OT The Shakespeare First Folio - Times article of 18 Feb 2023
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I found this article in a back edition of The Times newspaper and it gave me some surprising and interesting information about the First Folio. The new owners of the new Folio Society Limited Edition might find it of interest:
At 400 years old, the First Folio still hasn’t given up all its secrets. The first printed collection of Shakespeare’s plays turns 400 this year. Richard Morrison finds out what it has to tell us about the Bard.
With a gesture not unlike a medieval bishop unveiling a sacred relic, Peter Ross, the principal librarian of the Guildhall Library in the City of London, opens the ancient book lying on the table between us. “This is it,” he says, his voice hushed in reverence. “It’s the copy of the First Folio belonging to the city in which Shakespeare lived and worked, kept in a library just a few hundred feet from where the book was printed and the shop where it would have been sold.”
He doesn’t add “and this year is its 400th birthday”, but he could have done.
The First Folio was the first printed collection of Shakespeare’s plays, lovingly compiled by two of Shakespeare’s actor colleagues, John Heminge and Henry Condell, in 1623, seven years after the playwright died. It is undoubtedly one of the two or three most influential books ever published in the English language. That’s not just because it did so much to shape that language. It is also the only source we have for 18 of Shakespeare’s plays, including Macbeth, Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest and Julius Caesar.
About 750 First Folios were printed in 1623 and sold for a pound each (there were further editions later in the century). Of those original 750, 230 are known still to exist. If you want to buy one today, it will set you back a lot more than a quid. A copy was sold at Christie’s in New York in 2020 for almost $10 million, making it the most expensive work of literature to be auctioned. One institution holds no fewer than 82 First Folios. That’s the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, founded by a 19th-century American oil tycoon who started buying up First Folios at the very moment when impoverished English aristocrats were flogging them. Other copies continue to turn up in the most unlikely places including, in recent years, the library of a Jesuit college in France, a stately home on the Scottish island of Bute, and in the attic of a woman who died, intestate and without any close relatives, in Tottenham, north London.
The remarkable thing about all these First Folios is that few are exactly the same. “One of the paradoxes about this very ambitiously produced book, 950 pages long, is that no part of the considerable investment of money or labour seems to have been devoted to a really thorough check of the errors,” says Emma Smith, the Oxford professor who is arguably the world’s leading Shakespeare scholar. “As the presses were rolling, the printers would read the pages as quickly as possible, spot whatever mistakes they could, stop the presses, make the changes, and restart. So the copies are all different mixtures of corrected and uncorrected pages.”
That’s one reason why, despite its huge importance, the First Folio is not generally regarded as “holy writ” by Shakespeare scholars, and particularly not by actors and directors. Another reason is that where we have earlier versions of the same plays (published separately in editions called quartos), they often differ considerably from the text in the First Folio.
“King Lear is a famous example,” Smith says. “There are hundreds of minor differences between the quarto text from 1608 and the Folio of 1623, and one or two quite big ones. The quarto, for instance, includes a scene where Lear, in his madness on the heath, sets up a mock trial of his absent daughters. That’s not in the First Folio, but it’s still often done. It’s very powerful theatrically.”
Many quartos date from when Shakespeare was still alive, but that doesn’t necessarily give them greater authority. “There are good quartos and bad quartos,” Ross says. “There’s a notorious quarto of Hamlet that reads as if someone — an actor or member of the audience — had tried to write down the ‘To be or not to be’ speech from memory. You will laugh at how bad it is.”
He’s not wrong. It starts: “To be, or not to be, I there’s the point,/ To die, to sleepe, is that all? I all/ No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes.”
Why, though, does the First Folio differ so much from the quartos? After all, it was an attempt by two colleagues who clearly revered Shakespeare to bring together his dramas in one coherent volume.
“You have to remember that those two actors, Heminge and Condell, were working from a combination of sources,” Smith says. “Some sources were quartos, perhaps with marked-up emendations, but a large number must have been playhouse scripts of some sort — probably the prompt book.” The prompt book would have contained everyone’s lines, whereas the actors worked from cue scripts containing only their lines and the immediately preceding ones.
