1623
William Shakespeare is generally held to be the greatest writer in the English language. Yet it was seven years after his death before many of his plays appeared in print, in the collection known as the First Folio. Properly titled Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, it contains 36 plays and is the sole source for 18 of them. Its influence is incalculable: Shakespeare, more than any other writer, has changed a language, defined a literary and theatrical tradition, and charted the highs and lows of the human condition.
In their Preface to the First Folio, Hemynge and Condell offer a rare and touching description of their friend:
It had been a thing, we confess, worthy to have been wished, that the Author himself had lived to have set forth, and overseen his own writings … Who, as he was a happy imitator of Nature, was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together; and what he thought, he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers … Read him, therefore; and again, and again: And if then you do not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger, not to understand him.
And in Act V, Scene i, of The Tempest – believed to be one of Shakespeare’s last plays – occurs what some scholars take as the playwright’s own farewell to his craft. The godlike figure of Prospero declares that, with the conflicts of the play resolved, he will no longer practise his magic:
… the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs pluck’d up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ‘em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book …
During Shakespeare’s life (1564–1616), there was comparatively little demand for published plays. The professional theatre was young and regarded by its practitioners and audience alike as the stuff of ephemeral events, not of lasting literature. Although Shakespeare took great care over the publication of his two long poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece during the 1590s, he was typical in demonstrating little interest in preserving his plays: they were practical tools for performance. (By contrast, his friend and rival Ben Jonson appeared rather pretentious in supervising his published Works in 1616.) The plays that did appear were often pirated and inaccurate versions, sometimes cobbled together from the memories of people who had watched performances or, slightly better, acted in them.
Shakespeare spent more than twenty profitable years in London’s theatre, as writer, actor and company shareholder. But after 1614 he gave it all up and retired to his family and life as a country gentleman in sleepy Stratford-upon-Avon, dying shortly afterwards. Some years later a memorial to him was placed in the local church – and a scheme was hatched to publish his plays. John Hemynge and Henry Condell – both actors from his theatre company, the King’s Men – joined a syndicate with booksellers and stationers.
Hemynge and Condell wrote a Preface and acted as editors. They worked from Shakespeare’s original drafts, from fair copies made by him and the company’s official scrivener, from the prompt book used during performances, and from some of the earlier editions of individual plays. They also arranged the plays into ‘Comedies’, ‘Histories’, and ‘Tragedies’, a classification that broadly persists to this day. Their aim, they declared in their Preface, was ‘only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare’.
The resulting book contained almost all the plays now securely ascribed to Shakespeare (Pericles was added to a later edition), and generally in their most authoritative versions where previous ones had existed. As well as boasting the great tragedies of Hamlet, Othello and King Lear, it contains such plays as The Tempest, Julius Caesar, Macbeth and Twelfth Night, which had never been published previously, and which – without the First Folio – would almost certainly have been lost to us.
The book was adorned with a now-famous portrait of the playwright, by engraver Martin Droeshout, and a dedicatory poem by Jonson. The first printing ran to 750 copies of over 900 pages each, and around one third of those copies survive today, 79 of them alone in the US Folger Shakespeare Library. Most have leaves missing, and because proofreading continued while the pages were being printed, there are slight differences in the text. The initial price of the book was £1 (around £100 / $200 in today’s equivalent), but of course each could now sell for millions. It is a quirk of literary history that the collection became known as the First Folio rather than by its name. ‘Folio’ refers to the page size: a large printer’s sheet was folded once to make two leaves, or four individual pages, making the book around 15 inches tall. This was the format considered suitable for serious tomes such as Bibles, atlases, and histories, in contrast to the ‘quarto’ size (where the printer’s sheet is folded twice) in which the earlier, unauthorized copies of individual plays had appeared. (Scholars refer to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ quartos of the plays, according to the presumed integrity of their texts.)
As for the Folio’s contents, Shakespeare took the stories for his plays where he could find them – from Homer, from Geoffrey Chaucer, from the chronicler Ralph Holinshed (d. c.1580). But he enriched them to such an extent that they provided the backbone for the entire English dramatic tradition and penetrated the world’s imagination, recycled for every age and every medium. Verdi’s opera Macbeth, the musicals West Side Story (based on Romeo and Juliet) and Kiss Me Kate (based on The Taming of the Shrew), the sci-fi film Forbidden Planet (inspired by The Tempest), Akira Kurosawa’s samurai masterpiece Throne of Blood (from Macbeth), or Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guilden-stern are Dead (indebted to Hamlet): these, and many more, are the children of the First Folio.
His influence on language itself is more thoroughgoing than any other writer’s. People who have never read or watched a Shakespeare play may say they are ‘more sinned against than sinning’ (like King Lear); they may describe something or someone as ‘dead as a doornail’ (from Henry VI) or demand their ‘pound of flesh’ (like Shylock in The Merchant of Venice). The list could go on ‘for ever and a day’, another of Shakespeare’s phrases. He also brought new words into the language – ‘domineering’, ‘fashionable’, ‘misquote’, ‘puke’ and ‘swagger’ are just five of scores of words whose first usage, as listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, is Shakespearian.
Perhaps his biggest contribution, though, is that he demonstrated the power of language and its incarnation in performance. His language, 400 years ago, was different from ours, and reading or watching his plays today demands a degree of effort and concentration from most people – but the plays still show how effectively anger, pain, love, fear, doubt, jealousy, remorse, ambition, guilt or desire can be expressed in words. His emotional range was immense, and in his thematic range he grappled head-on with the great questions of life and death, right and wrong, loyalty and love, in ways that have permeated the way we look at the world and the way we feel about ourselves and others. We may not have read Hamlet, but we know about doubt – and we know a little more about it because what Shakespeare wrote resonated so forcefully beyond the play itself.
Shakespeare, ultimately, endures because he helps us to see who we are – and without the First Folio, the legacy of the plays through which he does that might have been lost.