“Let me be satisfied, is’t good or bad?”: Reevaluating the First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet

Juliet’s question in the traditional text of Romeo and Juliet (quoted in this essay’s title) embodies the human tendency to fall back on basic categories when faced with complexity, uncertainty, and a pressing desire to know. Her exasperated response to the Nurse’s prevaricating about Romeo’s wedding plans has a counterpart in Henry V’s invasion plans, when Henry, after listening to Canterbury’s sixty-two line disquisition on Henry’s claim to the French throne and the intricacies of the Salic law, responds with just one pentameter line: “May I with right and conscience make this claim?”. Like the incisive yes-or-no structure of Henry’s question, Juliet’s response attempts to impose order upon confusion by permitting one of two possible answers: good or bad – the very same terms that have limited editorial vocabulary throughout what Paul Werstine has called “A Century of ‘Bad’ Shakespeare Quartos”. Although textual scholars and editors must by definition be sensitive to the quiet power of words, they often fail to watch their own language. As Randall McLeod pointed out twenty-five years ago upon reading Brian Gibbons’s then new Arden Romeo and Juliet, “Employing moral categories in textual work obliges one to choose: to reject Evil once [and] for all, and to strike out toward Goodness (and toward Shakespeare, who is a Good writer)”. In the intervening years, revisionist textual scholarship has responded instead by interrogating and frequently rejecting the structure of that choice. Just as Juliet’s and Henry’s questions fail to produce the clarity they seek, so too are there few straight answers in matters of textual authority. However, as Lukas Erne’s admirable new edition of Romeo and Juliet portends, Shakespeareans may have finally grown comfortable with the idea that, in McLeod’s words, “multiple authority is richness”. This new edition, based on the “bad” first quarto (Q1, 1597) rather than the “good” second quarto (Q2, 1599), adds considerable strength to the idea that the century of “bad” quartos is now over. Even the now-ubiquitous – but no less awkward – presence of scare-quotation marks around such straightforward words as “good” and “bad” indicates that critical discourse about the authority of Shakespeare’s texts has changed since the New Bibliographers’ ascendancy, and, more importantly, that the consequences of that change are working their way through Shakespeare studies in ways yet unknown

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