This uncertainty about the sources for the First Folio hasn’t stopped some theatre practitioners from arguing that the book contains vital clues to how Shakespeare wanted his lines spoken. Two seasoned champions of that approach are Patrick Tucker and Christine Ozanne, whose Original Shakespeare Company flourished in the Nineties. They believe that every aspect of the First Folio — from punctuation and the capitalisation of certain words to the way lines and half-lines are typeset — are indications of where Shakespeare wanted actors to breathe, to move and even to insert stage business.
“The way the First Folio is laid out is actually a way of giving instructions to actors,” Tucker says. “If you have a half-line, then another half-line, then that is Shakespeare’s way of saying ‘take a pause’. If there are words in capitals — capitals that every modern editor strips out — that’s the writer telling us that those words need significant emphasis.
“And it’s the same with the punctuation. In a modern edition of Antony and Cleopatra I counted over 1,000 punctuation changes from how the First Folio presents the play. That’s madness.”
Perhaps, but the unarguable fact is that Shakespeare had no part in producing the First Folio. He was dead. “True,” Tucker counters, “but it was prepared by actors who were members of his company and had been in his plays. If the prologue of Romeo and Juliet is missing from the First Folio, which it is, I think that’s because the actors discovered that the play works better without it, which it does. That way, the audience doesn’t know what’s coming. So they printed the First Folio without it.”
As one might expect, Tucker’s theory has its detractors. “The evidence from other sources is that early 17th-century printers used punctuation very freely indeed,” Smith points out. “They don’t set punctuation as they find it. The same with line spacing and capitalisation. So I wouldn’t have much faith in punctuation and capitalisation as a direct line to how Shakespeare wanted actors to breathe or where to place the emphasis.”
Ross agrees. “We know that up to five compositors worked on the First Folio. Each had his own style of punctuation. And they would space out or jam up text, depending on how well they had estimated the paper they needed for a particular play. So the ‘Two houses’ opening of Romeo and Juliet may well have been left out by accident, because they had miscalculated the space.”
Of course, many of these arguments would be settled, or never started in the first place, if Shakespeare’s original handwritten scripts had survived. Not one has. Surprisingly, perhaps, Smith doesn’t regret that. “I think their absence has been very enabling,” she argues. “The sense that these plays have, in some very important ways, left their author behind — even by the time the First Folio was compiled — is probably the reason why we have been able to do them in so many different ways. If we knew exactly what Shakespeare intended, that might tie us up more.”
Erica Whyman, the acting artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, also emphasises the liberating aspect of not having an indisputable “authentic” version of the text. “Creating a new play in a working theatre environment, there are always lots of changes in the rehearsal process,” she says. “Then, after you have performed it a few times, you want to rewrite it again. That’s the world Shakespeare was in. He wouldn’t have recognised this notion of textual purity. And when we find different words in different sources, that’s a useful reminder that these words are free for us to interpret now.”
There’s also evidence that Shakespeare’s second thoughts were often about making plot, characters and motivation less clear-cut — not the opposite. “We can see that in an early source for Othello,” Smith says. “Iago is definitely in love with Desdemona, and the great modern question — what was his motive for destroying Othello? — is easily answered. But Shakespeare removed that certainty, and it seems totally deliberate to me. He wanted to make something perfectly straightforward more mysterious and intriguing.”
Four centuries on from the publication of the First Folio, is there much left for scholars such as Smith to research? Surely anything worthwhile that could be discovered has been discovered by now.
“Oh, there are still hugely disputed areas,” Smith replies. “There’s the whole matter of how far he collaborated with other authors. Then there’s the question of how far he was interested in transferring his plays into book form, and what the intention was. Were the longer versions of the plays primarily meant to be read, rather than performed?
