📣 For more lifestyle news, click here to join our WhatsApp Channel and also follow us on Instagram
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
You say Shakespeare never published any of his plays himself. Who brought out the first folio then?
Five years after Shakespeare’s death in 1616, a plan developed to compile, edit and publish all his plays. The book was to be compiled and edited by two of his colleagues and friends, John Heminge and Henry Condell. It was published by booksellers Edward Blount and the father-son team of William and Isaac Jaggard. Heminge and Condell worked with Shakespeare in his theatre company Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later renamed The King’s Men. In Shakespeare’s troupe, Heminge worked in the administration while Condell was a comic actor. They were both left some money in his will. It was probably why they decided to compile the first folio. At the time, it was a risky venture because only a handful of Shakespeare’s plays had been performed. The entire process took 21 months.
Watch What Else Is Making News:
Are all the first folios identical?
Each of them is a hand-pressed book. The process back then never allowed the copies to be identical. There are 420 recorded stop press changes in all, in typeset or if an alphabet got printed upside down. On top of that, there was the issue of the printing rights for the play Troilus and Cressida. We believe the play was printed in a few copies of the first folio before the publishers realised they don’t have the rights to print it. Later, when the rights were acquired, it came into print again. Even the title page that everyone loves, with Shakespeare’s portrait, differs in each copy. It’s likely the printer outsourced it to Martin Droeshout, the artist who made the famous Shakespeare portrait. During the same print run, there are copies where the head looks like it’s floating too much. There are some portraits where shading has been done to bring it together, a twinkle added to the eyes and such. England, in all, has five copies of the first folios.
Were any of Shakespeare’s works printed before the folio?
Many individual plays were earlier published in cheap editions called ‘quarters’. The first one was published in 1594 and 18 plays in total had independent editions. But only in 1598 does his name appear on the title page of his play. For a long time, his name was not supplied on the title page because he wasn’t famous until then. A book of sonnets was published as a collective edition in 1609, with his name on it but it didn’t get follow up editions until 31 years later. It could be because some of Shakespeare’s sonnets were romantic, even erotic. And England was changing at the time.
What are the first folio’s contents?
The volume contains 36 plays but no poetry. The Tempest appears first, even though it is the last of the works he wrote alone. The sources for the text seem varied. Some are reproduced versions that appeared in print, like Romeo and Juliet. Some are reproduced versions substantially different from any other printed editions, like Hamlet and Othello. If it weren’t for the first folio, 18 plays would have been completely lost, including The Tempest. In such cases, we assume the friends worked on the text based on multiple manuscripts and working drafts. But the first folio’s version doesn’t have the famous monologue at the beginning that was there in every print edition before, probably to save paper, which was expensive at the time.
The folio also has a series of poems commissioned especially for the edition, including two by leading poet and dramatist Ben Jonson. The second edition also includes a poem by John Milton, the first time his English language poem were printed.
When did King George III acquire his copy?
King George III, in fact, didn’t get the first folio with the original portrait. The title page has been mended to include the portrait, probably by a bookseller, not with the intention to fool but at the time, there was a trend of mending pages in order to provide the collector with an item as close as possible to the original. King George III must have acquired the book in the early 19th century. But there is no evidence of who owned it before.
Do any samples of Shakespeare’s handwriting survive?
Playwright Anthony Munday wrote a play titled Sir Thomas More, which didn’t clear the censors because it was too political. In order to have it performed, Munday got a number of fellow playwrights to work on the play and revise the text between 1601 and 1604. Three of the pages, it is believed, were worked on by Shakespeare and are most extensive piece of his handwriting to survive.
