William Shakespeare’s First Folio

In November 1623, Edward Blount took a long-awaited delivery at his London bookshop at the sign of the Black Bear near St Paul’s. This book, into which he had made a considerable financial investment, had been long in the making. Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies was the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays. It appeared some seven years after their author’s death in 1616 and, across 950 folio pages, it presented 36 plays (no narrative poems or sonnets), half of which had not previously been printed. These were divided across the three generic headings of the title. The main title page bore the striking engraved portrait of their bald author in a wide ruff. The dramatic works were prefaced by several dedicatory poems and epistles.

On the book’s arrival, there was nothing of the marketing overdrive that marks an important new publication today. No selective leaks or advertising campaign; no reviews, interviews or literary prizes; no queues in St Paul’s Churchyard; no sales figures, bidding war, copycat publications or bestseller lists – in short, no sensation. Nevertheless, it is hard to overstate the importance of this literary, cultural and commercial moment. The publishing cartel, headed by Blount in partnership with the printing house of William Jaggard and his son Isaac, is responsible for giving us ‘Shakespeare’.

Without this book, 18 of Shakespeare’s plays would have joined the many hundreds of early modern plays (the vast majority of all those performed) that have not survived. Without this book there would be no Macbeth or Julius Caesar or The Tempest. We would not have lines like ‘Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them’ (Twelfth Night), or Cleopatra’s ‘salad days’ (Antony and Cleopatra), or even that most famous stage direction: ‘Exit, pursued by a bear’ (The Winter’s Tale). Without this book, Shakespeare’s reputation might not have survived the gap in professional theatre production during Cromwell’s rule, since his works would not have been on hand as the convenient choice for restoration along with the king. And without this book, we would have no image of the playwright tacitly authenticated by those who knew him.

As the playwright and poet Ben Jonson predicted in his dedicatory poem prefacing the collection, ‘he was not of an age but for all time’. Shakespeare’s reputation has rocketed in the 400 years since this publication, but all that – everything from school syllabi to politicians’ rhetoric, from Nahum Tate’s happily ending King Lear (1681) to Haider, a Hamlet film set in modern Kashmir (2014), from YouTube parodies and internet memes to elaborate theories of true authorship – can be traced back to this moment in St Paul’s Churchyard in 1623. The book we have named in retrospect the First Folio is the beginning of a long and hugely influential afterlife, an extraordinary story of how a 17th-century London actor-playwright’s work came to dominate Western literary culture.

The Shakespeare First Folio is now an extremely valuable book. The most recent public auction produced a record price of almost $10 million. By the standards of early modern books it is not rare: almost 240 copies or substantial part-copies survive, as well as scores of fragments, compared with, for example, just one complete copy of the first printing of Hamlet in 1603. Nevertheless, its weight and heft give it a monumental quality, and it has accrued the aura of a precious treasure, to be handled reverentially with care and sometimes (unnecessarily) with gloves, shown only to privileged visitors or kept in a display case for devout cultural pilgrims. 2023 is a good time to see one since many copies will be on display, each securely guarded behind reinforced glass. One of the ironies is that this increased value means that the book no longer operates interactively. Its readers do not turn its pages to encounter text: in fact, it has no readers at all.

The First Folio is not now a book but a relic. It is in the nature of a relic that the circumstances of its production tend to be obscured. However, this revered object is in fact a distinctive product of recoverable human enterprise. Shakespeare himself is only one agent in its preparation and realisation. Emphasising the people and the technology that brought the book to its readers does not diminish Shakespeare’s extraordinary literary achievement, but apportions credit more widely.

‘Read him, therefore; and again and again’

By the winter of 1623 Shakespeare had been dead seven years, having effectively retired from playwrighting some years before. There had not been a new play performed for more than a decade and the publication of Othello in 1622 was the first new Shakespeare play in print for even longer. Most of Shakespeare’s plays of the Jacobean period had not been published. Though Edward Blount registered with the Stationers’ Company the rights to Antony and Cleopatra in 1608, the play remained unpublished until the Folio. Blount apparently did not think of this title as a surefire commercial success: indeed, he seems to have forgotten he even owned it, since he asked the clerk to the Stationers’ Company to look up the rights.

