Bad Quarto - Criticism and Alternate Hypotheses

Criticism and Alternate Hypotheses

Some problems remained with the hypothesis, however; the sheep-and-goats division of texts into "good" and "bad" categories was not always easy or elegantly simple. Consider the determination that Q1 of Richard III is a bad quarto, "even though it is an unusually 'good' bad quarto." Alexander himself recognized that the idea of memorial reconstruction did not apply perfectly to the two plays he studied, which possessed problematical features that could not be explained this way. He maintained that the quartos of the two early histories were partial memorial reconstructions.

A few critics — Eric Sams is one example, Hardin Craig another — disputed the entire concept of memorial reconstruction, pointing out that, unlike shorthand reporting, there was no reliable historical evidence that actors ever reconstructed plays from memory. In this skeptical view, memorial reconstruction is purely a modern fiction divorced from any underlying Elizabethan reality. Individual scholars have sometimes favored alternative explanations for variant texts — in some cases, revision. Steven Roy Miller considers a revision hypothesis in preference to a bad-quarto hypothesis for The Taming of a Shrew, the alternative version of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.

Robert Burkhart's 1975 study Shakespeare's Bad Quartos: Deliberate Abridgements Designed for Performance by a Reduced Cast provides another alternative to the hypothesis of bad quartos as memorial reconstruction. Other studies have questioned the "orthodox view" on bad quartos, as in David Farley-Hills's work on Romeo and Juliet.