Listening to First Quartos: The Women of The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry V

The so-called 'bad' quarto editions of Shakespeare's plays have long been treated as superfluous. However, recent debates suggest that these publications are not corrupt but may instead be Shakespeare's early drafts, opening up a conversation about how to treat the textual disparities between the early quartos and the 1623 folio. This article examines two variant texts in light of this assessment. The early quartos of The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602) and Henry V (1600) offer moments where female characters display an agency that is silenced and controlled in the more canonical texts of the folio, suggesting that, as he revised the plays, Shakespeare moved to restrict women's behaviour. For example, the titular Merry Wives design and orchestrate the final masque in the quarto text of that play, while they cede artistic control to their husbands in the later folio version. So too, in Henry V, Katherine's final scene in the quarto gives her the opportunity to speak more and to assert an equality with Henry in a passage unique to that text. Attention to the gender dynamics of revision demonstrates that, to understand the full range of feminist potential within Shakespeare's canon, scholars must explore his plays' textual variation.