Information about First Folio

The First Folio is the term applied by modern scholars to the first published collection of William Shakespeare's plays; its actual title is Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies.^[1]

Printed in folio format and containing 36 plays (see list of Shakespeare's plays), it was prepared by Shakespeare's colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell in 1623, about seven years after Shakespeare's death. Although eighteen of Shakespeare's plays had been published in quarto prior to 1623, the First Folio is the only reliable text for about twenty of the plays, and a valuable source text even for many of those previously published. The Folio includes all of the plays generally accepted to be Shakespeare's, with the exception of Pericles, Prince of Tyre and The Two Noble Kinsmen. It does not include his poems.

Printing the Book

The contents of the First Folio were compiled by Heminges and Condell, the members of the Stationers Company who published the book were the booksellers Edward Blount and the father/son team of William and Isaac Jaggard. The Jaggards were printers as well as booksellers, an unusual but not unprecedented combination. William Jaggard has seemed an odd choice by the King's Men, since he had published the questionable collection The Passionate Pilgrim as Shakespeare's, and in 1619 had printed new editions of ten Shakespearean quartos to which he did not have clear rights, some with false dates and title pages. It is thought that the typesetting and printing of the First Folio was such a large job that the King's Men simply needed the capacities of the Jaggards' shop. (At any rate, William Jaggard was old, infirm, and blind by 1623, and died a month before the book went on sale; most of the work in the project must have been done by his son Isaac.)

The First Folio's publishing syndicate also included two stationers who owned the rights to some of the individual plays that had been previously printed: William Aspley (Much Ado About Nothing and Henry IV, Part 2) and John Smethwick (Love's Labor's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet). Smethwick had been a business partner of another Jaggard, William's brother John.

The actual printing of the Folio was likely done between April and October 1621, and then, after a break for other work, from the autumn of 1622 to autumn in the following year. The book was on sale by the end of 1623; the Bodleian Library, in Oxford, received its copy in early 1624 (which it subsequently sold for £24 as a superseded edition when the Third Folio became available in 1664).^[2]

The Contents

The thirty-six plays of the First Folio occur in the order given below; plays that had never been published before 1623 are marked with a ✓. Each play is followed by the type of source used, as determined by bibliographical research.^[3]

[Some definitions are needed. The term "foul papers" refers to Shakespeare's working drafts of a play; when completed, a transcript or "fair copy" of the foul papers would be prepared, by the author or by a scribe. Such a manuscript would have to be heavily annotated with accurate and detailed stage directions and all the other data needed for performance, and then could serve as a "prompt-book," to be used by the prompter to guide a performance of the play. Any of these manuscripts, in any combination, could be used as a source for a printed text. On rare occasions a printed text might be annotated for use as a prompt-book, as may have been true in the case of A Midsummer Night's Dream.]

Comedies

• 1 The Tempest ✓ — the play was set into type from a manuscript prepared by Ralph Crane, a professional scrivener employed by the King's Men. Crane produced a high-quality result, with formal act/scene divisions, frequent use of parentheses and hyphenated forms, and other identifiable features.
• 2 The Two Gentlemen of Verona ✓ — another transcript by Ralph Crane.
• 3 The Merry Wives of Windsor — another transcript by Ralph Crane.
• 4 Measure for Measure ✓ — probably another Ralph Crane transcript.
• 5 The Comedy of Errors ✓ — probably typeset from Shakespeare's "foul papers," lightly annotated.
• 6 Much Ado About Nothing — typeset from a copy of the quarto, lightly annotated.
• 7 Love's Labor's Lost — typeset from a corrected copy of Q1.
• 8 A Midsummer Night's Dream — typeset from a copy of Q2, well-annotated, possibly used as a prompt-book.
• 9 The Merchant of Venice — typeset from a lightly edited and corrected copy of Q1.
• 10 As You Like It ✓ — from a quality manuscript, lightly annotated by a prompter.
• 11 The Taming of the Shrew ✓ — typeset from Shakespeare's "foul papers," somewhat annotated, perhaps as preparation for use as a prompt-book.
• 12 All's Well That Ends Well ✓ — probably from Shakespeare's "foul papers" or a manuscript of them.
• 13 Twelfth Night ✓ — typeset either from a prompt-book or a transcript of one.
• 14 The Winter's Tale ✓ — another transcript by Ralph Crane.

Histories

• 15 King John ✓ — uncertain: a prompt-book, or "foul papers."
• 16 Richard II — typeset from Q3 and Q5, corrected against a prompt-book.
• 17 Henry IV, Part 1 — typeset from an edited copy of Q5.
• 18 Henry IV, Part 2 — uncertain: some combination of manuscript and quarto text.
• 19 Henry V — typeset from Shakespeare's "foul papers."
• 20 Henry VI, Part 1 ✓ — likely from an annotated transcript of the author's manuscript.
• 21 Henry VI, Part 2 — probably a Shakespearean manuscript used as a prompt-book.
• 22 Henry VI, Part 3 — like 2H6, probably a Shakespearean prompt-book.
• 23 Richard III — a difficult case: probably typeset partially from Q3, and partially from Q6 corrected against a manuscript (maybe "foul papers").
• 24 Henry VIII ✓ — typeset from a fair copy of the authors' manuscript.

