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,[a] published in 1623, about seven years after Shakespeare's death. It is considered one of the most influential books ever published.[1]
Although 19 of Shakespeare's plays had been published in quarto before 1623, the First Folio is arguably the only reliable text for about 20 of the plays, and a valuable source text for many of those previously published. Eighteen of the plays in the First Folio, including The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Julius Caesar and Measure for Measure among others, are not known to have been previously printed.[2][3] The Folio includes all of the plays generally accepted to be Shakespeare's, except the following plays which are believed likely to have been written, at least partly, by Shakespeare; Pericles, Prince of Tyre, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Edward III, and the two lost plays, Cardenio and Love's Labour's Won. Some believe the last of these is an alternative title for a known published Shakespeare play.
Of perhaps 750 copies printed, 235 are known to remain, most of which are kept in either public archives or private collections. More than one third of the extant copies are housed at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., which is home to a total of 82 First Folios.
Shakespeare's works—both poetic and dramatic—had a rich history in print before the publication of the First Folio: from the first publications of Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594), 78 individual printed editions of his works are known. Of these, 23 are his poetry and the remaining 55 his plays. Counting by number of editions published before 1623, the best-selling works were Venus and Adonis (12 editions), The Rape of Lucrece (6 editions), and Henry IV, Part 1 (6 editions). Of the 23 editions of the poems, 16 were published in octavo; the rest, and almost all of the editions of the plays, were printed in quarto.[8] The quarto format was made by folding a large sheet of printing paper twice, forming 4 leaves with 8 pages. The average quarto measured 7 by 9 inches (18 by 23cm) and was typically made up of 9 sheets, giving 72 total pages.[9] Octavos—made by folding a sheet of the same size three times, forming 8 leaves with 16 pages—were about half as large as a quarto.[8] Since the cost of paper represented about 50-75% of a book's total production costs,[9] octavos were generally cheaper to manufacture than quartos, and a common way to reduce publishing costs was to reduce the number of pages needed by compressing (using two columns or a smaller typeface) or abbreviating the text.[8]
[Publish me in] the Smallest size, Least I bee eaten vnder Pippin-pyes. Or in th’ Apothicaryes shop bee seene To wrap Drugg's: or to dry Tobacco in. First (might I chuse) I would be bound to wipe, Where he discharged last his Glister-pipe.
Editions of individual plays were typically published in quarto and could be bought for 6d (equivalent to £6in 2023) without a binding. These editions were primarily intended to be cheap and convenient, and read until worn out or repurposed as wrapping paper (or worse), rather than high quality objects kept in a library.[9] Customers who wanted to keep a particular play would have to have it bound, and would typically bind several related or miscellany plays into one volume.[10] Octavos, though nominally cheaper to produce, were somewhat different. From c.1595–96 (Venus and Adonis) and 1598 (The Rape of Lucrece), Shakespeare's narrative poems were published in octavo.[11] In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's First Folio, Tara L. Lyons argues that this was partly due to the publisher, John Harrison's, desire to capitalize on the poems' association with Ovid: the Greek classics were sold in octavo, so printing Shakespeare's poetry in the same format would strengthen the association.[12] The octavo generally carried greater prestige, so the format itself would help to elevate their standing.[11] Ultimately, however, the choice was a financial one: Venus and Adonis in octavo needed four sheets of paper, versus seven in quarto, and the octavo The Rape of Lucrece needed five sheets, versus 12 in quarto.[12] Whatever the motivation, the move seems to have had the intended effect: Francis Meres, the first known literary critic to comment on Shakespeare, in his Palladis Tamia (1598), puts it thus: "the sweete wittie soule of Ouid liues in mellifluous & hony-tongued Shakespeare, witnes his Venus andAdonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his priuate friends".[13]
Pray tell me Ben, where does the mystery lurk, What others call a play you call a work.
