| There is a rare Quarto in the Charlecote library.
Here you see it alongside the folio. It is a little slim volume but is so
rare it is worth more than the folio. It is of The Merry Wives of Windsor.
It is the second quarto of 1619 and is a reprint of the first edition of
1602. Shakespeare wrote the play in 1600. I would have loved to have told
you that Thomas Lucy I bought this so he could see how Shakespeare had lampooned
him as Justice Shallow but that would have been too neat. In fact it was
one of the books William Pickering obtained for George Hammond Lucy in 1838
to help fill the shelves in his new library. George paid over six pounds
for it. If you look on Amazon you find that is about the price you would
pay for that play today although George’s price works out at £350.
However a Quarto would actually cost 100 times more than that today –
if you could find one.
This quarto has a shortened version of the play apparently written down
from memory by an actor. These are known as memorial reconstructions and
give rise to bad quartos. The first folio had a longer text based on a
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