All but Othello (1622) and The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634), were published prior to the date of Shakespeare's retirement from the theatre in about 1611. It is unlikely that Shakespeare was involved directly with the printing of any of his plays, although it should be noted that two of his poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were almost certainly printed under his direct supervision.
The plays printed originally in quarto format were branded fraudulent by the editors of the First Folio, Heminge and Condell, who wrote in the Preface to their collection that fans of Shakespeare's works had been cheated by "diverse stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds of injurious imposters that expos'd them." They believed that most of the quartos in circulation had been either stolen outright by unscrupulous printers who plagiarized the official prompt-books belonging to Shakespeare and his company or they had been horribly reconstructed from the memory of people who had seen the plays performed. Heminge and Condell were right to be concerned about the integrity of Shakespeare's great works. The flaws in some of the quartos are wretched. Take for example the opening of Hamlet's famous soliloquy: "To be, or not to be: that is the question" (3.1.56-65). In the quarto version of 1603 we have, "To be or not to be. Aye, there's the point/To die to sleep, is that all? Aye all."
Heminge and Condell's accusations were taken very seriously, and early scholars believed without question that the First Folio was the only authoritative Shakespearean manuscript, and that "all of the quartos were poor texts, dishonestly obtained without the consent of the company for which Shakespeare was writing" (Holzknecht 355). Thus, the twenty-two quartos were relegated to the heap of pirated material.
However, in the late nineteenth century the academic community began to challenge the claims made by the editors of the First Folio and reassess the validity of the quartos. "Led by the late A. W. Pollard, whose 'Shakespeare Folios and Quartos' (1909) and 'Shakespeare's Fight with the Pirates and the Problems of the Transmission of His Text' (1917, revised 1920) are fundamental studies, they began an investigation of publishing contradictions in Shakespeare's day and a more thorough examination of the quartos and folios themselves. As a result, the modern belief is that, far from being the ruling practice in the Elizabethan book-mart, piracy was exceptional, and that Elizabethan printers, taken as a whole, were neither exceptionally stupid nor exceptionally dishonest" (Holzknecht 355). It is now believed that only ten of the quartos are corrupt or unauthorized: The Troublesome Reign of King John, The Taming of a Shrew, King Henry VI, Parts II and III, Romeo and Juliet (the 1597 quarto), The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry V, Hamlet, King Lear, and Pericles. The remaining plays are classified as "good" or authentic quartos. Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet are unique in that they were published twice each in quarto format and the earlier quartos of the two are considered "bad" while the latter two are now considered "good" quartos.
