Compared with the price of purchasing each play separately, buying them in bulk via the Folio wasn’t a bad deal. Weighing in at nearly five pounds, the Folio debuted a year later than initially advertised. “So every First Folio is a random collection of corrected and uncorrected pages.” “If they caught an error, they would correct it in the middle of the run-and to save money, they wouldn’t throw away the sheets that were not correct,” says Michael Witmore, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. To increase efficiency, mistakes were fixed as the books were printed. The Folio separated Shakespeare's works into comedies, histories and tragedies for the first time. They secured one play, Troilus and Cressida, so late in the process that it isn’t even listed in the table of contents. The friends ran into myriad legal, financial and procedural issues. Logistically, the publication process was “difficult and laborious,” involving “a lot of negotiation-and quite a lot of financial investment,” says Michael Dobson, director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham in England. “Reade him, therefore and againe, and againe.” “His mind and hand went together,” they write. Based on the Folio’s preface, Heminge and Condell clearly held Shakespeare in high regard. The pair compiled the Folio in the years that followed, though scholars aren’t certain what compelled them to pursue the project-or “what role friendship, theater loyalties and publishing economics played in the whole thing,” says Smith. When the playwright died in 1616, he left both men money to purchase mourning rings, indicating he considered them close friends. But they knew a great deal about Shakespeare, having performed with his acting company, the King’s Men, for many years. History owes the Folio’s existence to John Heminge and Henry Condell, two actors who knew nothing of the book business. “It’s the moment,” she adds, “when we leave him behind.” Who created the Folio? He probably had nothing to do with the conception of publishing in this way.” “The First Folio stands as the gatepost to post-Shakespeare Shakespeare, if you like,” says Smith. It also saved half of his plays: Of the 36 included in the collection, 18 had never been published.Įrrors were corrected during the print run, so copies of the text contain small discrepancies.īecause it debuted seven years after Shakespeare’s death, the book is also one of the first serious efforts to engage with the plays in the absence of their author. Published in 1623, the 900-page tome cemented the Bard’s legacy and permanently muddled the boundaries between popular culture and high art. Without it, “we wouldn’t even be talking about Shakespeare,” says Emma Smith, a Shakespearean scholar at the University of Oxford and the author of Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book. It was-and still is-one of the English language’s foundational texts. In 2020, a copy sold for nearly $10 million, making the Folio the world’s most expensive work of literature. Today, editions of the text fetch far higher prices. The pope, the actors realized, had mistakenly accepted the Folio as a gift.Īfter some behind-the-scenes diplomacy, the company retrieved the book-then worth an estimated $60,000-from the Vatican. “It will make a beautiful memento for this occasion,” he said, passing the volume to an aide, who promptly vanished. ![]() Macbeth is among the 18 plays that would have been lost to history without the Folio. Paul, who didn’t hear her request, misread the situation. ![]() Would the pontiff be willing to bless the book, she asked? This particular volume belonged to the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Tutin had carried it with her to the Vatican in preparation for this moment. When three Shakespearean actors performed at the Vatican in 1964, the stakes were high: Among the 2,000 observers packed into the auditorium were cardinals, dignitaries and even Pope Paul VI, who looked on from a raised chair.Īfter the show, one of the actors, Dorothy Tutin, approached the pope clutching a rare copy of William Shakespeare’s First Folio, the earliest collection of the Bard’s plays ever published.
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