The earliest texts of William Shakespeare's works were published during the 16th and 17th centuries in quarto or folio format. Folios are large, tall volumes; quartos are smaller, roughly half the size. The publications of the latter are usually abbreviated to Q1, Q2, etc., where the letter stands for "quarto" and the number for the first, second, or third edition published.
Plays
Eighteen of the 36 plays in the First Folio were printed in separate and individual editions prior to 1623. Pericles (1609) and The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634) also appeared separately before their inclusions in folio collections (the Shakespeare Third Folio and the second Beaumont and Fletcher folio, respectively). All of these were quarto editions, with two exceptions: The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, the first edition of Henry VI, Part 3, was printed in octavo form in 1595, as was the 1611 edition of The most lamentable tragedy of Titus Andronicus. In chronological order, these publications were:
Titus Andronicus, 1594, 1600, 1611 (octavo) Henry VI, Part 2, 1594, 1600, 1619 Henry VI, Part 3, 1595 (octavo), 1600, 1619 Edward III, 1596 Romeo and Juliet, 1597, 1599, 1609 Richard II, 1597, 1598, 1608, 1615 Richard III, 1597, 1598, 1602, 1605, 1612, 1622 Love's Labour's Lost, 1598 Henry IV, Part 1, 1598, 1599, 1604, 1608, 1613, 1622 Henry IV, Part 2, 1600 Henry V, 1600, 1602, 1619 The Merchant of Venice, 1600, 1619 A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1600, 1619 Much Ado About Nothing, 1600 The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1602, 1619 Hamlet, 1603, 1604, 1611 King Lear, 1608, 1619 Troilus and Cressida, 1609 Pericles, Prince of Tyre, 1609, 1611, 1619 Othello, 1622 The Two Noble Kinsmen, 1634.
Six of the preceding were classified as "bad quartos" by Alfred W. Pollard and other scholars associated with the New Bibliography. Popular plays like 1 Henry IV and Pericles were reprinted in their quarto editions even after the First Folio appeared, sometimes more than once.
Poetry
Shakespeare's poems were also printed in quarto or octavo form: Venus and Adonis, Q1—1593, Q2—1594 (with later editions in octavo); The Rape of Lucrece, Q—1594 (with later editions in octavo); The Phoenix and the Turtle, Q1—1601, Q2—1611 (in Robert Chester's Love's Martyr); The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint, Q—1609.
Differing from the quartos of the plays, the first editions of Shakespeare's narrative poems are extremely well printed. "Richard Field, Shakespeare's first publisher and printer, was a Stratford man, probably a friend of Shakespeare, and the two produced an excellent text." Shakespeare may have had direct involvement in the publication of the two poems, as Ben Jonson exercised in reference to the publication of his works, but as Shakespeare clearly did not do in connection with his plays.
John Benson published a collected edition of Shakespeare's Poems in 1640; the poems were not added to collections of the plays until the 18th century. (The disputed miscellany The Passionate Pilgrim was only printed in octavo: twice in 1599, with another in 1612, all by William Jaggard.)
Folios
The folio format was reserved for expensive, prestigious volumes. During Shakespeare's lifetime, stage plays were not generally taken seriously as literature and not considered worthy of being collected into folios, so the plays printed while he was alive were printed as quartos. His poems were never included in his collected works until the eighteenth century.
It was not until 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death, that Ben Jonson defied convention by issuing a folio collection of his own plays and poems. Seven years later the folio volume Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories & Tragedies appeared; this edition is now called the First Folio. It contains 36 plays, 18 of which were printed for the first time. Because Shakespeare was dead, the folio was compiled by John Heminges and Henry Condell (fellow actors in Shakespeare's company), and arranged into comedies, histories and tragedies. The First Folio is generally looked to by actors and directors as the purest form of Shakespeare's text. While punctuation and grammar are not always accurate by today's rules, these things served as direction to the actors on how to say the lines.