THE SHAKESPEARE CANON

    THE PROBLEM OF THE TEXT:

     ·      Problem about original texts.

     ·       Years in which the plays were written and performed.

      REASONS:

    ·     Playwrights used not to publish their plays. They only concerned with the  staging of them.

    ·     Plays were not considered literature.

    ·     The most successful plays were published without playwright's permission: they were copied from PROMPTBOOKS or from MEMORY's audience or player's.--> they were unreliable.

THE "QUARTOS" AND THE "FOLIOS":

    ·     The reliable editions are called "bad quartos" because they were published in quarto size.

    ·     Some of them were good because the author agreed to supervise the work or the editor published the original version.

    ·     The first accurate and complete edition of Shakespearean works was published in  1623 (by Hemminges and Condell). It is called "First Folio" because it was folio sized.

    ·     The Shakespearean texts that we read today are not original.

THE PROBLEM OF THE DATE:

    ·     Uncertainty about the date of when some plays were written or performed, but it is possible to make reference to other sources to try to date them:

·     some plays are mentioned in the "Stationers' Register"

·     other are documented in some author's worksà we know roughly the date of composition (for instance some are cited in Francis Mere's Palladis Tamia)

·     some of them contain contemporary historical eventsà it is possible to date them

·     they use images taken from other books

·     Shakespeare uses a kind of style: it is different throughout the years

è Hamlet was published before 1603, in fact Shakespeare paraphrases parts of its version written in 1603