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Chapter Six: Whole Volumes in Folio: The Ultimate Prize for Collectors
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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Chapter Six q q q Whole Volumes in Folio The Ultimate Prize for Collectors . . . I am sure I shall turn sonnet. Devise wit, write pen, for I am for whole volumes in folio. Love’s Labor’s Lost 1.2.183–85 Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623) is a large book with dense double-column pages printed in London seven years after Shakespeare’s death. One scholar has described its printing as not “consistent,” another as “careless.”1 The manuscripts for this volume have gone missing. Yet its pedigree is matchless. It became, early on, the ultimate prize for major collectors, and Henry Folger triumphed in assembling the greatest number of First Folios in the world. The First Folio is important for many reasons. It is the first edition of the author’s collected plays, thereby establishing the core of the Shakespeare dramatic canon.2 It is the sole source for half of Shakespeare’s dramatic production. Eighteen plays (including Macbeth, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, and As You Like It) had never been printed before and would not have survived without this early compilation. The large size of the folio represents a statement about the importance of dramatic works in an age where the stage was not usually deemed an elevated art form. Shakespeare’s now iconic portrait, his steep forehead memorialized in the volume’s preliminary pages, is one of only three representations of Shakespeare widely accepted as authentic .3 Three subsequent editions followed: Folio 2 (1632), Folio 3 (1663–64), and Folio 4 (1685). Scholars assign textural preeminence to the 1623 folio because each of the others derives from the preceding editions and introduces its own corrections and errors. The First Folio is not considered an extremely rare book. First Folio specialist Anthony James West has described in extraordinary detail 232 extant copies of the book out of an estimated 750 printed nearly four centuries ago.4 By comparison, fewer than fifty Gutenberg bibles survive. Today 147 copies of the First Folio exist in North America, 47 in the British Isles, and 26 in other parts of the world, notably Japan. 96 Collecting Shakespeare Two of Shakespeare’s friends, longtime fellow actors, and shareholders in the acting company first known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and then as the King’s Men—John Heminge and Henry Condell, neither of whom had any editorial experience as far as we know—took the initiative to gather Shakespeare’s plays in a single, comprehensive edition and prepare the First Folio for publication. The substantial risks of financing the venture were borne by five London publishers: William and Isaac Jaggard, Edward Blount, John Smethwick, and William Aspley. William Jaggard had become blind, and died during the course of production of the First Folio; his son Isaac took over the family printing business. Without the enterprise of these seven men, the work might not have appeared at all. The First Folio was approximately a foot high, most copies measuring about nine by thirteen inches.5 With some exceptions, they were offered to the public unbound, with pages uncut. Due to the large-size format of the volume, and the quality of the handmade sheets of rag paper imported from northern France, the sales price was high—between fifteen shillings and a little over one pound (twenty shillings), or, as Paul Collins expresses it, the equivalent to buying forty loaves of bread.6 No evidence exists that William Shakespeare cared about leaving a written record of his plays. In his era, performance was publication. Drama was written to be recited by actors, not read by the public. An author would have derived little to no financial benefit from the printing of his works, for the theater—not the author—owned the plays. Appearance of plays in print was feared to discourage potential spectators from attending performances. Hundreds of dramatic works produced during Shakespeare’s time have thus disappeared, known only by their titles.7 q The first First Folio Henry Folger acquired cost him a mere $1.25. Soon after his college graduation in 1879, Henry bought a reduced facsimile edition prepared by the British collector Halliwell-Phillipps.8 He had ample time to enjoy and scrutinize the volume before deciding to acquire a genuine First Folio in 1893, for an unrecorded price. We can only guess at the thirty-six-year-old Folger’s feelings as he leafed through the partially mutilated volume, a few pages in facsimile, others supplied from another...