Many of the plays of William Shakespeare were printed during his lifetime in cheap editions known as quartos, which were roughly the size of today's paperbacks. The first quarto of Romeo and Juliet was published in 1597, but it is so lacking in the text we are accustomed to today that it is frequently referred to as the "bad" quarto.
Hamlet similarly had a "bad" quarto published in 1603. In both cases, the early printed text might be a reconstruction based on the memory of a single actor, which would explain its insufficiencies. On the other hand, the "bad" quarto might be an accurate representation of the performance text when the play was first done, prior to subsequent tinkering by the playwright.
In 1599, one Thomas Creede printed a second quarto (or "good" quarto) of Romeo and Juliet noting it was "newly corrected, augmented, and amended" for publication. This implies that earlier errors were corrected, but also that new material was added and certain passages might have been changed from what was previously printed. A third quarto came out in 1609 based on the second quarto, and it was this text that was used by Shakespeare's actors John Heminge and Henry Condell when they brought out the First Folio of his work.
Interestingly enough, when Heminge and Condell published Romeo and Juliet with Shakespeare's other plays, they left out the famous prologue, recited by a Chorus character. The first quarto begins: “Two household Frends alike in dignitie,” which just doesn’t sound right to the modern ear. (Weren’t they foes, not friends?) The second quarto has the more familiar opening line: “Two households both alike in dignitie,” before adding in parentheses “(In faire Verona, where we lay our Scene)” and continuing with the rest of the well-known opening.
Why did Heminge and Condell remove the prologue? It's anybody's guess, but its excision implies that the text for Romeo and Juliet was never fixed in Shakespeare's day. Rather, the company probably modified it over the years, dropping some bits and adding others. Most editors (and most directors) tend to treat the second quarto as authoritative. Some even suspect it might have been based on Shakespeare's own manuscript of the play.
The prologue ends with the promise "What heare shall misse, our toyle shall strive to mend." (Or if you follow the "bad" quarto: "What here we want wee'l studie to amend." In either case, there is a promise by the players to make up for the shortcomings of the stage through their own efforts, achieved by study and toil.
Producing Shakespeare's plays has never been easy, presumably not even during the Bard's own lifetime. Still, with the proper effort, the plays can still shine today.