—anonymous, Wits Recreations (1640)
Publishing literary works in folio was not unprecedented. Starting with the publication of Sir Philip Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (1593) and Astrophel and Stella (1598), both published by William Ponsonby, there was a significant number of folios published, and a significant number of them were published by the men who would later be involved in publishing the First Folio.[d] But quarto was the typical format for plays printed in the period: folio was a prestige format, typically used, according to Fredson Bowers, for books of "superior merit or some permanent value".[15]
Printing
The contents of the First Folio were compiled by John Heminges and Henry Condell;[16] the members of the Stationers Company who published the book were the booksellers Edward Blount and the father/son team of William and Isaac Jaggard.[17] William Jaggard has seemed an odd choice by the King's Men because he had published the questionable collection The Passionate Pilgrim as Shakespeare's, and in 1619 had printed new editions of 10 Shakespearean quartos to which he did not have clear rights, some with false dates and title pages (the False Folio affair). Indeed, his contemporary Thomas Heywood, whose poetry Jaggard had pirated and misattributed to Shakespeare, specifically reports that Shakespeare was "much offended with M. Jaggard (that altogether unknown to him) presumed to make so bold with his name."[18]
Heminges and Condell emphasised that the Folio was replacing the earlier publications, which they characterised as "stol'n and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by frauds and stealths of injurious impostors", asserting that Shakespeare's true words "are now offer'd to your view cured, and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers as he conceived them."
The paper industry in England was then in its infancy and the quantity of quality rag paper for the book was imported from France.[19] It is thought that the typesetting and printing of the First Folio was such a large job that the King's Men simply needed the capacities of the Jaggards' shop. William Jaggard was old, infirm and blind by 1623, and died a month before the book went on sale; most of the work in the project must have been done by his son Isaac.
Comparison of the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy in the first three editions of Hamlet, showing the varying quality of the text in the Bad Quarto, the Good Quarto and the First Folio
The printing of the Folio was probably done between February 1622 and early November 1623, and the book was entered into the Stationers' Register on 8 November 1623 (Julian calendar).[20] It is possible that the printer originally expected to have the book ready early, since it was listed in the Frankfurt Book Fair catalogue as a book to appear between April and October 1622, but the catalogue contained many books not yet printed by 1622, and the modern consensus is that the entry was simply intended as advance publicity.[21] The first impression had a publication date of 1623, and the earliest record of a retail purchase is an account book entry for 5 December 1623 of Edward Dering (who purchased two); the Bodleian Library, in Oxford, received its copy in early 1624 (which it subsequently sold for £24 as a superseded edition when the Third Folio became available in 1663/1664).[22]
Contents
The 36 plays of the First Folio occur in the order given below; plays that had never been published before 1623 are marked with an asterisk. Each play is followed by the type of source used, as determined by bibliographical research.[23]
The term foul papers refers to Shakespeare's working drafts of a play. When completed, a transcript or fair copy of the foul papers would be prepared, by the author or by a scribe. Such a manuscript would have to be heavily annotated with accurate and detailed stage directions and all the other data needed for performance, and then could serve as a prompt book, to be used by the prompter to guide a performance of the play. Any of these manuscripts, in any combination, could be used as a source for a printed text. The label Qn denotes the nth quarto edition of a play.
1 The Tempest * – The play was set into type from a manuscript prepared by Ralph Crane, a professional scrivener employed by the King's Men. Crane produced a high-quality result, with formal act/scene divisions, frequent use of parentheses and hyphenated forms, and other identifiable features.
18 Henry IV, Part 2 – uncertain: some combination of manuscript and quarto text
19 Henry V – typeset from Shakespeare's "foul papers."
20 Henry VI, Part 1 * – likely from an annotated transcript of the author's manuscript
21 Henry VI, Part 2 – probably a Shakespearean manuscript used as a prompt-book
22 Henry VI, Part 3 – like 2H6, probably a Shakespearean prompt-book
23 Richard III – a difficult case: probably typeset partially from Q3, and partially from Q6 corrected against a manuscript (maybe "foul papers")
24 Henry VIII * – typeset from a fair copy of the authors' manuscript
Tragedies
25 Troilus and Cressida – probably typeset from the quarto, corrected with Shakespeare's "foul papers," printed after the rest of the Folio was completed
26 Coriolanus * – set from a high-quality authorial transcript
27 Titus Andronicus – typeset from a copy of Q3 that might have served as a prompt-book
36 Cymbeline * – possibly another Ralph Crane transcript, or else the official prompt-book
Troilus and Cressida was originally intended to follow Romeo and Juliet, but the typesetting was stopped, probably due to a conflict over the rights to the play; it was later inserted as the first of the tragedies, when the rights question was resolved. It does not appear in the table of contents.[24]
Introductory poem
Ben Jonson wrote a preface to the folio with this poem addressed "To the Reader" facing the Droeshout portrait engraving:
This Figure, that thou here ſeeſt put, It vvas for gentle Shakeſpeare cut; Wherein the Grauer had a ſtrife vvith Nature, to out-doo the life: O, could he but haue dravvne his vvit As vvell in braſſe, as he hath hit His face; the Print vvould then ſurpaſſe All, that vvas euer vvrit in braſſe. But, ſince he cannot, Reader, looke Not on his Picture, but his Booke.
