"Betwixt" and "Between": Variant Readings in the Folio and First Quarto Versions of 'Richard III' and W.W. Greg's Concept of Memorial Reconstruction

In the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, scholarly opinion was divided over the relative merits of the folio and first quarto texts of 'Richard III', and the consensus swung in both directions. But the publication in 1936 of David Lyall Patrick's 'The Textual History of Richard III' moved the scholarly pendulum in the direction of the folio as the better text, indeed the only authoritative one. The result was a consensus, which prevailed until recently, that the first quarto text is inferior and indeed defective, specifically that it is an unreliable memorial reconstruction of a missing "prompt book" by the actors of the Chamberlain's Men. Antony Hammond's influential Arden edition perpetuates the theory of the memorial reconstruction of the first quarto, though with some hesitations, and it has been enshrined in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor's 'Textual Companion': "At present, Patrick's hypothesis holds the field, and has held it, virtually uncontested, for half a century."