In the fifteen-year period 1594–1609, versions of eighteen recently performed Shakespearean plays reached print in inexpensive quarto or octavo editions. From the beginning of the Shakespeare editorial tradition in the eighteenth century, editors and textual critics have been particularly perplexed by five of these playtexts: Q1 Romeo and Juliet (1597), Q1 Henry 5 (1600), Q1 The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602), Q1 Hamlet (1603), Q1 Pericles (1609).

This perplexity was caused by the suspicion that the London playreading public was being offered a product very different from that given the London play-going public (even though all of these texts advertised recent performance on their title-pages). Certain unusual features in these first editions (imperfect metre, blunt dialogue, and allegedly jejune depiction of characters and development of situations) were deemed incompatible with composition by a proficient commercial playwright and performance by a leading company. Furthermore, these five early playtexts were all suspiciously brief (particularly in comparison with subsequent quarto versions released during Shakespeare's lifetime, and with the Folio collection of Shakespeare's works prepared by his theatre colleagues, Heminge and Condell, after his death).