B. I.
Compositors
As far as modern scholarship has been able to determine,[25] the First Folio texts were set into type by five compositors, with different spelling habits, peculiarities, and levels of competence. Researchers have labelled them A through E, A being the most accurate, and E an apprentice who had significant difficulties in dealing with manuscript copy. Their shares in typesetting the pages of the Folio break down like this:
Comedies
Histories
Tragedies
Total pages
"A"
74
80
40
194
"B"
143
89
213
445
"C"
79
22
19
120
"D"
35+1⁄2
0
0
35+1⁄2
"E"
0
0
71+1⁄2
71+1⁄2
Compositor "E" was most likely one John Leason, whose apprenticeship contract dated only from 4 November 1622. One of the other four might have been a John Shakespeare, of Warwickshire, who apprenticed with Jaggard in 1610 to 1617. ("Shakespeare" was a common name in Warwickshire in that era; John was of no known relation to the playwright.)
W. W. Greg has argued that Edward Knight, the "book-keeper" or "book-holder" (prompter) of the King's Men, did the actual proofreading of the manuscript sources for the First Folio. Knight is known to have been responsible for maintaining and annotating the company's scripts, and making sure that the company complied with cuts and changes ordered by the Master of the Revels.
Some pages of the First Folio—134 out of the total of 900—were proofread and corrected while the job of printing the book was ongoing. As a result, the Folio differs from modern books in that individual copies vary considerably in their typographical errors. There were about 500 corrections made to the Folio in this way.[26] These corrections by the typesetters, however, consisted only of simple typos, clear mistakes in their own work; the evidence suggests that they almost never referred back to their manuscript sources, let alone tried to resolve any problems in those sources. The well-known cruxes in the First Folio texts were beyond the typesetters' capacity to correct.
The Folio was typeset and bound in "sixes"—3 sheets of paper, taken together, were folded into a booklet-like quire or gathering of 6 leaves, 12 pages. Once printed, the "sixes" were assembled and bound together to make the book. The sheets were printed in 2-page formes, meaning that pages 1 and 12 of the first quire were printed simultaneously on one side of one sheet of paper (which became the "outer" side); then pages 2 and 11 were printed on the other side of the same sheet (the "inner" side). The same was done with pages 3 and 10, and 4 and 9, on the second sheet, and pages 5 and 8, and 6 and 7, on the third. Then the first quire could be assembled with its pages in the correct order. The next quire was printed by the same method: pages 13 and 24 on one side of one sheet, etc. This meant that the text being printed had to be "cast off"—the compositors had to plan beforehand how much text would fit onto each page. If the compositors were setting type from manuscripts (perhaps messy, revised and corrected manuscripts), their calculations would frequently be off by greater or lesser amounts, resulting in the need to expand or compress. A line of verse could be printed as two; or verse could be printed as prose to save space, or lines and passages could even be omitted (a disturbing prospect for those who prize Shakespeare's works).[27]
The First Folio was reprinted three times in the 17th century, each time by different groups of stationers; these editions are referred to as the Second Folio, Third Folio, and Fourth Folio.
Holdings, sales and valuations
The Folger Shakespeare Library owns 82 copies of the First Folio—more than one third of all known surviving copies.
