in size. Shakespeare's folio might have been inspired by Jonson's, but it contains much more material, leading to densely printed pages. Eighteenth-century Shakespeare is characterized by celebrity editing and conjecture. The nineteenth century also opened up the possibility of photographic facsimiles of Shakespeare's originals.
