How Can a Book Tell Its Own Life Story?

paul edmondson and stanley wells declared in 2010 that the First Folio's 'reputation has never stood as high as it does now'.¹ This comment may well have been disproved in 2016 with the quatercentenary celebrations of Shakespeare's death, alongside the publication of no fewer than three books on the First Folio by Emma Smith.² Shakespeare's First Folio is an important history which contributes authority and visibility to Shakespeare in his anniversary year through the book with which he is most closely associated.

Nevertheless, Shakespeare's First Folio begins after Shakespeare. Smith is firmly resolved to offer a reception history of the Folio rather than discussing any of the events leading up to its composition. Her premise is that the material book held and holds different cultural meanings from its different contexts, and her aim is to create a history of those meanings. Now distributed transnationally, Smith's book works against the dispersal of Folios from Jaggard's print shop, gathering them back together for comparison. Today the folios carry crucial differences, altered by their heterogeneous interactions with a material world. These marks of history–the passage of time, records of people, conditions of storage–are what Smith perceives as the biography of the book (or books). It is not just the books that Smith brings together, but the diverse documents, places, and people that also make up its history. Smith's readers thus find themselves encountering Edward Hyde's description of Lucius Cary's library in Great Tew, Oxfordshire, in the mid-1630s (p. 125); a satirical etching by James Gillray of John Horne Tooke delivering a speech next to the 'Droit de l'homme' published in 1798 (p. 38); and a description of the luxurious life of Raymond Scott, who stole a Folio in 1998 and committed suicide in prison in 2012 (pp. 340–3).

The study has five chapters: 'Owning', 'Reading', 'Decoding', 'Performing', and 'Perfecting'. Each chapter could well have been a book in itself, but instead Smith densely packs thoroughgoing research into these five sections to give a wide-ranging biblio-biography. Chapter 1 registers the owners of various copies of the First Folio, whom they passed from and to, when, and why people have wanted to own these books. She references three main copies: the first associated with the Sheldon family, probably acquired by 1630 and now in the Folger; the second belonging to Thomas Hervey (1625–94) and now at Meisei University, Japan; and the third, owned by the Bodleian from 1624, and eventually finding its way back there in the twentieth century. Smith delves into the philosophy of ownership and how the meaning of owning a First Folio has altered from 1623 to the present day. This chapter is the longest, at ninety-seven pages, and is entirely undivided. Subtitles would have helped break down the information, given a clearer sense of which copy is being discussed and would greatly improve quick reference work. Subtitles would, however, interrupt the chapter's continuous narrative, and would remove Smith's artful weaving of names, dates, reportage, signatures, book sales, libraries, institutions, and histories, from women readers to colonialism. Her structure may well have been an intentional move away from the reference style of Anthony James West's The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book (2001), where volume I is subdivided and filled with numerical details, and which provides almost as many pages of appendices to tables as chapter content. A lot of the work contained in West's two volumes has now been surpassed by West and Eric Rasmussen's invaluable The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue (2012), which West conceives as the third in his four-volume First Folio study. In volume I he looks ahead to a book he has yet to write: 'Volume IV will explore the cultural history of the First Folio and a present biography of the book' (p. viii). Smith's study is...