This is a guest post by Patrick Hastings, a specialist in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. It also appears in the September-October issue of the Library of Congress Magazine. 

A contemporary production of one of William Shakespeare’s plays might cut lines for a snappier performance, and some directors will even eliminate characters or combine scenes for expediency. The plays might be set in Miami or Mantua, costumed in ’60s mod or medieval tunics. We are taught early on that we can cut and paste Shakespeare’s text, and we can put Richard III in a World War I uniform, but we do not change Shakespeare’s language. Prince Hamlet says, “How dost thou?” not “Wassup?”

But theater people were not always so precious about Shakespeare. The Rare Book and Special Collections Division holds no fewer than seven printings of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” that include an added deathbed conversation between Romeo and Juliet in the play’s final scene. The editorial introductions to these editions reveal changing attitudes toward the fixed nature of the text; they challenge our contemporary reverence for Shakespeare as an untouchable genius.

The first authorized, complete edition of “Romeo and Juliet” was published in 1599 and served as the source text for the 1623 First Folio of “Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies.”

By 1769, a new version of “Romeo and Juliet” — “as it is performed at the Theatre-Royal in Drury Lane” — had become popular. Published with alterations to the text made by an actor/director named David Garrick and first staged in 1748, this edition eliminates references to Rosaline (Romeo’s initial love interest), reduces the role of Mercutio and, most notably, adds a 67-line final conversation between Romeo and Juliet.

In Garrick’s version of Act 5, Scene 3, Juliet wakes up after Romeo takes the poison but before he dies. (“O true apothecary! Thy drugs are not so quick” in Garrick’s version.) The lovers share a melodramatic final conversation, and then Romeo dies in Juliet’s arms. Subsequent 1794, 1814, 1819 and 1874 editions of “Romeo and Juliet” adopt Garrick’s alterations to Shakespeare’s original text.

The prefatory notes to these editions provide context and justification for retaining Garrick’s changes. Some simply prefer Garrick’s version over Shakespeare’s. A few claim that Garrick’s alterations are more faithful to the original 16th-century sources that Shakespeare used for the story of “Romeo and Juliet,” including an Italian novel by Bandello.

After more than a century of preference for printing Garrick’s altered version of “Romeo and Juliet,” attitudes begin to shift back toward Shakespeare’s original text in the late 1800s. An 1882 edition reprises the figure of Rosaline, and Romeo dies immediately after taking the poison without the deathbed conversation added by Garrick.

Chasing these changes from edition to edition through time eventually leads us back to where we started; in 1886, a multivolume series of Shakespeare’s plays publishes a facsimile of the 1599 quarto edition of “Romeo and Juliet” along with a scholarly preface that demonstrates a concern for identifying the original text and introduces a practice for noting textual variants.

This focus on representing and honoring the true, authoritative text continues today, and we might be surprised to learn that readers haven’t always regarded a fixed version of Shakespeare’s plays with such “mannerly devotion.”

Rather, an altered version of the text was a “trespass sweetly urged” for over a century.