afforded by. the. duplication of direction for the Friar's entrance
at the beginning of V. 2, and by the speech heading 'M. Wife. 2.'
at I.1.83. Thus the copy for Q2 appears to have been a text of
Romeo and Juliet from which the promptbook was subsequently
derived, either by direct transcription of the foul papers or by
transcription of a 'fair copy' itself transcribed from the foul
papers. The statement on the title page of Q2 that the text in
that edition is 'newly corrected, augmented, and amended' does
not mean that Q2 is the revision of an earlier version of Romeo
and Juliet but rather that the authentic text is now being pub-
lished to replace the pirated edition of 1597. The title page of Q2
also records that Romeo and Juliet had been 'sundry times pub-
licly acted by the right Honorable the Lord Chamberlain his
Servants.' Neither Q2 nor the 1597 Quarto was entered in the
Stationers' Register.

The debased state of the text in the 'bad' First Quarto of
Romeo and Juliet, printed 'by John Danter' in 1597, 4 suggests
that this edition is one of the 'stolen and surreptitious copies
mentioned by Heminge and Condell in their epistle to the reader
of the First Folio ( 1623). Although in the 18th century Q1 was
thought to be an early draft of Romeo and Juliet, during the
following century the view gradually prevailed that Q1 is a steno-
graphic or memorial report; and the theory is now generally
accepted that Q1 is a memorial reconstruction of Shakespeare's
Romeo and Juliet, made by players who were familiar with the
promptbook version of Shakespeare's company. (Although there
were probably at least two reporters, for convenience they will
be here referred to collectively as the Q1 reporter.) Because of
gape in the Q1 text and cuts in the number of necessary players,
it has been suggested that Q1 is a memorial report of an abbre-
viated acting version made by Shakespeare's company from their
promptbook. 5 Such a shortened version might well have been
prepared for performance in the provinces, and if Romeo and
Juliet was indeed written by 1592, Shakespeare's company may
have performed it there during the period from 1592 to 1594
when the London theaters were closed because of plague. How-
ever, it is also possible that many of the lacunae observable in
Q1 are memorial errors and that others are cuts stemming from

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