The First Folio’s Arrangement and Its Finale

[T]he fate of all Bookes depends vpon your capacities : and not of your heads alone, but of your purses. Well! It is now publique, & you wil stand for your priuiledges wee know : to read, and censure. Do so, but buy it first. That doth best commend a Booke, the Stationer saies.

—John Heminge and Henry Condell, “To the great Variety of Readers”

At the beginning of their address to readers of the First Folio, Shakespeare’s fellow actors, John Heminge and Henry Condell, characterize the book they present to the public as a commodity. Unabashedly voicing the priorities of publishers, they appeal to its readers to censure if they must, but “what euer you do, Buy.”¹ On the assumption that the commercial nature of their approach may well be worth heeding, the present essay considers the arrangement of plays in the material book and its “Catalogue,” as its table of contents is titled. Much has been learned about how that book constructed Shakespeare for posterity,² and recent attention to the early modern book trade has offered a larger context for that knowledge. But the priorities of early modern publishing have not yet been considered in relation to the placement of plays within the volume. W. W. Greg concluded in 1955 that the First Folio’s arrangement was “largely accidental,”³ and the absence of further comment on the issue may be a sign of tacit acceptance or continued perplexity.

Cymbeline’s placement in the Folio is only one of many obstacles to making sense of its organization, but as I was editing that play for Arden’s third series, its terminal position engaged me. The argument that follows begins with an account of the First Folio as giving prominence of place to plays that met three criteria in 1622–23: those written in the last portion of Shakespeare’s career but never published; those for which the book’s publishers could readily obtain the “right to copy”⁴; and those in good quality texts. A. W. Pollard laid the foundation for these assertions early in the twentieth century, and his case is modified here in light of more recent research. To these organizing principles I propose a fourth consideration—content—because the two plays that open and close the book foreground Shakespeare as author and accomplished playwright. If the first play, The Tempest, can be read as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage, then Cymbeline, the last, deserves consideration as a farewell to his plays, given its highly recapitulatory character. The Catalogue registers an intention to place the most recent, unpublished plays in good texts with clear right to copy at the beginning and end of each generic section. Then it book-ends the volume with two valedictory plays as a way of highlighting Shakespeare’s achievement. The opening play exhibits his ability to meet neoclassical requirements of the unities; the closing one displays the copia of his richly diverse corpus and serves as a peroration for the entire volume. Placed in alpha and omega positions on the principle that potential buyers were likely to notice plays in those locations first—the same principle that largely governed the internal texts—the plays that frame the First Folio foreground its author’s versatility and virtuosity.

David Scott Kastan observes that the Shakespeare Folio “was the first to insist that a man might be an ‘author’ on the basis of his plays alone, and, more remarkably, on the basis of plays written exclusively for the professional stage.”⁵ The choice to organize plays by genre may seem unremarkable after centuries of attention to their classification, but it was far from predictable in 1623 when folio collections made up entirely of plays did not exist and playwrights were held in relatively low esteem. The only other folio publication of an English dramatist had been The Workes of Beniamin Ionson, published in 1616. That book opens with nine of Jonson’s plays followed by poems, entertainments, and masques without further generic division. The Workes of James, King of Great Britaine was...