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Few plays in the First Folio of Shakespeare appear to have received less editorial supervision from Heminge and Condell than Romeo and Juliet. Although the authoritative second quarto is sometimes regarded as one of the less satisfactory so-called "good" quartos, responsible scholarship has found no reason to believe that Heminge and Condell, or their agents, felt obliged to bring the text of its descendant, Q3, into conformity with a playhouse manuscript in order to have F1 represent the "True Originall"—as they frequently did with other quartos that provided Folio copy. Sir Walter Greg summed up the matter in 1955 as follows: "Q2 was reprinted in 1609 and from this third quarto F was set up without material alteration. There is no evidence that the copy was ever compared with a playhouse manuscript; indeed it certainly was not, for any such comparison must have left apparent traces. Nor can the quarto have been conceivably used as a prompt-book. . . . Italic for the Nurse's part was finally discarded. The stage-directions were slightly revised, sometimes intelligently, sometimes not; there is nothing to suggest that this was done anywhere but in the printing-house." He documents these conclusions by noting that "at IV.v.103 [tln 2680] 'Enter Will Kemp' is replaced by 'Enter Peter' in accordance with the prefixes. V.iii.71 [2924] is recognized as a speech and given to Peter, in accordance with the direction at l. 22 [2874], but there Peter is an error for Balthasar, and in fact the speaker is Paris's Page. Prefixes ('Nurse') are given to the marginal calls of 'Madam' at II.ii.149 and 151 [952, 954], and the muddled prefix 'Watch boy' at V.iii.171 [3036] is corrected to 'Boy'." Otherwise he finds that "the only differences appear to be" some eighteen changes in stage-directions, "apart from purely formal alterations." Greg's view of the matter has, predictably, been followed by a variety of subsequent scholars.[1]
Greg's verdict on the Folio text of Romeo and Juliet (despite his reference to "the printing-house") would seem to receive some support from other plays in the volume, which generally exhibit variants from their quarto copy that are more striking either individually or as a group. But his argument for Rom. itself rests on the evidence of F1's errors of omission—the failure to alter the erroneous entry at 2069 (III.v) —or of commission—the replacing of the erroneous 'Enter Romeo' "by the equally erroneous 'Enter Servant'" (I.v. tln 568), the deficient exit introduced at 1309 (II.iv), the wrong speech-prefix added at 2924 (V.iii), the unnecessary deletion of 'manet' at 2675 (IV.v).[2] Both ranges of evidence of course entail Greg's usual hypothesis that such inconsistencies must have been resolved in the prompt-book, and both depend directly for their worth on the validity of this hypothesis.[3] The evidential basis for his conclusions is obviously not as broad as might be hoped. Also causing some uncertainty about his assessment are two facts that have come to light since Greg wrote: (1) the "newly corrected, augmented, and amended" Q4 was printed before November of 1622, and (2) most of Folio Rom. was typeset by the least capable of Jaggard's workmen, Compositor E.[4] Neither of these discoveries is so revolutionary by itself as to overturn Greg's verdict, however unsure its foundations, that the Folio is not dependent on the prompt-book. Yet examination of their possible implications reveals that the changes introduced in the Folio
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