“Mainly, though, the fact that Shakespeare is still being performed in different ways all the time, still inspiring novels and movies, makes him eternally interesting for scholars. He’s a constantly moving target, and that’s energising.”
At 400 years old, the First Folio still hasn’t given up all its secrets. The first printed collection of Shakespeare’s plays turns 400 this year. Richard Morrison finds out what it has to tell us about the Bard.
With a gesture not unlike a medieval bishop unveiling a sacred relic, Peter Ross, the principal librarian of the Guildhall Library in the City of London, opens the ancient book lying on the table between us. “This is it,” he says, his voice hushed in reverence. “It’s the copy of the First Folio belonging to the city in which Shakespeare lived and worked, kept in a library just a few hundred feet from where the book was printed and the shop where it would have been sold.”
He doesn’t add “and this year is its 400th birthday”, but he could have done.
The First Folio was the first printed collection of Shakespeare’s plays, lovingly compiled by two of Shakespeare’s actor colleagues, John Heminge and Henry Condell, in 1623, seven years after the playwright died. It is undoubtedly one of the two or three most influential books ever published in the English language. That’s not just because it did so much to shape that language. It is also the only source we have for 18 of Shakespeare’s plays, including Macbeth, Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest and Julius Caesar.
About 750 First Folios were printed in 1623 and sold for a pound each (there were further editions later in the century). Of those original 750, 230 are known still to exist. If you want to buy one today, it will set you back a lot more than a quid. A copy was sold at Christie’s in New York in 2020 for almost $10 million, making it the most expensive work of literature to be auctioned. One institution holds no fewer than 82 First Folios. That’s the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, founded by a 19th-century American oil tycoon who started buying up First Folios at the very moment when impoverished English aristocrats were flogging them. Other copies continue to turn up in the most unlikely places including, in recent years, the library of a Jesuit college in France, a stately home on the Scottish island of Bute, and in the attic of a woman who died, intestate and without any close relatives, in Tottenham, north London.
The remarkable thing about all these First Folios is that few are exactly the same. “One of the paradoxes about this very ambitiously produced book, 950 pages long, is that no part of the considerable investment of money or labour seems to have been devoted to a really thorough check of the errors,” says Emma Smith, the Oxford professor who is arguably the world’s leading Shakespeare scholar. “As the presses were rolling, the printers would read the pages as quickly as possible, spot whatever mistakes they could, stop the presses, make the changes, and restart. So the copies are all different mixtures of corrected and uncorrected pages.”
That’s one reason why, despite its huge importance, the First Folio is not generally regarded as “holy writ” by Shakespeare scholars, and particularly not by actors and directors. Another reason is that where we have earlier versions of the same plays (published separately in editions called quartos), they often differ considerably from the text in the First Folio.
“King Lear is a famous example,” Smith says. “There are hundreds of minor differences between the quarto text from 1608 and the Folio of 1623, and one or two quite big ones. The quarto, for instance, includes a scene where Lear, in his madness on the heath, sets up a mock trial of his absent daughters. That’s not in the First Folio, but it’s still often done. It’s very powerful theatrically.”
Many quartos date from when Shakespeare was still alive, but that doesn’t necessarily give them greater authority. “There are good quartos and bad quartos,” Ross says. “There’s a notorious quarto of Hamlet that reads as if someone — an actor or member of the audience — had tried to write down the ‘To be or not to be’ speech from memory. You will laugh at how bad it is.”
He’s not wrong. It starts: “To be, or not to be, I there’s the point,/ To die, to sleepe, is that all? I all/ No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes.”
Why, though, does the First Folio differ so much from the quartos? After all, it was an attempt by two colleagues who clearly revered Shakespeare to bring together his dramas in one coherent volume.
“You have to remember that those two actors, Heminge and Condell, were working from a combination of sources,” Smith says. “Some sources were quartos, perhaps with marked-up emendations, but a large number must have been playhouse scripts of some sort — probably the prompt book.” The prompt book would have contained everyone’s lines, whereas the actors worked from cue scripts containing only their lines and the immediately preceding ones.
