Shakespeare's First Folio
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Which made the Globe of heav’n and earth to ring.”

Hugh Holland, First Folio

Another Shakespeare-related icon nominated on this site is the First Folio. The First Folio is the name given to the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays. The actual title of the book is Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories And Tragedies. Published According To The True Originall Copies.

It was published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death. The two editors of the volume were John Heminges and Henry Condell, actors alongside Shakespeare in the King’s Men who would have known him well. There are 36 plays in the collection, 18 of which had never been published before - see below for a list of the contents. The only play missing from this collection that you would find in a Complete Works today is Pericles (and some would argue that the authorship of parts of this play is highly questionable).

Why the name?

The book is called a “folio” because of the page size. In publishing terminology, folios are made up of large sheets folded once to form two leaves (four sides that can have text on). This means the pages are quite big, 27-40cm long by 20-28cm high. Consisting of 907 pages, the First Folio is an impressive volume. The folio format was usually reserved for works with heavyweight intellectual content, such as philosophy and theology. Shakespeare’s Folio was the first to contain exclusively plays.

The initial print run was about 750 copies, probably priced at 15s. Today, 247 of these copies survive, although they are not all in good condition, and none of them are exactly the same. The last time one was sold at auction, which went for $6.2 million. There are 79 copies in the Folger Shakespeare Library, so if you live in Washington DC it’s relatively easy to see one, but the British Library in London and Bodleian Library in Oxford also have copies.

A monument to Heminges and Condell outside the Guildhall Library in the City of London clearly states the importance of the First Folio: “To their disinterested affection, The world owes all that it calls Shakespeare.” Without it we would only know about half the plays performed so regularly today. There would be no Macbeth, no Julius Caesar, no Twelfth Night. Collecting them together like this helped to establish Shakespeare as a playwright worthy of eternal fame. In Ben Jonson’s prefatory poem he famously says of Shakespeare: “He was not of an age, but for all time.”

In a letter “To the great Variety of Readers” at the beginning of the First Folio, Heminges and Condell lament the fact that Shakespeare was not alive to help them prepare the plays for publication. They were working from many different kinds of copy: 12 plays had already been legally published in quarto form (illegal reproductions of the plays based on actor-memory rather than full texts are known as “bad quartos”); foul papers, first drafts by the author complete with crossings out and alterations and fair copies, transcripts made by professional scribes. The First Folio text is usually seen as being closest to Shakespeare’s intentions. Compare this famous line from the bad quarto of Hamlet, for example, with its counterpart in the First Folio.

“To be or not to be; ay, there’s the point.” (“bad” quarto)

“To be, or not to be, that is the Question:” (First Folio)

How accurate?

There are many ways in which misunderstandings and errors could creep into the First Folio edition, despite the editors’ best attempts to present them “as he conceived them”. Editors who have worked on the First Folio since 1623 have made lots of little changes, trying to “clean up” the texts, correct anomalies and get even clearer versions of the plays. These changes, such as breaking Orlando’s opening speech in As You Like It into six grammatically correct sentences instead of one 20 line blurt, can have big repercussions for actors and directors of the plays today.

The Original Shakespeare Company like to work using the practices of Shakespeare’s acting companies, as far as it is possible re-construct them. They only use the First Folio in their productions as they believe the punctuation, layout of lines (verse/prose) and use of capital letters in this edition give the actor vital clues as to how Shakespeare wanted them to perform it - coded stage directions, in a way.

The First Folio is the foundation on which Shakespeare’s international reputation rests; by publishing it his friends Heminges and Condell truly made him immortal.

Contents of the First Folio

This is the Table of Contents as printed in the First Folio. Troilus And Cressida does not appear on the list but is included between Histories and Tragedies. The plays appearing for the first time in print have been asterisked.

 
Comedies:

*The Tempest.

*The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

The Merry Wives of Windsor.

*Measure for Measure.

*The Comedy of Errours.

Much adoo about Nothing

Loves Labour lost.

Midsommer Nights Dreame.

The Merchant of Venice.

*As you Like it.

*The Taming of the Shrew.

*All is well, that Ends well.

*Twelfe-Night, or what you will.

*The Winters Tale.

Histories:

*The Life and Death of King John.

The Life & death of Richard the second.

The First part of King Henry the fourth.

The Second part of K. Henry the fourth.

The Life of King Henry the Fift.

*The First part of King Henry the Sixt.

The Second part of King Henry the Sixt.

The Third part of King Henry the Sixt.

The Life and Death of Richard the Third

*The Life of King Henry the Eight.

[Troilus and Cressida]

Tragedies:
*The Tragedy of Coriolanus.

Titus Andronicus.

Romeo and Juliet.

*Timon of Athens.

*The Life and death of Julius Caesar.

*The Tragedy of Macbeth.

The Tragedy of Hamlet.

King Lear.

Othello, the Moore of Venice.

*Anthony and Cleopater.

*Cymbeline King of Britaine.