“It’s the moment,” she adds, “when we leave him behind.” Who created the Folio? He probably had nothing to do with the conception of publishing in this way.” “The First Folio stands as the gatepost to post-Shakespeare Shakespeare, if you like,” says Smith.

It also saved half of his plays: Of the 36 included in the collection, 18 had never been published.Įrrors were corrected during the print run, so copies of the text contain small discrepancies.īecause it debuted seven years after Shakespeare’s death, the book is also one of the first serious efforts to engage with the plays in the absence of their author. Published in 1623, the 900-page tome cemented the Bard’s legacy and permanently muddled the boundaries between popular culture and high art.

Without it, “we wouldn’t even be talking about Shakespeare,” says Emma Smith, a Shakespearean scholar at the University of Oxford and the author of Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book. It was-and still is-one of the English language’s foundational texts. In 2020, a copy sold for nearly $10 million, making the Folio the world’s most expensive work of literature. Today, editions of the text fetch far higher prices. The pope, the actors realized, had mistakenly accepted the Folio as a gift.Īfter some behind-the-scenes diplomacy, the company retrieved the book-then worth an estimated $60,000-from the Vatican. “It will make a beautiful memento for this occasion,” he said, passing the volume to an aide, who promptly vanished. Macbeth is among the 18 plays that would have been lost to history without the Folio. Paul, who didn’t hear her request, misread the situation. Would the pontiff be willing to bless the book, she asked? This particular volume belonged to the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Tutin had carried it with her to the Vatican in preparation for this moment. When three Shakespearean actors performed at the Vatican in 1964, the stakes were high: Among the 2,000 observers packed into the auditorium were cardinals, dignitaries and even Pope Paul VI, who looked on from a raised chair.Īfter the show, one of the actors, Dorothy Tutin, approached the pope clutching a rare copy of William Shakespeare’s First Folio, the earliest collection of the Bard’s plays ever published.

First folio pdf