Memorial Reconstruction - The Theory

The Theory

The theory emerged in embryo during the nineteenth century, but was only clearly defined by W. W. Greg in 1909 when he analysed the quarto text of The Merry Wives of Windsor, systematically comparing the divergences from the Folio version. He concluded that scenes containing the character of the Host are much closer to the Folio version than are other scenes. He therefore deduced that the actor playing the Host had played a significant role in creating the text of the quarto publication. In 1915 Henry David Gray analysed the first quarto of Hamlet using the same method. He concluded that the actor who played Marcellus was responsible for the reconstruction. He explained the fact that the "mousetrap" scene, in which Marcellus does not appear, was also accurate by suggesting that the same actor must have also played one of the roles in that scene. Both Gray and Greg argued that hired actors playing minor roles would be more susceptible to bribery than established actors in the company, as they had much less to lose. They also suggested that an anonymous writer filled out the missing verses.

The theory rapidly took off and was used to explain the textual oddities of many Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. There was considerable debate about which plays may have been surreptiously recorded by shorthand during a performance, and which by memorial reconstruction, or a combination of the two. Shakespeare's contemporary Thomas Heywood appears to complain about the former practice when he attacks "mangled" versions of his works "copied only by the ear". The shorthand method would be unlikely to involve major differences in accuracy from one scene to the next. John Dover Wilson, for example, argued that the Hamlet bad quarto was mainly based on a transcript, but with additions from the actor playing Marcellus. There was much discussion of the first quarto of King Lear, leading to the widespread conclusion that it was based on a transcript and not an actor's memory, because divergences from the Folio version appeared consistently throughout, and were not bunched by scene.