New writers, especially Shakespeare’s collaborator and successor John Fletcher, were all the rage with their clever, urbane tragi-comic plots drawn from fashionable European literature. Shakespeare’s drama, with its taste for romance, green-world comedy and the fighting and political intrigue of Elizabethan history plays, may well have looked outdated. In his Bartholomew Fair of 1614, Ben Jonson had mocked the playgoer whose tastes were fixed firmly in the early 1590s as an out-of-touch dotard: tastes moved quickly in this energetic entertainment industry. It is striking that the comparison points for Shakespeare’s achievement in the poems praising him in the Folio are from the long past: he outdoes Lyly, Kyd and Marlowe in a dramatist rollcall from a generation ago, but there is no mention of more recent rivals and co-authors, such as Fletcher or Thomas Middleton.

The publication of the book was a commercial collaboration between Shakespeare’s fellow actors and long-term friends John Heminge and Henry Condell, and the stationers Blount and Jaggard. Heminge and Condell had been left money for mourning rings in Shakespeare’s will and it has been speculated that they understood their job of gathering their friend’s literary works together as an act of memorial and homage. Perhaps inadvertently, however, they also alienated these plays from their original home on stage. The means by which Shakespeare’s plays came to be printed, during his own lifetime as well as afterwards, are a subject of debate, but what is clear is that there was a readership for Shakespeare alongside the appetite for performances of his plays. Perhaps the same people bought playbooks and went to the theatre, or perhaps print reached readers who could not go to the theatre, for reasons of distance or respectability. Perhaps there were specific versions of the plays actively intended for readers who could spend time on their dense poetry; perhaps the differences between early versions of Shakespeare’s texts have more to do with theatrical contingencies. There is still a good deal that scholars do not agree on about the process of stage to page. What does seem clear, however, is that this large format 1623 edition is intended for the study rather than the theatre. ‘Read him, therefore; and again and again’, Heminge and Condell urge ‘the great variety of readers’ in their dedicatory letter, ‘and if then you do not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger not to understand him’. Stupidity or incomprehension is clearly established as the only reason not to enjoy reading Shakespeare.

The publication of the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays can be seen both as the attempt to create the demand for a readerly edition of his plays and the response to that demand. Were they successful? It depends how we interpret the fact of a second edition in 1632. Presumably this suggested that all the copies had been sold, but nine years is a long time to recoup an investment. Many works of the period did not have second editions, so the fact of the Second Folio suggests a level of commercial success. However, there are other comparable texts which look more immediately marketable: Matheo Aleman’s The Rogue, also published by Blount in 1623, had a second edition in 1628 and a third in 1633.

The print shop

William Jaggard was a senior businessman in London’s printing community and had a long term contract with the theatres to produce advertising playbills. He had previously published a collection of poems by several poets including Shakespeare, under the title The Passionate Pilgrim. Jaggard attributed this volume to Shakespeare in 1599, but a second edition in 1612 withdrew this claim, apparently because the author was not willing to carry the attribution. He had also been involved in a short-lived attempt to produce a serial edition of Shakespearean plays with another stationer, Thomas Pavier. These reprinted volumes were issued in 1619, but often carried fake dates suggesting they were older stock, and this subterfuge was used to condemn them as pirated copies, printed without authority. This ruse made Jaggard’s central role in the collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays a few years later seem rather unexpected. The 1619 plays now seem more like a marketing pilot for the collected edition, an explanation that places Jaggard as the crucial agent of Shakespeare’s posthumous print reputation.

