Romeo and Juliet was published in in quarto (one sheet of paper folded1 to give four pages) in 1597 and again in 1599. The first in quarto, short and often confused, reflects an actual performance of Shakespeare’s time as it contains an unusual amount of full stage directions2.
The second is based upon a written copy of the play and contains many errors.
Shakespeare, like his contemporaries, did not supervise the publication of the quartos, because in general when a playwright3 sold a play to a theatrical company he also sold all his rights on his work. There was no copyright to protect an author’s work and anyone who laid hands4 on the text could print it as he wanted. Of course the texts printed in this way were very imprecise, existing errors were not corrected and new ones were made in the course of printing because the printers were often uneducated5.
The best qualified edition of Romeo and Juliet was published in 1623 in the in folio (a sheet of paper folded to give two pages). It was the first complete collection of Shakespeare’s works (37 plays), edited and revised by John Heminges and Henry Condell, two actors in Shakespeare’s company.
