Memorial reconstruction

[2][3] In 1623, the preface to the First Folio of Shakespeare's works specifically marketed its content as correct, in contrast to the garbled texts of "stolen and surreptitious copies" published previously.

[1] It has been theorized that the only version to survive of Christopher Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris is a text obtained in this way,[4] although there is no persuasive evidence to support this assertion.

The theory has been used to explain the content of some quartos, and also to suggest identities of the actors responsible, on the assumption that they would get their own parts right, along with cue-lines and possibly other lines performed when they were onstage, but would most likely make more errors when reconstructing scenes in which their character was not present.

The theory has, however, been criticised on various grounds; that it is not based on serious research into the way actors actually remember or misremember lines; that texts may have been "stolen" by other means; and that the so-called "bad" quartos are early or alternative versions of plays that were later revised.

The theory first appeared during the 19th century, and it was more fully defined by W. W. Greg in 1909, when he analysed the quarto text of The Merry Wives of Windsor by systematically comparing the divergences from the Folio version.

There was much discussion of the first quarto of King Lear, leading to the conclusion by some that it was based on a transcript and not an actor's memory, as divergences from the Folio version appeared consistently throughout and were not bunched by scene.

In 1996, Laurie Maguire of the Department of English at the University of Ottawa published a study[10] of the concept of memorial reconstruction, based on the analysis of errors made by actors taking part in the BBC TV Shakespeare series, broadcast in the early 1980s.