8-3FirstFolio

WHAT IS THE FIRST FOLIO AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT? Written by Claire Inda  The First Folio was a collection of all but two of thirty-eight plays thought to have been written by Shakespeare, eighteen of which had never been published before. The First Folio was published in 1623. The plays were arranged in double columns on pages nearly a foot high. According to Mowat and Werstine, who wrote the introduction for an edition of __A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream__, the word ‘folio’ comes from the Latin for a leaf, and usually means a leaf in a manuscript. In this case, it refers to page size. The page was arranged in double columns a foot high. The First Folio was a giant book. With its size, it has given us Shakespeare’s wonderful and rich stories. The First Folio has been around for 386 years. The published title was //Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies//. In the preface to the First Folio beginning with “To the great variety of readers”, two of Shakespeare’s former fellow actors in the King’s Men (John Heminge and Henry Condell) wrote that they were the ones that had collected Shakespeare’s plays. They stated that they had seen Shakespeare’s own papers. They said their effort was, “to show their gratitude to the living, and the dead,” it was “without ambition either of self-profit, or fame: only to keep the memory of so worthy a Friend & Fellow alive, as was our Shakespeare...” Henry Clay Folger (founder of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C.) collected Seventy-Five of the 230 copies of the First Folio! There were many editions of this Folio. In 1632 the Second Folio was published. The Third in 1663-1664, and the Fourth in 1685. Each of these versions was edited based off of the one before it. That means that there is a possibility that it was changed very dramatically by the Fourth Folio. The Printer and the Publisher of the First Folio were William Jaggard and his son Isaac with Ed. Blount.  The First Folio offered readers the ability to read almost all of Shakespeare’s work from one book. Before this, readers had been reading from smaller copies called “quartos”. Only some of his plays had been available in these smaller books. Some of these quartos had been revised and were different from the originally published ones from Shakespeare. However, according to Heminge and Condell, readers would have the plays as they were actually performed, “where before,” the editors wrote, “you were abused with diverse, stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors... ”. Of course, they are referring to the fact that the quartos were revised and not the “real” play that you saw on the stage. Most people believe that the First Folio is the correct version of his plays because some of the plays in the First Folio had never been published before. There is no way to prove if the First Folio was the real play or the Quarto version was. If not for the First Folio, we would not know Shakespeare as well as we do now. In fact, if it weren’t for the Folio, Shakespeare would probably not be as famous as he is today.