Tragedies

• 25 Troilus and Cressida — probably typeset from the quarto, corrected with Shakespeare's "foul papers."
• 26 Coriolanus ✓ — set from a high-quality authorial transcript.
• 27 Titus Andronicus — typeset from a copy of Q3 that might have served as a prompt-book.
• 28 Romeo and Juliet — in essence a reprint of Q3.
• 29 Timon of Athens ✓— set from Shakespeare's foul papers or a transcript of them.
• 30 Julius Caesar ✓ — set from a prompt-book, or a transcript of a prompt-book.
• 31 Macbeth ✓ — probably set from a prompt-book.
• 32 Hamlet — one of the most difficult problems in the First Folio: probably typeset from some combination of Q2 and manuscript sources.
• 33 King Lear — a difficult problem: probably set mainly from Q1 but with reference to Q2, and corrected against a prompt-book.
• 34 Othello — another difficult problem: probably typeset from Q1, corrected with a quality manuscript.
• 35 Anthony and Cleopatra ✓ — possibly "foul papers" or a transcript of them.
• 36 Cymbeline ✓ — possibly another Ralph Crane transcript, or else the official prompt-book.

Troilus and Cressida was originally intended to follow Romeo and Juliet, but the typesetting was stopped, probably due to a conflict over the rights to the play; it was later inserted as the first of the Tragedies, when the rights question was resolved.

Compositors

As far as modern scholarship has been able to determine,^[4] the First Folio texts were set into type by five compositors, with different spelling habits, peculiarities, and levels of competence. Researchers have labelled them A through E, A being the most accurate, and E an apprentice who had significant difficulties in dealing with manuscript copy. Their shares in typesetting the Folio break down like this (the + sign representing half a page):

	Comedies	Histories	Tragedies	Total
A	74	80	40	194
B	143	89	213	445
C	79	22	19	120
D	35+	0	0	35+
E	0	0	71+	71+

Compositor E was most likely one John Leason, whose apprenticeship contract dated only from Nov. 4, 1622. One of the other four might have been a John Shakespeare, of Warwickshire, who apprenticed with Jaggard in 1610-17. ("Shakespeare" was a common name in Warwickshire in that era.)

First Folio Technique

Some Shakespeare directors believe that modern editions of Shakespeare's plays, which are heavily edited and changed to be more readable, remove possible actor cues in the Folio, such as capitalization, different punctuation and even the changing or removal of whole words.

W. W. Greg has argued that Edward Knight, the "book-keeper" or "book-holder" (prompter) of the King's Men, did the actual proofreading of the manuscript sources for the First Folio. Knight is known to have been responsible for maintaining and annotating the company's scripts, and making sure that the cuts and changes ordered by the Master of the Revels were complied with.

Some pages of the First Folio—134 out of the total of 900—were proofread and corrected while the job of printing the book was ongoing. As a result, the Folio differs from modern books in that individual copies vary considerably in their typographical errors. There were about 500 corrections made to the Folio in this way.^[5] These corrections by the typesetters, however, consisted only of simple typos, clear mistakes in their own work; the evidence suggests that they almost never referred back to their manuscript sources, let alone tried to resolve any problems in those sources. The well-known cruxes in the First Folio texts were beyond the typesetters' capacity to correct.

Modern sales

The First Folio's original price was 1 pound, the equivalent of about £95-£110 or US$170 to $190 today. ^[6]

It is believed that around 1,000 copies of the First Folio were printed. The most recent census (1995-2000) records 228 still in existence, including five copies held by the British Library. The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. holds the world's largest collection with 79 copies.

It is one of the most valuable printed books: a copy sold at Christie's in New York in October 2001 made $5.6m hammer price (then £3.73m). Oriel College, Oxford raised a conjectured £3.5 million from the sale of its First Folio to Sir Paul Getty in 2003.

On 13 July 2006, a complete copy of the First Folio owned by Dr Williams's Library was auctioned at Sotheby's auction house. The book, which was in its original 17th century binding, sold for £2.5 million hammer price, less than Sotheby's top estimate of £3.5 million.^[7] This copy is one of only about 40 remaining complete copies (most of the existing copies are incomplete); only one other copy of the book remains in private ownership.

See also

•  • [ e] Early Editions of William Shakespeare's Works
Shakespeare's Folios and Quartos
Foul papers • Bad quarto • First quarto • Second quarto • First folio • Second folio • False folio

Notes

References

• Greg, W. W. The Shakespeare First Folio: Its Bibliographical and Textual History. London, Oxford University Press, 1955.
• Hinman, Charlton. The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio. Oxford, the Clarendon Press, 1963.
• Pollard, Alfred W. The Foundations of Shakespeare's Text. London, Oxford University Press, 1923.
• Walker, Alice. Textual Problems of the First Folio. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1953.
• Willoughby, Edwin Eliott. The Printing of the First Folio of Shakespeare. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1932.

External links

• First Folio - plain vanilla text from Project Gutenberg
• Of Folios and Facsimiles - A discussion of available facsimiles of the First Folio.
• Landmarks in Printing: Shakespeare's First Folio - British Library
• The Internet Shakespeare Editions maintains a collection of full colour facsimilies of the folios and quartos. Full text transcriptions are also available.