I love it when my coworkers want to talk Shakespeare.  Glad that I’m there to answer their question (because, if I hadn’t been there, would they have found someone else? Or just never asked it?) and also glad that here’s another person who wants to learn more about my favorite subject.

I’m especially pleased when they ask me questions I don’t know the answer to, because I get to post about it and we all get to learn something.

Today’s questions are about the publication of the First Folio, and the Quartos before that.

Q1:  Why was there a market for quartos at all?  We all seem to be in agreement that there was really no market for “casually read the play as literature” like we might do today.  The market for them seems to have been purely Shakespeare’s competitors who were looking for new ideas, to put it generously (to steal his, to put it more realistically).  But how is that a valid model, to go through all the trouble?  If 100 people visit a bookseller but the market for a certain book is only 2 or 3 of those people, wouldn’t it be easier to shop your work around directly to the other theatres?  Why print N copies if only a fraction of N will ever be purchased?

Q2: Before the First Folio, was “collected works” even a thing?  This is an extension of the former question, because if there was no real market for “read the plays as literature”, and the only people who wanted the quartos were competing playwrights and theatre owners, then what in the world would have been the point of making an official, authorized version of the playwright’s entire work and making that available?  Wouldn’t that just enable the problem all the more?

Was the whole idea new?  Did Marlowe or Jonson or Fletcher or anybody else get their complete works published like this?  Or was this the first milestone that said, “Shakespeare was different, Shakespeare’s contribution to the art deserves a memorial effort that has never been done before.”

This came up in conversation awhile back but I never posted it.  I’m pretty sure that Mercutio and Juliet never actually share the stage, right?

A new Midsummer was thinking about (not sure if they went through with it) having Helena played as a gay man.  I think that’s a horrid idea myself, but that’s just my opinion.  The point is that we’re getting pretty bold in our creative re-imaginings for the purpose of making certain statements.

People often want to argue whether Mercutio is gay.  That’s nothing new for the internet, of course – any popular male character can find fan fiction that portrays him as gay.  But what if we ran with that idea, and put the suggestion out there that what Romeo sees in Juliet is, in fact, his best friend?

When my daughter was having trouble with the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet, I fired up the 1968 Zeffirelli movie version so she could follow along … and promptly discovered that, at least for the beginning, they’re not on book at all.  It’s entirely new language.  Maybe it gets better later? I forget.

So I swapped out for the 1996 Romeo+Juliet version which, although it cuts out the collier/choler/collar stuff, seems to say true to the text for the rest of the scene.  Then somebody told me that this version only retains about 40% of the original. I don’t know if that’s true, or if I even understand it — does that mean they flat out cut 60% of the play?  Or that they wrote new dialog? Because I haven’t really paid close attention to either of those possibilities, I’m usually too distracted by the direction and over acting.

I have the 1930something Norma Shearer / Lesley Howard version on DVD, but I haven’t watched it. I’m guessing that it’s probably pretty close, since back then they seemed more interested in sticking to the original intent, setting, costume and language than we do today. But I’d also suspect it’s edited way down, it doesn’t seem long enough to be even close.

So that’s my question.  Let’s say that a student wants to sit down with text in lap and watch a movie version, much like Amazon would have us do with our books by letting the audio version read it to us while we follow along on paper.

Which play, and which movie, would give the best results?  Obviously, Branagh’s full text Hamlet is the gold standard, and not eligible as an answer to this question.  I’m wondering about all the others.