Quarto and Folio

There are two primary texts of Love's Labour's Lost, the Quarto of 1598 and the Folio version of 1623. Of these the Quarto has generally been regarded as the more authoritative by modern editors, and some, like Clark and Wright, have boldly declared that ‘the Folio edition is a reprint of this Quarto, differing only in its being divided into Acts, and, as usual, inferior in accuracy’. Nevertheless, no previous editor, as far as we are aware, has dared to deny all authority to the Folio text, or to base his own text exclusively upon that of the Quarto; and this for a very obvious reason, namely that even a casual examination of the 1623 version reveals the presence of variants which cannot possibly be attributed to compositors working with an unaltered Quarto as copy. The last words of the Folio text, for instance, ‘You that way; we this way’ are not to be found in the Quarto; yet they appear in all modern editions. In spite then of the practical unanimity in favour of the Quarto, there is uncertainty, and there is bound to be uncertainty so long as the Folio variants remain unexplained. So much indeed was H. C. Hart impressed by these variants that in the old ‘Arden’ edition of the play (1906) he joined issue with the supporters of the Quarto, denied that the Folio text was printed therefrom, declared both texts ‘to have been printed from a prompter's or actor's copy, in which probably authentic alterations and corrections had been made’, and based his own text upon that of the Folio.