This uncertainty about the sources for the First Folio hasn’t stopped some theatre practitioners from arguing that the book contains vital clues to how Shakespeare wanted his lines spoken. Two seasoned champions of that approach are Patrick Tucker and Christine Ozanne, whose Original Shakespeare Company flourished in the Nineties. They believe that every aspect of the First Folio — from punctuation and the capitalisation of certain words to the way lines and half-lines are typeset — are indications of where Shakespeare wanted actors to breathe, to move and even to insert stage business.
“The way the First Folio is laid out is actually a way of giving instructions to actors,” Tucker says. “If you have a half-line, then another half-line, then that is Shakespeare’s way of saying ‘take a pause’. If there are words in capitals — capitals that every modern editor strips out — that’s the writer telling us that those words need significant emphasis.
“And it’s the same with the punctuation. In a modern edition of Antony and Cleopatra I counted over 1,000 punctuation changes from how the First Folio presents the play. That’s madness.”
Perhaps, but the unarguable fact is that Shakespeare had no part in producing the First Folio. He was dead. “True,” Tucker counters, “but it was prepared by actors who were members of his company and had been in his plays. If the prologue of Romeo and Juliet is missing from the First Folio, which it is, I think that’s because the actors discovered that the play works better without it, which it does. That way, the audience doesn’t know what’s coming. So they printed the First Folio without it.”
As one might expect, Tucker’s theory has its detractors. “The evidence from other sources is that early 17th-century printers used punctuation very freely indeed,” Smith points out. “They don’t set punctuation as they find it. The same with line spacing and capitalisation. So I wouldn’t have much faith in punctuation and capitalisation as a direct line to how Shakespeare wanted actors to breathe or where to place the emphasis.”
Ross agrees. “We know that up to five compositors worked on the First Folio. Each had his own style of punctuation. And they would space out or jam up text, depending on how well they had estimated the paper they needed for a particular play. So the ‘Two houses’ opening of Romeo and Juliet may well have been left out by accident, because they had miscalculated the space.”
Of course, many of these arguments would be settled, or never started in the first place, if Shakespeare’s original handwritten scripts had survived. Not one has. Surprisingly, perhaps, Smith doesn’t regret that. “I think their absence has been very enabling,” she argues. “The sense that these plays have, in some very important ways, left their author behind — even by the time the First Folio was compiled — is probably the reason why we have been able to do them in so many different ways. If we knew exactly what Shakespeare intended, that might tie us up more.”
Erica Whyman, the acting artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, also emphasises the liberating aspect of not having an indisputable “authentic” version of the text. “Creating a new play in a working theatre environment, there are always lots of changes in the rehearsal process,” she says. “Then, after you have performed it a few times, you want to rewrite it again. That’s the world Shakespeare was in. He wouldn’t have recognised this notion of textual purity. And when we find different words in different sources, that’s a useful reminder that these words are free for us to interpret now.”
There’s also evidence that Shakespeare’s second thoughts were often about making plot, characters and motivation less clear-cut — not the opposite. “We can see that in an early source for Othello,” Smith says. “Iago is definitely in love with Desdemona, and the great modern question — what was his motive for destroying Othello? — is easily answered. But Shakespeare removed that certainty, and it seems totally deliberate to me. He wanted to make something perfectly straightforward more mysterious and intriguing.”
Four centuries on from the publication of the First Folio, is there much left for scholars such as Smith to research? Surely anything worthwhile that could be discovered has been discovered by now.
“Oh, there are still hugely disputed areas,” Smith replies. “There’s the whole matter of how far he collaborated with other authors. Then there’s the question of how far he was interested in transferring his plays into book form, and what the intention was. Were the longer versions of the plays primarily meant to be read, rather than performed?
“Mainly, though, the fact that Shakespeare is still being performed in different ways all the time, still inspiring novels and movies, makes him eternally interesting for scholars. He’s a constantly moving target, and that’s energising.”