By the time his print shop in the Barbican took on the collected plays volume, Jaggard was blind. His son Isaac was taking on the major responsibility for the running of the business. Perhaps this large volume was part of Isaac’s ambitious plans: not only did the Jaggards take on this substantial printing task, but Isaac also joined Edward Blount as publisher, investing in the costs and sharing in subsequent profits. Having been first announced, in a list of English books advertised at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1622, as ‘Playes written by Mr. William Shakespeare, all in one volume, printed by Isaac Jaggard, in fol’, the book took a further year to be printed. Its progress through the press was interrupted by many obstacles, including access to copies of the plays, rights disputes with other stationers, bread-and butter printing jobs and pressure from other clients. The largely forgotten, but rather grand, topographical book by William Burton called The Description of Leicestershire took over Jaggard’s presses for weeks, and Thomas Wilson’s lengthy Christian Dictionary also elbowed out Shakespeare’s plays for a time. Just weeks before the book that would immortalise him, as well as its author, appeared on London’s bookstalls, William Jaggard died.

The printing process required organisation, dexterity, strength and coordination. One major challenge was gathering the plays together. The texts needed to be sourced: one group from the manuscripts of the theatre company and the other from earlier printed editions, the rights to which needed to be negotiated with their holders. We might assume that it was the job of Heminge and Condell to supply theatre scripts: the first plays in the first section of the book, the comedies, are a run of previously unpublished titles, and perhaps these were the texts that were readiest to hand to make a start. Blount and Jaggard must have begun the discussions with other stationers to acquire the rights to the published plays. Some of these had been reprinted several times and must have commanded a significant price.

There is a hiccup in the progress of setting and printing the history plays that may have been caused by Matthew Law, who probably thought he had a strong hand with his rights to the popular Henry IV, Part 1 and Richard III. It seems that the publication of Troilus and Cressida was delayed, almost terminally, by the stationer Henry Whalley. The catalogue page of the First Folio does not include this title and plans for the volume seem to have accepted that this play could not be secured for the collection. Analysis of the pagination of extant copies reveals that Timon of Athens was drafted in as a late replacement. The earliest copies of the book to be sold in late 1623 may well not have included Troilus: since books were usually sold as a looseleaf package of papers for binding to the purchaser’s own requirements, it was relatively simple to insert an additional play. Many copies show that owners wrote the missing title in between the histories and tragedies sections on the catalogue page.

Some of the copy for the printers to use in setting the type for the Folio would have been printed texts, sometimes marked with revisions. Others came from the hand of the playhouse scribe, Ralph Crane, whose clear, printed texts may well have given us some of the features we think of as distinctly authorial, such as the use of hyphenated compound words like ‘tempest-tossed’. Yet other copies must have come from authorial or other manuscripts, often causing difficulties of deciphering. One example is the name of the princess Imogen in Cymbeline. This name does not appear before 1623 and in the play’s sources is ‘Innogen’: the most plausible explanation is that one of Jaggard’s compositors – the print workers who set type in lines from copy text – misread a double ‘n’ for an ‘m’. There are other points in the text where compositors have intervened and erred. One influential study of the printing of the First Folio in the 1960s used patterns of spelling to identify the work of different compositors, each named with a letter of the alphabet. Compositor E was seen to have a high error rate and this hesitant work has plausibly been identified as the first steps in printing by the Jaggards’ teenaged apprentice, John Leason.

Textual authority

The First Folio is printed on linen paper imported from France (there was no high-grade paper mill producing print-quality paper in England at this time). Paper was the major expense in book publication; the First Folio texts have been effectively distributed across its characteristic double-column layout for maximum economy. The folio format, often understood as bestowing a certain status on the contents by allying it with the form of bibles, legal texts or atlases, was also efficient. Less well ordered are the prefatory poems and other material: there is a suggestion of randomness in their organisation, and a good deal of blank, so wasted, paper. It does not seem as if anyone edited the texts consistently for publication. One feature offers a good example: the ‘List of the Actors’ that forms part of a handful, but not all, of the plays in the volume. Such a list was becoming a standard prefatory document in printed plays by this time, but no one – not the Jaggards or Blount, neither of whom were highly experienced in play publication, nor Heminge and Condell, whose expertise was the theatre – identified this need and prepared the plays in a consistent style. Shakespeare’s First Folio is often compared to, and may have been modelled on, Ben Jonson’s Works, which appeared in 1616. But Jonson’s control-freakery means that he is all over the printed text, checking, standardising, rewriting, in order to manage his literary status in print; Shakespeare’s book has had nothing like this detailed overview and attention.

