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.
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. [1] In chronological order, these publications were:
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.
Shakespeare's poems were also printed in quarto or octavo form:
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." [2] 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.[ citation needed ]
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.) [3]
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.
The First Folio was compiled by Heminges and Condell but published by a trio of stationers (booksellers and publishers): William Jaggard, his son Isaac Jaggard, and Edward Blount. William Aspley and John Smethwick participated in the endeavor as subsidiary partners. It contained, in addition to blandishments provided by various admirers of Shakespeare, such as the dedication signed by "John Heminge and Henry Condell", 36 plays. They included Troilus and Cressida, which was not, however, listed in the table of contents, but omitted Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen, which are now usually considered canonical. [4] The Jaggards were printers, and did the actual printing of the book. The elder Jaggard has seemed an odd choice to many commentators, given his problematical relationship with the Shakespeare canon: Jaggard issued the suspect collection The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599 and 1612, and in 1619 printed the so-called False Folio, ten pirated or spurious Shakespearean plays, some with false dates and title pages. It is thought that the printing of the First Folio was such an enormous task that the Jaggards' shop was simply needed to get the job done. William Jaggard was old, infirm, and blind by 1623, and in fact died a month before the First Folio was complete. [5]
The First Folio was reprinted three times in the 17th century:
The Second Folio appeared in 1632. Isaac Jaggard had died in 1627, and Edward Blount had transferred his rights to stationer Robert Allot in 1630. The Second Folio was published by Allot, William Aspley, Richard Hawkins, Richard Meighen, and John Smethwick, and printed by Thomas Cotes. It contained the same plays as the First Folio and much of the same additional material, with the addition of an unsigned poem by John Milton. [6]
The Third Folio was issued in 1663, published by Philip Chetwinde; Chetwinde had married Robert Allot's widow and so obtained the rights to the book. To the second impression of the Third Folio (1664) he added seven plays, namely Pericles, Prince of Tyre; Locrine; The London Prodigal; The Puritan; Sir John Oldcastle; Thomas Lord Cromwell; and A Yorkshire Tragedy. (See: Shakespeare Apocrypha.) All seven of these additional plays had been published as quartos while Shakespeare was alive, but only Pericles was eventually widely accepted into the Shakespearean canon. [7]
The quartos of Pericles (1609 and 1611), The London Prodigal (1605) and A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608) were all attributed to William Shakespeare on their front pages. The quartos of Locrine (1595), The Puritan (1607) and Thomas Lord Cromwell (1602 and 1613) were attributed to W. S. on their title pages, but Shakespeare was not the only playwright with those initials; Wentworth Smith has been put forward as another possible author of these works. Sir John Oldcastle was printed in 1619, three years after Shakespeare's death, as part of the False Folio. It was attributed to Shakespeare on its title page which also bore a false date of 1600.
The Third Folio is relatively rare, compared to the Second and Fourth, probably because unsold copies were destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. One surviving copy was purchased by the Irish High Court judge and antiquarian William O'Brien in the 1880s. It was put up for auction by Sotheby's in 2017.[ citation needed ]
The Fourth Folio appeared in 1685, published by R. Bentley, E. Brewster, R. Chiswell, and H. Herringman. It contains the same 43 plays as the Third Folio. Brewster, Chiswell, and Herringman were members of the six-man syndicate that published the third Ben Jonson folio in 1692; Herringman was one of three stationers who issued the second Beaumont and Fletcher folio in 1679.
The Fourth Folio in turn served as the base for the series of eighteenth-century editions of Shakespeare's plays. Nicholas Rowe used the Fourth Folio text as the foundation of his 1709 edition, and subsequent editors — Pope, Theobald, etc. — both adapted and reacted to Rowe's text in their own editions. (See: Shakespeare's editors.)
The Two Noble Kinsmen did not appear in any Folio edition. It was not printed until 1634, although there is evidence of its being performed much earlier. The title page said "written by the memorable worthies of their time: Mr. John Fletcher and Mr. William Shakspeare [sic], Gent." [8] It was not included in most editions of Shakespeare (e.g., the Cambridge/Globe editions of Wright and Clark, ca. 1863) until the latter half of the 19th century (it appears, e.g., in Dyce's collected Works of Shakespeare in 1876) but it was not generally accepted into the Shakespeare canon until well into the 20th century, when, for example, it was included in the Riverside edition of 1974.
Benjamin Jonson was an English playwright and poet. Jonson's artistry exerted a lasting influence on English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours; he is best known for the satirical plays Every Man in His Humour (1598), Volpone, or The Fox, The Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614) and for his lyric and epigrammatic poetry. "He is generally regarded as the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare, during the reign of James I."
