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Four centuries of the Bard’s great book
Four hundred years ago in a dim, grimy and smelly — yet still prestigious — printing shop in London’s bustling Barbican, a major project reached completion.
At William Jaggard’s premises, at the sign of the Half-Eagle and Key, it was a huge task that had produced the single most important and influential book in world drama — Shakespeare’s First Folio, published in November, 1623, and sold at the price of £1 each (about £130 today).
It contained 36 plays in 907 pages under the title ‘Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies Published according to the True Original Copies’. The very first collection of the Bard’s plays, it featured Martin Droeshout’s engraving of Shakespeare accompanied by a verse from Ben Jonson who also eulogised his fellow playwright as the ‘Soul of the Age’ whose works were ‘for all time’.
So, four hundred years later, one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of all literary anniversaries is celebrated in 2023.
Of the 36 plays in the First Folio, 18 had not been printed before, one play had been printed after Shakespeare’s death, and 17 had been printed in his lifetime in various good and bad small ‘quarto’ editions — referring to the size of page, roughly square. A folio is a larger book where the printed sheet is folded in half, creating two leaves or four…