Something similar can be seen around the practice of proofreading. Most publication in the hand-press period worked by printing a proof sheet and continuing to print copies while it was checked. If changes were needed, the press was stopped, the type untied, corrected, retied and printing resumed; the resulting copies of the book could have either a corrected or uncorrected page. There are around 500 press variants in the First Folio representing such corrections, a strikingly low figure for a book of over 900 pages, 800,000 words, and hundreds of obvious errors. Some marked-up proof sheets have survived by being gathered into copies of the book, in the frugal world of the print shop, and these show us that the practice of checking seems to have focused on obvious typos. There is no evidence that the printed text was checked against copy. The majority of the corrected sheets are from the last part of the book to be printed, the tragedies: this seems to have been where Leason cut his teeth.

Heminge and Condell’s introductory letter stresses that the collection is complete. Not only does it present authorised versions of those plays previously, but badly, published, ‘deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious imposters’, but also ‘all the rest, absolute in their numbers’. It is a compelling claim, but, like much else in their prose, more advertorial than strictly factual. Setting aside the poems that do not seem to have figured in this collection, the First Folio nevertheless does not include Pericles, already in print, or The Two Noble Kinsmen, printed for the first time in 1634. Nor does it include the now-lost Love’s Labour’s Won, or Cardenio, and their absence is decisive for their non-survival. If it weren’t for Henry Whalley, the Folio probably would not have included Timon of Athens, which presumably would also have disappeared (in fact, we would not even know it had disappeared since there is no other documentary record of its existence). Troilus and Cressida makes it just in time. The monumental collected edition is in fact a best-shot, a considerable logistical effort, rather than an aesthetic choice. It is later ages that have conferred on it a textual authority that it can scarcely claim for itself.

400 years on

The first known purchaser of the First Folio, in December 1623, was the Kentish gentleman Edward Dering. Keen on amateur theatricals, his account book lists scores of other, unnamed playbooks that he collected on visits to London: there is a contemporary dramatic manuscript of a combined version of the two parts of Henry IV made under his commission, perhaps for domestic performance. But Dering is an exception to the rule. Most early purchasers were keen to add the book to their library, not to produce theatre from it. The stage has a short memory, print a long one: the First Folio is the vital means by which Shakespeare’s works have been transmitted into the modern age. But its weight and its density on the page belies the kinetic energy of its contents. The irony of the book’s role in preserving Shakespeare is the danger of its deadening him, too: part of the legacy of the book is the sense that Shakespeare is hard, serious work. A contemporary mocked Ben Jonson for calling his plays ‘Works’: Shakespeare’s own collected plays, too, have always had a whiff of the study.

The 400th anniversary of the First Folio is a mixed moment. The 1923 tercentenary was marked with celebrations, ‘duly commemorated’, as the Manchester Guardian put it, ‘throughout the Empire and in America’. Theatres, universities, learned societies and libraries all did their bit. At a luncheon party given by the Worshipful Company of Stationers, the toast was ‘Shakespearean scholarship’. Some of this is familiar in 2023. After a run of anniversaries in 2014 (450 years since Shakespeare’s birth) and 2016 (400 years since his death), celebrating an expensive book runs counter to current priorities to extend audiences and engagement, and to the assumption that Shakespeare’s true home is the theatre. Nevertheless, the opportunity to see one of these charismatic books is an encounter not just with Shakespeare himself, but with the group of artisans, actors and investors that preserved his works for posterity.

Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Hertford College. The second edition of her The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio (Bodleian) is published in April 2023.