Making Sense of the First Quartos of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Hamlet.

Kathleen Irace associates herself with recent scholars who are inclined to rehabilitate the so-called bad quartos (here, Hamlet, Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The First Part of the Contention [2 Henry VI], and Richard Duke of York [3 Henry VI]) on account of their theatrical properties, but her method is less subjective. Her investigations have not led her to confuse theatrical viability with textual authority. The first part of her book, 'Performance Features', deals separately with plot structure, characterization, and staging, employing tables of material peculiar to the quartos or shared with their Folio counterparts that reveal patterns relieving her of the burden of having to argue the provenance or value of quarto variants individually. This is not to say that her discussion of the …