Pericles, Prince of Tyre is a Jacobean play written at least in part by William Shakespeare and included in modern editions of his collected works despite questions over its authorship, as it was not included in the First Folio. It was published in 1609 as a quarto, was not included in Shakespeare's collections of works until the third folio, and the main inspiration for the play was Gower's Confessio Amantis. Various arguments support the theory that Shakespeare was the sole author of the play, notably in DelVecchio and Hammond's Cambridge edition of the play, but modern editors generally agree that Shakespeare was responsible for almost exactly half the play — 827 lines — the main portion after scene 9 that follows the story of Pericles and Marina. Modern textual studies suggest that the first two acts, 835 lines detailing the many voyages of Pericles, were written by a collaborator, who may well have been the victualler, panderer, dramatist and pamphleteer George Wilkins. Wilkins published The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre which is the prose version of the story, and drew from Lawrence Twines' The Pattern of Painful Adventures. Pericles was one of the seventeen plays that were in print during Shakespeare's life, and was reprinted 5 times between 1609 and 1635.
This article presents a possible chronological listing of the composition of the plays of William Shakespeare.
The Shakespeare apocrypha is a group of plays and poems that have sometimes been attributed to William Shakespeare, but whose attribution is questionable for various reasons. The issue is not to be confused with the debate on Shakespearean authorship, which questions the authorship of the works traditionally attributed to Shakespeare.
Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies is a collection of plays by William Shakespeare, commonly referred to by modern scholars as the First Folio, published in 1623, about seven years after Shakespeare's death. It is considered one of the most influential books ever published.
John Benson was a London publisher of the middle seventeenth century, best remembered for a historically important publication of the Sonnets and miscellaneous poems of William Shakespeare in 1640.
Catiline His Conspiracy is a Jacobean tragedy written by Ben Jonson. It is one of the two Roman tragedies that Jonson hoped would cement his dramatic achievement and reputation, the other being Sejanus His Fall (1603).
A bad quarto, in Shakespearean scholarship, is a quarto-sized printed edition of one of Shakespeare's plays that is considered to be unauthorised, and is theorised to have been pirated from a theatrical performance without permission by someone in the audience writing it down as it was spoken or, alternatively, written down later from memory by an actor or group of actors in the cast – the latter process has been termed "memorial reconstruction". Since the quarto derives from a performance, hence lacks a direct link to the author's original manuscript, the text would be expected to be "bad", i.e. to contain corruptions, abridgements and paraphrasings.
False Folio is the term that Shakespeare scholars and bibliographers have applied to William Jaggard's printing of ten Shakespearean and pseudo-Shakespearean plays together in 1619, the first attempt to collect Shakespeare's work in a single volume. There are only two complete extant copies. One is part of the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. The other is held in the Special Collections at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas.
William Jaggard was an Elizabethan and Jacobean printer and publisher, best known for his connection with the texts of William Shakespeare, most notably the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays. Jaggard's shop was "at the sign of the Half-Eagle and Key in Barbican."
Valentine Simmes was an Elizabethan era and Jacobean era printer; he did business in London, "on Adling Hill near Bainard's Castle at the sign of the White Swan." Simmes has a reputation as one of the better printers of his generation, and was responsible for several quartos of Shakespeare's plays. [See: Early texts of Shakespeare's works.]
Thomas Creede was a printer of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, rated as "one of the best of his time." Based in London, he conducted his business under the sign of the Catherine Wheel in Thames Street from 1593 to 1600, and under the sign of the Eagle and Child in the Old Exchange from 1600 to 1617. Creede is best known for printing editions of works in English Renaissance drama, especially for ten editions of six Shakespearean plays and three works in the Shakespeare Apocrypha.
Peter Short was an English printer based in London in the later Elizabethan era. He printed several first editions and early texts of Shakespeare's works.
William Aspley was a London publisher of the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline eras. He was a member of the publishing syndicates that issued the First Folio and Second Folio collections of Shakespeare's plays, in 1623 and 1632.
John Smethwick was a London publisher of the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline eras. Along with colleague William Aspley, Smethwick was one of the "junior partners" in the publishing syndicate that issued the First Folio collection of Shakespeare's plays in 1623. As his title pages specify, his shop was "in St. Dunstan's Churchyard in Fleet Street, under the Dial."
Thomas Cotes was a London printer of the Jacobean and Caroline eras, best remembered for printing the Second Folio edition of Shakespeare's plays in 1632.
Nathaniel Butter was a London publisher of the early 17th century. As the publisher of the first edition of Shakespeare's King Lear in 1608, he has also been regarded as one of the first publishers of a newspaper in English.
Thomas Pavier was a London publisher and bookseller of the early seventeenth century. His complex involvement in the publication of early editions of some of Shakespeare's plays, as well as plays of the Shakespeare Apocrypha, has left him with a "dubious reputation."
Quarto is the format of a book or pamphlet produced from full sheets printed with eight pages of text, four to a side, then folded twice to produce four leaves. The leaves are then trimmed along the folds to produce eight book pages. Each printed page presents as one-fourth size of the full sheet.
