First Folio

Why weren’t the works of William Shakespeare lost to the ages? How did they manage to survive the transmission of over four centuries time? How is it that the greatest body of work in the English language transcended plague, war, impoverishment, vast illiteracy and make it to the shelf behind me as I type?

The answer lies with the devoted work of a handful of men.

The First Folio is a compilation of 36 of Shakespeare’s plays, printed in the fall of 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death. Of those 36, half had never been published before. Only 18 of the 36 plays included existed in quarto editions of varying reliability; the other half had not been published. The work was instigated as a labor of love by John Heminges and Henry Condell, friends and fellow actors with the Bard. If it weren’t for the efforts of these two men, we’d never know The Tempest, Macbeth, or Julius Caesar, just to name a few plays that might have passed from this world. The First Folio could have been influenced by Ben Jonson’s folio of his own work, entitled Workes, done in 1616 while Jonson was still alive.

Why didn’t Shakespeare strive to publish the remaining half of his output during his lifetime? In the Elizabethan age, the theater owners generally owned rights to any and all plays performed; therefore Shakespeare would not necessarily have earned any money off them. Indeed, the only works he did make an effort to publish were his two long-form epic poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.

Also to be found in the First Folio is a list of the actors from Shakespeare’s performing company, the Chamberlain’s Men, 26 names in all, including Shakespeare, Heminges, and Condell. Heminges was the company’s business manager and part-time actor. Legend has it he was the first Falstaff. Condell was an actor noted for his comedic roles.

The First Folio (a “folio” is a large format book) numbers 907 pages; thereby each play averages about 25 pages in length. The First is generally acknowledged as the most authentic version of Shakespeare’s plays, though from a typesetting point of view, the Folios are atrocious. Words are frequently misprinted, stray words appear out of nowhere, page numbering skips about, character names are occasionally substituted with the names of the actors portraying them. Some plays are divided into scenes and acts, others not. Some plays have character lists, some do not; those that do might list characters at the beginning or at the end of the play.

Through research akin to forensic literary detection, nine men have been determined to have worked on the typesetting of the Folios, each hand labeled “A” through “I.” “B” did half the text. “E” was an apprentice and was the worst of the bunch, responsible for many errors and misprints.

There are other descrepancies. Troilus and Cressida, though in the First Folio, is not listed in the Table of Contents because that page was printed before permission to include the play was obtained. Shakespeare’s Pericles was not included in the original Folio. Nor were The Two Noble Kinsmen and Edward III, which only recently were acknowledged to be part of the Shakespearean canon (all three plays were known collaborative efforts).

Copies cost a hefty Elizabethan pound a piece, something like $400 in today’s US currency. Now an original First Folio is worth at least $3 million. That’s quite an investment! 750 to 1200 editions were printed over the course of 18 months, with changes being made throughout the process, so there are different versions of the Folio. A second edition only nine years later suggests a low-volume initial run.

Considering that only 230 plays survive from the time of Will Shakespeare, the First Folio represents 15 percent of that total. Again, without the First Folio, half and maybe more of Shakespeare’s plays may have been lost forever.

A Second Folio was published in 1632 and a Third Folio in 1664. The Third added seven new plays to the canon, though only one, Pericles, would be accepted as authentically Shakespearean. A fourth came out in 1685. A 1709 edition, edited by Nicholas Rowe, “modernized” Shakespeare’s Elizabethen and Jacobean spellings and punctuations. He also systematically divided the plays into Acts and Scenes, and included the first formal biography of the playwright.

About three hundred First Folios survive to this day in various stages of quality and completion. The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC has the most of any single entity, 82. More about this in next week’s Shakespeare Saturday.

PLAYS LISTED IN ORDER IN THE FIRST FOLIO

COMEDIES
The Tempest
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Measure for Measure
The Comedy of Errors
Much Ado About Nothing
Love’s Labour’s Lost
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Merchant of Venice
As You Like It
The Taming of the Shrew
All’s Well That Ends Well
Twelfth Night
The Winter’s Tale

HISTORIES
King John
Richard II
Henry IV part I
Henry IV part II
Henry V
Henry VI part I
Henry VI part II
Henry VI part III
Richard III
Henry VIII

TRAGEDIES
Troilus and Cressida
Coriolanus
Titus Andronicus
Romeo and Juliet
Timon of Athens
Julius Caesar
Macbeth
Hamlet
King Lear
Othello
Anthony and Cleopatra
Cymbeline


Sources: Shakespeare by Bill Bryson; Shakespeare: The Writer and his Work, by Stanley Wells, and the wikipedia article on the “First Folio”