William Shakespeare (1564-1616) may have been the greatest writer in the history of the English language, but that reputation never would have come about without the effort of his two fellow actors and closest friends, John Heminges and Henry Condell, who labored for years “onely to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow alive, as was our Shakespeare, my humble offer of his playes.”
Heminges and Condell spent years gathering and editing 36 of the late writer’s plays ( but not the sonnets or poems). Before that point, only half of the dramatic works had been published, and those that had were issued in a small format and rife with errors. Some versions didn’t even credit Shakespeare as the playwright. As managers Shakespeare’s company, however, Heminges and Condell had access to his surviving handwritten scripts and prompt-books. At last, they wrote, readers would have the great dramatist’s plays as they were actually performed, “where before, you were abused with diverse stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors…”.
So in 1621, his friends began to supervise a fine printing that was done by Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount. Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies first appeared in 1623. Scholars called it the First Folio, in reference to its original appearance and its large page size.
Given that Shakespeare’s original play manuscripts do not survive, the air’s scrupulously prepared version of his comedies, histories, and tragedies remain the closest thing to Shakespeare’s original words for the stage. Without the Folio, the world would not have Macbeth, Julius Ceasar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. The book’s portrait of Shakespeare (engraved by Martin Droeshout) on the title page may have also been the most authentic likeness extant, so his face was preserved as well.
The book’s original price was one pound for an unbound copy and two or three pounds for a bound version, a substantial amount in those days.
About 30% of the approximately printed are known to have survived. The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, Meisei University in Japan, and the British Library all have multiple copies. Considered one of the world’s most valuable printed books, a copy sold at auction in 2001 for 6.16 million, when Stephen Massey the book appraiser called it “the most documented book in the world.”
Although Shakespeare’s work has undergone continual new translations to make it more understandable to contemporary audiences, this would not have been possible without the First Folio.