Jean-Christophe Mayer, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's First Folio (2016), estimates the original retail price of the First Folio to be about 15s (equivalent to £174in 2023) for an unbound copy, and up to £1 (equivalent to £232in 2023) for one bound in calfskin.[e] In terms of purchasing power, "a bound folio would be about forty times the price of a single play and represented almost two months' wages for an ordinary skilled worker."[29]
It is believed that around 750 copies of the First Folio were printed, of which there are 235 known surviving copies.[30][31][32]
The First Folio is one of the most valuable printed books in the world: a copy sold at Christie's in New York in October 2001 made $6.16 million hammer price (then £3.73m).[41] In October 2020, a copy sold by Mills College at Christie's fetched a price of $10 million,[42] making it the most expensive work of literature ever auctioned.[43]
To commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death in 2016, the Folger Shakespeare Library toured some of its 82 First Folios for display in all 50 U.S. states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.[44]
Discoveries of previously unknown Folios
In 2003, Anthony West identified a book previously thought to be a Second Folio in the collection of Craven Museum in Skipton, North Yorkshire, to be a First Folio. It had been donated to the museum in 1936 by a local mill owner. This copy is missing its introductory pages and all the comedies.[45]
On 13 July 2006, a complete copy of the First Folio owned by Dr Williams's Library was auctioned at Sotheby's auction house. The book, which was in its original 17th-century binding, sold for £2,808,000, less than Sotheby's top estimate of £3.5 million. This copy is one of only about 40 remaining complete copies (most of the existing copies are incomplete); only one other copy of the book remains in private ownership.[46]
On 11 July 2008, it was reported that a copy stolen from Durham University, England, in 1998 had been recovered after being submitted for valuation at the Folger Shakespeare Library. News reports estimated the folio's value at anywhere from £250,000 in total for the First Folio and all the other books and manuscripts stolen (BBC News, 1998), up to $30 million (The New York Times, 2008).[47] Although the book, once the property of John Cosin the Bishop of Durham, was returned to the library, it had been mutilated and was missing its cover and title page.[48] The folio was returned to public display on 19 June 2010 after its twelve-year absence.[49] Fifty-three-year-old Raymond Scott received an eight-year prison sentence for handling stolen goods, but was acquitted of the theft itself.[50] A July 2010 BBC programme about the affair, Stealing Shakespeare, portrayed Scott as a fantasist and petty thief.[51] In 2013, Scott killed himself in his prison cell.[52]
In November 2014, a previously unknown First Folio was found in a public library in Saint-Omer, Pas-de-Calais in France, where it had lain for 200 years.[30][53] Confirmation of its authenticity came from Eric Rasmussen of the University of Nevada, Reno, one of the world's foremost authorities on Shakespeare.[30][53] The title page and introductory material are missing.[53][54] The name "Neville", written on the first surviving page, may indicate that it once belonged to Edward Scarisbrick, who fled England due to anti-Catholic repression, attended the Jesuit Saint-Omer College, and was known to use that alias.[30]
In March 2016, Christie's announced that a previously unrecorded copy once owned by 19th-century collector Sir George Augustus Shuckburgh-Evelyn would be auctioned on 25 May 2016.[55] According to the Antiques Trade Gazette, an American collector paid £1,600,000 for it; the buyer also successfully bid on copies of the second, third, and fourth folios.[56]
↑ The exact years of his London career are unknown, but biographers suggest that it may have begun any time from the mid-1580s to just before Robert Greene mentions Shakespeare in his Groats-Worth of Wit.[4][5][6]
↑ Dates follow the Julian calendar, used in England throughout Shakespeare's lifespan, but with the start of the year adjusted to 1 January (see Old Style and New Style dates). Under the Gregorian calendar, adopted in Catholic countries in 1582, Shakespeare died on 3 May.[7]
↑ He also cites previous estimates from Anthony James West, based in part on unpublished estimates by Peter Blayney, that the publisher's cost was about 6s 8d (equivalent to £77in 2023), and the wholesale price no more than 10s (equivalent to £116in 2023).[29]
Related Research Articles
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.
The Folger Shakespeare Library is an independent research library on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., United States. It has the world's largest collection of the printed works of William Shakespeare, and is a primary repository for rare materials from the early modern period (1500–1750) in Britain and Europe. The library was established by Henry Clay Folger in association with his wife, Emily Jordan Folger. It opened in 1932, two years after his death.
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.
