Bad quarto

In Shakespearean scholarship, a bad quarto is a quarto-sized publication of one of Shakespeare’s plays that is considered spurious, that was pirated from a theatre without permission by someone in the audience writing it down as it was spoken. Or it would be written down later by an actor or group of actors, which, according to the theory, has been termed “memorial reconstruction”. In this way the quarto derives from performance, and since it lacks a direct link to the author’s original manuscript, it is a text that would be expected to contain corruptions, abridgments and paraphrasings. This is in contrast to a “good quarto”, which is considered to be a text that is authorized; one that may have been printed from the author’s manuscript, or a scribal copy or prompt copy based on the author’s manuscript. "Bad quartos" are considered to include the first quartos of Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Hamlet.