Shakespeare's folio

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Title page of the first Shakespeare folio from 1623

Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies is the first complete edition of William Shakespeare's dramas, which appeared in 1623, seven years after his death, in folio book format with a spine height of approx. 40 cm. It is also known as the First Folio . It contains a total of 36 dramas by Shakespeare: 14 comedies ( comedies ), 10 pieces of history ( histories ) and 12 tragedies ( tragedies ).

It was published by his colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell (the spelling of the names is uncertain and varied even then, e.g. Iohn Heminge , Henrie Condell ), to whom Shakespeare must have been particularly connected because he had money in his will for the purchase of mourning rings left ( mourning rings were to the 18th century, popular jewelry that should remember deceased).

The pressure

Comparison of the "to be or not to be" sequence in the first editions of Hamlet : Bad Quarto (1603), Good Quarto (1604) and First Folio (1623)

The folio edition was titled Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories and Tragedies and was printed in about 750 copies by William and Isaac Jaggard and cost 15 shillings for an unbound copy and £ 1 for a hardback. There are still 234 copies today, two thirds of them in the USA and of these 82 in the Folger Shakespeare Library , Washington.

There are no fewer than 40 different variants of this first folio edition. This is a consequence of the manufacturing process at that time. While printing was already in progress, the individual pages were proofread. If errors were detected, they were corrected, but the already finished, defective pages were also used. The resulting volumes are each a mixture of different corrected and uncorrected pages.

Facsimile editions printed today are ideally put together from the best pages of the still existing folio volumes. The most important edition is the Norton Facsimile by Charlton Hinman from 1968.

A number of Shakespeare plays had already appeared in four- high editions, but with this book the attempt was made for the first time to bring all the dramas together in an authorized version. In this respect, the folio is today the most reliable text in literary studies and serves as the basis for modern editions, even if some more or less carefully printed copies had already appeared before, during Shakespeare's lifetime.

Ben Jonson's role model

Acting texts were seen less as literature in the 16th and early 17th centuries than as raw material for theater performances, comparable to a film script, because here, too, consumers are usually only interested in the film, not the text on paper.

It was Ben Jonson who published his own plays for the first time in 1616 in an anthology of over a thousand pages and who also called them not just plays , but works . It was a bold innovation, in keeping with Jonson's assessment of his own importance in cultural life.

Shakespeare's Folio was the second such venture, and his colleagues enlisted Ben Jonson's support for it. A literary work at that time was characterized by the fact that it had one or more forewords and a dedication. And so the First Folio was able to demonstrate these attributes. Ben Jonson wrote the Foreword To the Reader , and the collection of dramas is introduced by a few poems of praise, including the famous lines by Ben Jonson in which he describes Shakespeare as a timeless poet (He was not of an age but for all time). It is dedicated to the Earl of Pembroke and the Earl of Montgomery , as well as the large and varied readership.

In another preface, Heminge and Condell report on their own experiences with William Shakespeare and tell how mind and hand worked together in his work, and how he put his thoughts on paper with such an easy hand that he never had to correct anything.

In addition, the book is adorned with a portrait of Shakespeare on the title page (not on the outside, the leather cover could not be printed), an engraving by Martin Droeshout (pronounced [ ˈdruːʃaʊt ]). In addition to the presumably authentic Chandos portrait, this is the only contemporary picture of Shakespeare that we know. Other images are either imaginary or inspired copies of the Droeshout portrait.

Editorial considerations

Memorial to Shakespeare with tribute to printers John Heminge and Henry Condell on the plinth

The book of the First Folio , (in the literature as F1 known), includes 36 dramas of Shakespeare, after the introduction of fellow actors Heminges and Condell collected (collected) were and at least five members of the printer Guild (stationers) William Jaggard, his son Isaac Jaggard, Edward Blount, William Aspley, and John Smethwick must have been printed. William Jaggard's involvement appeared unusual to some experts, as not only is his rather problematic relationship to Shakespeare's works known, but also his suspicious compilation in “ The Passionate Pilgrim ” 1599, 1612 and 1619, of ten false Shakespeare plays (some with false Dates and front pages). It is assumed that the printing of the First Folio was such a daunting task, even for the circumstances at the time, that it could not be mastered without the experience of Jaggard's printing house. (William Jaggard was old, weak and blind in 1623 and died a month before the First Folio was completed ). The First Folio cannot be regarded as a fundamentally better or more authoritative text than the previous quartos. In many of the pieces in the First Folio , omitted lines, misprints and text falsifications can be found as well as in the quartos.

It is not known how Heminges and Condell obtained half of Shakespeare's previously unpublished works. As far as we know today, the list of works is not complete; there are no dramas such as Pericles and The Two Noble Cousins . Nor do we know how many other plays Shakespeare wrote that were not published and are lost. But we have to assume that the editors took the greatest possible care in preparing this commemorative edition for their famous colleague.

The folio represents one of the most important books of English, perhaps even of all literature. Without it, we would not know even half of Shakespeare's plays today. A second edition of the folio appeared in 1632 ( Second Folio , known in literary studies as F2 ), the third ( Third Folio F3 , which first contains the drama Pericles ) in 1663, and the fourth (F4) in 1685.

The list of pieces

Table of contents with structure of the pieces, page [xvii]

The listing of all 36 dramas by William Shakespeare in the first-folio edition in their original order and spelling.

COMEDIES :

  1. The Tempest
  2. The Two Gentlemen of Verona
  3. The Merry Wiues of Windsor
  4. Measvre, For Measure
  5. The Comedie of Errors
  6. Much adoe about nothing
  7. Loues Labor's lost
  8. A Midsummer Nights Dreame
  9. The Merchant of Venice
  10. As you like it
  11. The Taming of the Shrew
  12. All's Well, that Ends Well
  13. Twelfe Night
  14. The Winters Tale


HISTORIES :

  1. The life and death of King John
  2. The life and death of King Richard the Second
  3. The First Part of Henry the Fourth
  4. The Second Part of Henry the Fourth
  5. The Life of Henry the Fift
  6. The first part of Henry the Sixt
  7. The second part of Henry the Sixt
  8. The third part of Henry the Sixt
  9. The Tragedie of Richard the Third
  10. The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eight


TRAGEDIES :

  1. The Tragedy of Coriolanus
  2. The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus
  3. The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet
  4. The Life of Timon of Athens
  5. The Tragedy of Julius Caesar
  6. The Tragedy of Macbeth
  7. The Tragedy of Hamlet
  8. The Tragedy of King Lear
  9. The Tragedy of Othello
  10. The Tragedy of Anthonie and Cleopatra
  11. The Tragedy of Cymbeline


The names of the main characters in all these pieces :
( The Names of the principall Actors in all thesis Playes. )

The Tragedie of Troylus and Cressida is not mentioned in the table of contents, but is in the edition between the histories and the tragedies. The piece was probably only inserted there afterwards, after the rest of the book had already been set.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Peter Blayney: Introduction , in: The First Folio of Shakespeare . The Norton Facsimile. Second edition, ed. By Peter WM Blayney, Norton, New York, 1996, p. xxxiii.
  2. ^ Anthony James West: The Shakespeare first folio. I. An account of the First Folio based on its sales and prices, 1623-2000 , Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, 2001, p. 8.
  3. ↑ “Isle of Bute” folio, discovered April 2016. Three- volume copy of the First Folio owned by Isaac Reed.
  4. ^ Anthony James West: The Shakespeare first folio. II. A new worldwide census of first folios. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2003.
  5. ^ WW Greg: The Printing of Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida" in the First Folio . In: Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 45 (1951), pp. 273-282.

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