First Folio

• 1. Introduction

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  The First Folio is a book that almost did not exist. William Shakespeare died on the 23rd of April 1616 in Stratford-upon-Avon, leaving behind no instruction to collect his plays. He had never bothered. Individual plays sold for sixpence in quarto pamphlets, cheap enough to read once and use as wrapping paper. Nobody expected them to last.

  Seven years after his death, two of his closest colleagues changed that. John Heminges and Henry Condell gathered 36 plays into a single large volume, printed in the prestige folio format, and sent it into the world. They called it Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. We call it the First Folio.

  Of perhaps 750 copies printed, 235 are known to survive. Eighteen of the plays inside had never been printed before. Without this book, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, and The Tempest might have vanished entirely. What drove two actors to undertake such a project? Who printed it, and what corners were cut? And how did a book that cost a skilled worker nearly two months' wages end up scattered across libraries from Tokyo to Santiago?

• 2. Before the Folio

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  Venus and Adonis, published in 1593, was Shakespeare's bestselling work in his lifetime. It went through 12 editions before 1623, more than any of his plays. The Rape of Lucrece and Henry IV, Part 1 each reached six editions. These numbers reveal something: Shakespeare's reputation rested as much on his poetry as his drama.

  By 1623, scholars can count 78 individual printed editions of his works, 55 of them plays and 23 poems. The plays circulated in quarto, a format made by folding a large sheet twice to yield four leaves and eight pages. Quartos were small, typically measuring 7 by 9 inches, and cheap: sixpence without a binding. They were not meant to be permanent objects. Customers who wanted to keep a play had to have it bound themselves, often bundling several quartos into one homemade volume.

  The poem editions took a different path. Starting around 1595-96, Shakespeare's narrative poems appeared in the smaller octavo format, which used fewer sheets of paper and therefore cost less to print. A scholar named Tara L. Lyons, writing in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's First Folio, argues this was partly a deliberate choice by publisher John Harrison to tie Shakespeare's poems to the classical tradition: Greek texts sold in octavo, so printing Shakespeare the same way raised his standing. It also happened to cut the paper bill sharply. Venus and Adonis needed four sheets in octavo but would have required seven in quarto. The literary critic Francis Meres, writing in his Palladis Tamia in 1598, called Shakespeare's soul the sweet, witty soul of Ovid, citing Venus and Adonis and Lucrece by name. The strategy had worked.

• 3. The Jaggard Problem

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  William Jaggard, the printer the King's Men chose to produce the First Folio, was a strange selection. He had previously published The Passionate Pilgrim, a collection attributed to Shakespeare that contained poems Shakespeare almost certainly did not write. In 1619, he had printed new editions of ten Shakespearean quartos without clear rights to do so, attaching false dates and false title pages to some of them. This episode is sometimes called the False Folio affair.

  Thomas Heywood, a playwright whose own poetry Jaggard had pirated and misattributed to Shakespeare, reported that Shakespeare was, in his words, "much offended with M. Jaggard" for presuming to use his name without permission. This was not a minor grievance. It went on record.

  Still, the King's Men apparently had little choice. Printing the First Folio was an enormous job, and Jaggard's shop had the capacity for it. By 1623, William Jaggard was old, infirm, and blind. He died a month before the book went on sale. His son Isaac handled most of the actual work. The publishing syndicate also included booksellers Edward Blount and two stationers who owned rights to specific plays: William Aspley held rights to Much Ado About Nothing and Henry IV, Part 2; John Smethwick held Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet. The paper for the book, England's own paper industry not yet equal to the task, was imported from France.

• 4. Inside the Print Shop

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  Scholars have identified five compositors who set the First Folio's type, labelling them A through E. Compositor B set by far the most pages: 445 out of the total, spread across all three genres. Compositor A set 194 pages and was the most accurate. Compositor E was an apprentice, probably John Leason, whose contract dated only from the 4th of November 1622, and he had significant trouble reading manuscript copy.

  The Folio was typeset in gatherings called "sixes": three sheets folded together to make a booklet of six leaves and 12 pages. Because pages had to be printed in pairs on the same sheet, the compositors had to calculate in advance how much text would fill each page before they began setting it. When they were working from handwritten manuscripts, including Shakespeare's own rough drafts, those calculations often went wrong. A line of verse might be broken into two lines to fill space, or printed as prose to save it. Passages could be cut entirely. W. W. Greg has argued that Edward Knight, the company's official prompter, handled the proofreading of the manuscript sources. About 134 of the Folio's 900 pages were corrected while printing was ongoing, resulting in roughly 500 corrections. Individual copies therefore differ from one another in their typographical errors, unlike modern printed books.

  One play, Troilus and Cressida, went through a particular ordeal. It was originally planned to follow Romeo and Juliet, but typesetting stopped mid-way, apparently because of a dispute over rights. When the conflict was resolved, it was inserted at the front of the tragedies section instead. It does not appear in the table of contents.

