In the 18th century, as Shakespeare began to take on classic status, editors began to notice differences between the texts of the plays preserved by his fellow actors in the posthumously published First Folio of his Comedies, Histories & Tragedies and those that had been published in the playwright’s lifetime in the cheap pocket editions, analogous to modern paperbacks, known in the trade as Quartos.
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Jonathan Bate is provost of Worcester College, Oxford; his books include Shakespeare and Ovid, The Genius of Shakespeare and Soul of the Age
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