Memorial Reconstruction

The term memorial reconstruction refers to the hypotheses concerning the transcription of 17th century plays from memory by actors who had played parts in them, and the subsequent publication of those transcripts. The theory is intended to explain the existence of so-called "bad quarto" versions of plays, in which the text differs dramatically from a later published version, or appears to be corrupted or confused in some way.

In 1623, the preface to the First Folio of Shakespeare's works specifically marketed its content as correct, in contrast to the garbled texts of "stolen and surreptitious copies" published previously. Memorial reconstruction has been supposed to be one of the ways in which texts were "stolen". Examples of possible memorial reconstructions are early editions of Shakespeare, including the second quarto (1598) of Richard III and the 1603 first quarto of Hamlet. It has been theorized that the only version to survive of Christopher Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris is a text obtained in this way, although there is no concrete evidence to support this assertion.

The theory has been used to explain the content of some quartos, and even to identify the actors responsible - on the assumption that they would get their own parts right, along with cue-lines and possibly other lines performed when they were onstage, but would most likely make more errors when reconstructing scenes in which their character was not present. The cast members of an Elizabethan dramatic production had their own parts written out for them, with relevant entrances and cues — but they did not have their own individual copies of the play text as a whole.

The theory has, however, been criticised on various grounds; that it is not based on serious research into the way actors actually remember or misremember lines; that texts may have been "stolen" by other means; or that the so-called "bad" quartos are early or alternative versions of plays that were later revised.