• 5. What the Folio Preserved

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  Eighteen plays in the First Folio had never been printed in any form before 1623. The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure, and Antony and Cleopatra were among them. Without Heminges and Condell, those texts would have existed only in manuscripts held by the King's Men, vulnerable to fire, flood, and simple neglect.

  For the plays that had been printed before, the situation is more complicated. Heminges and Condell described the earlier quartos as "stol'n and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by frauds and stealths of injurious impostors." They claimed the Folio offered Shakespeare's words "cured, and perfect of their limbes." The reality is mixed. Some quartos are reliable texts; some are not. The Folio draws on a range of sources: Shakespeare's own rough drafts, known as foul papers; clean transcripts by professional scribes; quarto editions corrected against manuscripts; and the company's official prompt books used in performance.

  Ralph Crane, a professional scrivener employed by the King's Men, prepared the copy for at least five plays, including The Tempest and The Winter's Tale. His work is identifiable by formal act and scene divisions, frequent parentheses, and hyphenated compound words. Crane produced clean, high-quality copy, which is why some Folio texts derived from his transcripts are considered particularly reliable. The Folio excludes several plays now believed to be wholly or partly Shakespeare's: Pericles, Prince of Tyre; The Two Noble Kinsmen; Edward III; and two plays, Cardenio and Love's Labour's Won, that are entirely lost.

• 6. Price, Patrons, and Prestige

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  Jean-Christophe Mayer, writing in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's First Folio in 2016, estimated the original retail price at about 15 shillings for an unbound copy, rising to about one pound for a copy bound in calfskin. Mayer puts that in concrete terms: a bound folio cost roughly forty times the price of a single quarto play and represented nearly two months' wages for a skilled worker.

  The book was dedicated to William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, and his brother Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, whom the editors called "the incomparable pair of brethren." Folio was the prestige format: according to the bibliographer Fredson Bowers, publishers reserved it for works of superior merit or permanent value. Heminges and Condell were making a claim about Shakespeare's standing, not just preserving texts.

  The earliest documented retail purchase is an entry in Edward Dering's account book for the 5th of December 1623. Dering bought two copies. The Bodleian Library in Oxford acquired its copy in early 1624, then later sold it for £24 as a superseded edition when the Third Folio became available in 1663-64. The Bodleian eventually had to buy another copy back. The book was reprinted three more times in the 17th century, producing the Second, Third, and Fourth Folios, each from different groups of stationers.

• 7. Where the Copies Are

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  The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., holds 82 First Folios, more than one third of all known surviving copies, by far the largest collection in the world. Meisei University in Tokyo holds 12. The New York Public Library owns six. The British Library in London holds five. Together, the nine largest collections account for more than half of all known extant copies.

  Universities across the United States and Britain hold dozens more. The University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford each own four. The University of Texas at Austin and Princeton University each have three. In Ireland, the only copy resides in the Old Library at Trinity College Dublin. One copy at the Free Library of Philadelphia is particularly notable: it was once owned by the poet John Milton and contains notes in his handwriting.

  Copies have surfaced in unexpected places. In 2003, Anthony West identified a book in the Craven Museum in Skipton, North Yorkshire, that had been catalogued as a Second Folio; it turned out to be a First. A local mill owner had donated it to the museum in 1936. In November 2014, a previously unknown copy was found in a public library in Saint-Omer, in northern France, where it had rested for roughly 200 years. Its title page is missing. The name "Neville" written on the first surviving page may link it to Edward Scarisbrick, a Catholic exile who attended the Jesuit college at Saint-Omer and used that alias. Eric Rasmussen of the University of Nevada, Reno, confirmed the Saint-Omer copy's authenticity.

• 8. Theft, Sale, and Recovery

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  In October 2001, a First Folio sold at Christie's in New York for a hammer price of $6.16 million. In October 2020, a copy sold by Mills College at Christie's fetched $10 million, making it the most expensive work of literature ever auctioned at that point.

  Not every copy has changed hands so cleanly. In 1998, a First Folio was stolen from Durham University. The book had once belonged to John Cosin, the Bishop of Durham. It sat undetected for a decade until the thief, Raymond Scott, submitted it for valuation at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2008. News outlets estimated its value at anywhere from £250,000 to $30 million, depending on which report one reads. The book was returned to Durham, though mutilated: its cover and title page were gone. Scott, who was 53 years old at the time of sentencing, received eight years in prison for handling stolen goods but was acquitted of the actual theft. A BBC programme in July 2010, titled Stealing Shakespeare, described him as a fantasist and petty thief. In 2012, Scott died by suicide in his prison cell.

  The Durham Folio went back on public display on the 19th of June 2010 after a 12-year absence. A copy found on the Isle of Bute in April 2016, at Mount Stuart House, had once belonged to 18th-century collector Isaac Reed, and was authenticated by Emma Smith of Oxford University. Smith has also cautioned publicly against overstating the importance of the First Folio itself, a reminder that the book's mythic status is itself a construction, built up over centuries of trade, scholarship, and loss.