Scholars are uncertain as to when before 1602 Hamlet was written. The later text is shorter than the second quarto by two hundred lines and contains passages not in that quarto. The text of Hamlet in the Folio is substantially different from that of the play's second quarto the Folio text is thought to have come from the prompt book of Shakespeare's acting company, the King's Men, and to be a revision of the second quarto by Shakespeare himself. In 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death, his friends and fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell assembled his plays in a single folio-sized volume, called the 1623 Folio.
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A third and a fourth quarto were subsequently printed, both based on the second. The 1604 quarto, called the second quarto, seems to be based on Shakespeare's own papers, but it is marred by printer's errors and by corrupt interpolations from the pirated text. This pirated edition is called the first quarto and is a corrupt text. In fact, sometime after Roberts initially registered Hamlet but before he printed it, Nicholas Ling published a pirated edition of the play, with the text assembled from memory by actors who had played in touring companies that took Hamlet to Oxford and Cambridge. and are to be sold at his shoppe vnder Saint Dunstons Church in Fleetstreet. Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect Coppie.
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The Tragicall Historie of hamlet, Prince of Denmarke. In 1602, James Roberts entered "A booke called the Revenge of Hamlett Prince Denmarke as yt was latelie Acted by the Lord Chamberleyne his servantes" in the Stationers' Register when the quarto text of the play was published in 1604, the title page read as follows: Two years passed between Hamlet's being entered in the Stationers' Register, a journal kept by the Stationers' Company of London in which the printing rights to works were recorded, and the play's being printed.