The story
The First Folio is the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, published in London in 1623, seven years after his death. Its full title is Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. It was edited by John Heminges and Henry Condell, two actors of Shakespeare's company, the King's Men, and printed by William Jaggard and his son Isaac, with a portrait engraving by Martin Droeshout on the title page and a prefatory poem by Ben Jonson.
Before 1623 about half of the plays had appeared in cheap single-play quartos, some of them badly reproduced from memory. The folio, a large and costly format normally used for serious works, claimed to give the plays as Shakespeare wrote them and arranged them in three groups, comedies, histories and tragedies. It contains 36 plays. Eighteen of these had never been printed before, among them Macbeth, The Tempest, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night, As You Like It and Antony and Cleopatra. The editors did not include Pericles, and the collaborative Two Noble Kinsmen appeared later.
Perhaps 750 copies were printed, and about 235 survive, of which the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington holds 82. A copy is among the most valuable of printed books; one sold at Christie's in 2020 for about 9.98 million dollars. The Folio is also the main evidence cited in the long-running argument that Shakespeare's plays were written by someone else, a view that mainstream scholars reject.
Why it mattered
- The Folio preserved 18 plays that might otherwise have vanished, including Macbeth and The Tempest.
- It established Shakespeare as a national poet whose work deserved the dignity of a folio, a status that his reputation has kept since.
- Every later edition of the plays rests on its text and on the quartos it was compared with.
Sources
- First Folio Britannica
- First Folios at the Folger Folger Shakespeare Library
- Christie's auction of Shakespeare's First Folio NPR
Contested history
Consensus: The First Folio's title page and tributes attribute the plays to William Shakespeare of Stratford and the London stage, and documentary evidence from his lifetime supports this.
- Shakespeare's Life: From the Folger Shakespeare Editions Folger Shakespeare Library
- William Shakespeare Britannica
- Appendix: Authorship of Henry VI, Part 1 Folger Shakespeare Library
- Exploring the evidence that the works of Shakespeare were written by Edward de Vere (Shakespeare Identified at 100) Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship
- Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford Britannica
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