The Passionate Pilgrim (1599) is an anthology of 20 poems collected and published by William Jaggard that were attributed to "W. Shakespeare" on the title page, only five of which are considered authentically Shakespearean. These are two sonnets, later to be published in the 1609 collection of Shakespeare's Sonnets, and three poems extracted from the play Love's Labour's Lost. Five were attributed to other poets during his lifetime, and two were published in other collections anonymously. While most critics disqualify the rest as not Shakespearean on stylistic grounds, stylometric analysis by Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza put two blocks of the poems within Shakespeare's stylistic boundaries. Jaggard later published an augmented edition with poems he knew to be by Thomas Heywood.
"To be, or not to be" is a speech given by Prince Hamlet in the so-called "nunnery scene" of William Shakespeare's play Hamlet. The speech is named for the opening phrase, itself among the most widely known and quoted lines in modern English literature, and has been referenced in many works of theatre, literature and music.
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. Publisher and bookseller Thomas Pavier is also implicated with 'printed for T.P.' appearing on the title pages.
Shakespeare's editors were essential in the development of the modern practice of producing printed books and the evolution of textual criticism.
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."
The Second Folio is the 1632 edition of the collected plays of William Shakespeare. It follows the First Folio of 1623. Much language was updated in the Second Folio and there are almost 1,700 changes.
Ralph Crane was a professional scrivener or scribe in early seventeenth-century London. His close connection with some of the First Folio texts of the plays of William Shakespeare has led to his being called "Shakespeare's first editor."
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 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.
The term "folio" has three interconnected but distinct meanings in the world of books and printing: first, it is a term for a common method of arranging sheets of paper into book form, folding the sheet only once, and a term for a book made in this way; second, it is a general term for a sheet, leaf or page in (especially) manuscripts and old books; and third, it is an approximate term for the size of a book, and for a book of this size.
Q1 of Hamlet is a short early text of the Shakespearean play. The intended publication of the play is entered in the Stationers' Register in 1602 by James Roberts, but Q1 was not published until summer or autumn 1603. It was published by the booksellers Nicholas Ling and John Trundle, and printed by Valentine Simmes. Roberts later printed the "Second Quarto" (Q2).
The Dering Manuscript is the earliest extant manuscript text of any play by William Shakespeare. The manuscript combines Part 1 and Part 2 of Henry IV into a single-play redaction. Scholarly consensus indicates that the manuscript was revised in the early 17th century by Sir Edward Dering, a man known for his interest in literature and theater. Dering prepared his redaction for an amateur performance starring friends and family at Surrenden Manor in Pluckley, Kent, where the manuscript was discovered in 1844. This is the earliest known instance of an amateur production of Shakespeare in England. Sourced from the 1613 fifth quarto of Part 1 and the 1600 first quarto of Part 2, the Dering Manuscript contains many textual differences from published quarto and folio editions of the plays. Dering cut nearly 3,000 lines of Shakespearean text and added some 50 lines of his own invention along with numerous minor interventions. The Dering Manuscript is currently a part of the collection at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC.
The Cambridge Shakespeare is a long-running series of critical editions of William Shakespeare's works published by Cambridge University Press. The name encompasses three distinct series: The Cambridge Shakespeare (1863–1866), The New Shakespeare (1921–1969), and The New Cambridge Shakespeare (1984–present).
West, Anthony James (2003). A New Worldwide Census of First Folios. The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book. Vol.II. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0198187684.
Nicholson, Catherine, "Theater for a New Audience" (review of Emma Smith, Shakespeare's First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book, Oxford University Press, 2023, 379 pp.; Chris Laoutaris, Shakespeare's Book: The Story Behind the First Folio and the Making of Shakespeare, Pegasus, 2023, 516 pp.; and Ben Higgins, Shakespeare's Syndicate: The First Folio, Its Publishers, and the Early Modern Book Trade, Oxford University Press, 2023, 291 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXX, no. 17 (2 November 2023), pp. 57–59. "Emma Smith argues in Shakespeare's First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book, first published in 2016 and now reissued with a fresh preface, [that] it is possible to overstate both the value and the significance of the 1623 Shakespeare folio. Indeed, Smith suggests, that is what we continually do, exaggerating its rarity, inflating its price, overlooking its textual and bibliographic weaknesses, fantasizing about its relation to Shakespeare himself, and forgetting or willfully obscuring the million accidents and historical contingencies that have facilitated its rise." (p. 57.)
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