This exhibit begins in the Special Collections Reading Room with key early items from the collection, including extracts from the First Folio, the three other early folio editions of Shakespeare, and rare copies of an early quarto edition of a single play and of Shakespeare’s Poems (1640). The First Folio fragments, from “disbound” copies of Shakespeare’s 1623 volume, provide the exhibit with its organizing concept of binding and unbinding. Shakespeare begins as a writer bound to his place and time (and in the pages of these folio volumes), but over time his works were increasingly unbound: unbound by time, by geography, by culture, by artistic medium. The exhibit continues downstairs on the ground floor of the library, where selections from the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, including the works of W. E. B. Du Bois, Phillis Wheatley, and others, are joined in conversation with William Shakespeare to show the ways these plays have spoken down the centuries to other writers, thinkers, readers, and audiences.
Books on Exhibit
The First Folio of Shakespeare’ s collected Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623) was the first folio published in England devoted entirely to plays. Gathering the texts and the rights to publish the 36 plays in this collection was a complicated process, and if Shakespeare’s friends had been unsuccessful in this risky publication venture, 18 plays not published earlier might have been lost to time. The plays published here for the first time include such perennial favourites as Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, Comedy of Errors, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Winter’s Tale.
About 235 copies of the First Folio survive, almost all in institutional collections: few remain in private hands. But most of these copies combine original leaves with facsimile leaves and with leaves imported from other (even less complete) copies: centuries after Shakespeare’s friends assembled his plays, dealers and collectors reassembled copies of the book after time had done its work on the original volumes. The process of remaking copies of the First Folio left many fragments, ranging from single leaves to complete plays to multi-play gatherings. No complete census exists of these fragments, despite their textual and bibliographical importance: every copy of the First Folio is different due to changes made during the printing process, and any given fragment can shed light on those differences. The private collection from which these fragments are selected includes 17 complete plays and at least one leaf from each of the remaining 19: every one of the 36 plays in the First Folio is represented, a remarkable feat of collecting potentially impossible to replicate.
Hamlet, the complete play extracted from Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623): “To be, or not to be” starts near the bottom of the inner column on the right (p. 265); “Oh what a Rogue and Pesant slave am I” begins at the top of the inner column on the left (p. 264). Notice the lack of act and scene divisions: the entrance of the King and others at the bottom of the inner column on the left marks the beginning of act 3 scene 1. The editor Nicholas Rowe introduced act and scene divisions to Shakespeare’s plays in his groundbreaking 1709 edition of Shakespeare’s Works (see case 3).
Shakespeare’s Second Folio (1632) is largely a page-by-page reprint of the First Folio: the main textual addition is a new poem by a young John Milton praising the “lasting Monument” of Shakespeare’s folio works. But comparison of the two collections reveals about 1700 deliberate textual changes: the Second Folio represents the first systematic edit of Shakespeare’s plays. About half of these changes are still accepted by modern editors, making the Second Folio a key source for all modern versions.
The Second Folio is the product of a group of investors and stationers working in syndicate, and their collective effort tells a story in itself. Published less than a decade after the First Folio, the Second Folio launches the ongoing project to update, repackage, protect, save, and “bind” Shakespeare (binding the plays together, binding their meaning through emendation, binding the rights to publish and market the plays). The subsequent history of these plays is one of constant dialogue between binding and unbinding, making, unmaking, and remaking.
Single editions of Shakespeare’s plays were published in quarto versions, like this 1635 edition of Pericles. A sheet of printing paper was folded once to produce a gathering of four folio-sized pages, twice to produce a gathering of eight quarto pages. Folios were authoritative, expensive books; quartos were inexpensive, ephemeral pamphlets. Quarto editions of plays are consequently rare, as most were not saved. They are also important textually because they sometimes represent earlier and often different versions of the plays than were printed in the folios. Representing efforts to market the plays to a popular readership, quarto editions of Shakespeare have been receiving increasing attention in recent years from editors and scholars.
Shakespeare’s Poems were first printed in 1609 as Shake-speares Sonnets: that volume is rare, and no copy remains in private hands. The poems were next printed in 1640 as Poems. Written by Wil. Shake-spear. Gent. This edition is editorially controversial and culturally fascinating. The editor, John Benson, rearranged the sonnets into a new order, gave them descriptive titles, merged some into longer poems, and removed or revised features that indicated that many of the sonnets were originally addressed to a “fair youth” or young man. Potentially these changes represent an early form of censorship that discouraged questions about Shakespeare’s sexuality; they certainly reflect an editorial effort to make the poems more conventional. Shakespeare’s sonnets have continued ever since to be revised and reinvented as much as his plays.
The Third Folio (1663) was published soon after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 after almost two decades of civil wars. The public theatres had been closed since 1642, and demand for theatre was high. Literary and cultural tastes had moved on from the pre-war period, but Shakespeare remained both popular and marketable. A second issue of the Third Folio, published in 1664, enticed new purchasers with its title-page announcement that this volume contained “seven Playes, never before Printed in Folio” (see the title-page to the Fourth Folio). Only one of these additions, Pericles, retains an undisputed association with Shakespeare (writing in collaboration). The title-page claim reminds us that the canon of Shakespeare’s plays is more fluid than is often thought, and these other plays are receiving increasing scholarly attention.
The Third Folio was issued twice, in 1664 as well as 1663, but survives in fewer copies than either of the first two folios. The cause of its scarcity is usually credited to the Great Fire of London of 1666, which destroyed huge quantities of books when the warehouses and stock of London booksellers went up in flames.
The Fourth Folio (1685), the last 17th century edition of Shakespeare’s works, retained the plays added to the 1664 version of the Third Folio and was long regarded by editors, readers, and collectors as the textually superior and so “preferred” version of the plays. Until the mid-18th century, many libraries and collectors would have discarded their old copies of the First Folio in favor of the more recent Fourth Folio. The Fourth Folio was set from the Third Folio, but in a grander presentation, on larger paper with a larger type font and more generous spacing.
Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718), considered the first professional editor of Shakespeare’s plays, published his six-volume edition of Shakespeare’s Works in 1709, based on the Fourth Folio. Rowe introduced the now familiar act and scene divisions, character exits and entrances, and dramatis personae. His was also the first edition of Shakespeare to be illustrated, and included a “Life” of Shakespeare.
Restoration and 18th-Century Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s plays were a mainstay of the Restoration (post-1660) stage— but they often differed from the versions Shakespeare’s original audiences would have seen. These Restoration versions initiate the ongoing process of “unbinding” Shakespeare from the original texts, reimagining the plays for new cultural conditions. One major change involved casting: female roles were now played by women. Restoration productions also introduced elaborate staging, including the use of sets and scenic backdrops. Restoration playwrights also initiated the long history of freely rewriting, revising, and adapting Shakespeare: Restoration audiences enjoyed King Lear with a happy ending, The Tempest with not one but two pairs of young lovers, Romeo and Juliet recast as a Roman play, The History and Fall of Caius Marius, and Macbeth supplemented with new song-and-dance numbers. Many of these revised versions “were” Shakespeare for centuries to come, until the theatrical virtues of Shakespeare’s originals were rediscovered in the late nineteenth century. Restoration versions of King Lear, Othello, and The Tempest are in cases on the library's lower level.