- #Norton facsimile first folio of shakespeare professional#
- #Norton facsimile first folio of shakespeare series#
It was commissioned from a mediocre Flemish engraver called Martin Droeshout, who worked either from a now-lost portrait painted during the author's lifetime (perhaps by Richard Burbage), or perhaps just from a proto-identikit sketch prepared by his surviving colleagues (the engraving is bad enough to support either hypothesis). The arrangement of the plays aside, there was the picture on the title page to sort out. Other potential anomalies abounded: Troilus, at one time scheduled for inclusion in the middle of the tragedies, and described both as a comedy and as a history in its quarto incarnation, finally wound up adrift between the tragedies and the histories. (The plays their author had known as The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, Richard Duke of York and All Is True, for example, reappeared as, respectively, Henry VI Parts 2 and 3 and Henry VIII.) Pre-Christian British kings, however, though just as solemnly vouched for by Holinshed's Chronicles, weren't seen to count as historical: the play originally printed as The History of King Lear had to be reclassified as a tragedy (just as the erstwhile tragedies of Richard II and Richard III became histories), and was joined by Cymbeline, despite that play's competing affinities with history and with comedy. Their strategy of grouping all the plays about English history, whether comic or tragic in structure, and placing them in chronological order by subject-matter, all neatly titled after the name of the appropriate reigning monarch, made Shakespeare's contributions to the development of the chronicle play look a lot tidier than might otherwise have been the case.
Foregrounding those which hadn't been printed before was clearly a priority (thus the comedies section starts with The Tempest and the tragedies with Coriolanus), but the editors' decision to classify the whole canon by genre created problems as well as solving them. There were tricky decisions to be made, about the order in which the plays should appear, for example. Nor did Heminges and Condell's difficulties end with the provision of usable and legible copies of Shakespeare's scripts. Judging from this, from Shakespeare's signatures on legal documents, and from the few holograph pages we have of his scriptwriting (part of his contribution to Sir Thomas More), the claim in Heminges and Condell's prefatory epistle that Shakespeare's "mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers" seems to have been merely conventionally figurative praise of the author's facility rather than a literal description of his foul papers.
#Norton facsimile first folio of shakespeare professional#
Of the plays supplied in manuscript, some of them in Shakespeare's own handwriting, five or six seem to have been sufficiently difficult to decipher for the publishers to commission the professional scribe Ralph Crane to prepare fresh transcripts, and even these were sometimes misread during typesetting. Some of the copy consisted of printed texts of plays that had already been published individually, causing all sorts of copyright problems, and many of these had been covered in intricate marginal scribblings and interleavings and strikings-out to bring them up to date with subsequent revisions (not all of them authorial), annotations which in some instances baffled the compositors.
(The sorry consequences are clear enough, however: namely, the survival of Pericles only in an abominably printed and unreliable quarto and the permanent loss of both Love's Labour's Won and Cardenio.) Of the plays they were able to track down, not all reached the printers on time - Troilus and Cressida came too late even to be listed on the contents page - and many gave both publishers and typesetters considerable trouble. Despite the confidently comprehensive title they gave it, the editors of the First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell, were defeated by the task of assembling all of their late colleague's plays: we will never know how many nights' sleep they lost over their failure to secure a copy of Love's Labour's Won, written before 1598 and printed in quarto before 1603, nor what arguments led to the exclusion not just of all Shakespeare's poems and the single scene he wrote for Sir Thomas More but of three late collaborative plays, Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Cardenio.
#Norton facsimile first folio of shakespeare series#
William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies was a series of headaches before it was anything else. I: An Account of the First Folio Based on Its Sales and Prices, 1623-2000 by Anthony James West Oxford, 215 pp., £70, 5 April, 0 19 818769 6Ĭollectors' fantasy Christmas present it may have become, but Mr. The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book Vol.
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