So here we have an object that looks like a book, but in fact it's a box with a book inside it.
A matching book, and this has been placed like a jewel in this velvet lined box because it is
a very precious object. It is a copy of the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays.
And there is the title page with this very famous image of Shakespeare gazing out at us.
So the book that is commonly known as Shakespeare's First Folio is in fact the
first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays,
that was published 400 years ago in 1623, several years after Shakespeare himself had in fact died.
There are 36 plays by Shakespeare in this book and half of them had not been previously printed.
So this book preserves really half of Shakespeare's complete works – plays
that would probably have been completely lost to us include the Tempest, Macbeth,
Twelfth Night, many others that are among people's favourites today.
Some people expect us to be handling a book like this wearing white gloves,
but actually the conservation advice now is to simply wash your hands before using it.
Shakespeare wasn't around to put this book together himself so it
took quite a lot of people to gather the texts. Two of the important names are on the title page
under Shakespeare's portrait, they're two printers Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount.
But the initial impetus we believe came from two of Shakespeare's colleagues in the
King's Men – his theatre company and their names are to be found on the next couple
of pages of the book. They are John Heminges sometimes known as Hemming and Henry Condell,
and they were fellow actors with Shakespeare, and they say that they are promoting his work not for
any personal gain for themselves but because they want to make sure that he will be remembered.
The term folio is really a common way of saying a 'big book' and big books of course
bring to mind church bibles, important works of law, or editions of classical
authors that would be going into libraries or into the collections of rich people.
Folios were expensive, so putting his plays together in a folio format was
partly a matter of fitting 36 plays into a single volume, but it was also making a
statement about his importance, about the fact that he was like a classical author.
That's also the message of this big portrait in the front.
The proposition of the book is that is is a work of important literature for people to read. The
dedication is to readers, Ben Johnson's poem is to the reader. It's not a book for performing with.
A very fascinating page that is included in the preliminaries is actually the names of
the principal actors in all these plays. So there is a sense in which the men of
the company have got a stake, have got some sort of relationship to these plays,
even though the plays are being presented as literature which will last for all time.
The format in which individual plays were published – Shakespeare's and others – was
usually a quarto. And a quarto means a little book, or a fairly little book. It's – you
know – a bit like paperback size today. They would have been sold at the time for sixpence or so.
This is the previous edition to the First Folio of the comedy Much Ado About Nothing
and it was published in 1600. So it's 20 plus years earlier than the First Folio.
A lot of the lines are actually marked so one can imagine it could be used as
a prompt. Here and there there are notes for an entrance or an exit or
the two characters meet each other, so if here for example it says 'enter'.
In Shakespeare's time actors would have received only their lines on sheets of
paper they would not have received the full play text for rehearsals and the
performance. There would be a prompters copy used to keep an eye on the action on stage,
however in the modern and contemporary period we have far more sophisticated prompt copies and
actors have the full published script throughout the whole rehearsal period and the performances.
This prompt book is from a 1959 production of the Winter's Tale and it shows the complete
process of the production on stage. It has the script pasted on every single page of the book,
alongside a stage and a lighting plot so every cue
for the music and the lighting to change throughout was recorded in this copy.
It's a really great example of how Shakespeare's text has been re-adapted, revised, reinterpreted
for different audiences over time. So from the 17th century when the first photo was published
which was already altered from previous editions – previous quartos – to now where
we still make changes according to director's preferences, performers, and what audiences expect
The First Folio has been the subject of endless scholarship and speculation and
in some ways almost everything is known about how it went through the printing shop and in
other ways there are quite fundamental facts that we don't know for sure still about it.
It's not known for sure what was the fundamental text that was put together
to give to the printers to produce this book. Half of the plays had
never been printed before so some kind of manuscript was evidently needed for those.
The half of the plays that had been previously published, one of those it is thought would
have been used as the base text but very often they would have been corrected or
amended from other sources and that might have been prompt books from the theatres,
or it might have been somebody else's transcription of a performance at some point.
So it's quite a big editorial job to get all of this material together
and decide what order it goes in and present it to the printers.
Another way in which the First Folio has really helped to determine the way that people think
about Shakespeare and his plays, is the way that they are actually organised in the book.
There is a contents page, or what is called a catalogue page here, which divides them
up into comedies, histories, and tragedies. So it starts with comedies, it includes Much Ado
About Nothing, As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew. And then the next category is the histories
starting with King John going through the various Henries and coming up to Henry VIII. And then
the tragedies include Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet. So we don't know exactly how many were published,
it was probably around 750 which was a decent print run for a book at this time.
We know today the whereabouts of upwards of 230 of them and that's actually a remarkable thing.
Books of the Early Modern period don't normally survive in that many copies,
and it's because this book is so treasured and famous that it has survived.
The majority of them are in libraries but there are still a few out there in private hands.
Here at the V&A we are lucky enough to have three First Folios. The reason that
we have three is that each came from a different donor in the 19th century.
This copy comes from a library of a man called John Jones who was a
rich clothier – a merchant a businessman – and he prized his Shakespeares so much
that he actually commissioned a bookcase with a carved head of Shakespeare and some roundels
with heads of characters in, to hold his First Folio, and that too is in the museum today.
One of the very fascinating things of looking at Early Modern books
like this is to see the ways in which their owners have used them.
So if we look a bit more closely at this contents page we can see that quite a few
of the plays have got a kind of a symbol to the right of the actual title. It looks like a 'G'.
I don't know what that signifies actually, but some clue to it can perhaps be derived from this
page – a blank page early in the book where an early owner of this copy has listed plays
and indicated whether they themselves have either seen them performed, or read them.
They have an 'S' for seen and an 'R' for read, but they also have this 'G' symbol alongside of some
of them as well. And there are quite a number of other examples of usage here opposite the Winter's
Tale – there is a comment 'a very fine play' in probably 17th or 18th century handwriting.
And at the top of the same page there is a note which says the list of characters
is actually to be found at the end of the play, but if we turn to the end of the Winter's Tale,
here we have an actual list of the characters with little signs and symbols or possibly the
initials of performers that this owner had seen acting this play.
Historically the First Folio was never used in a theatre for live performance. It was
never meant to be a play script which would be used by a company of actors. However due
to the reappraisal of the First Folio as a authentic source for Shakespeare's texts,
it has been increasingly used by directors as part of their process and interpretation
of Shakespeare's plays. And there was also a growing interest just generally in
the history of performance and the theatres that Shakespeare's plays were performed in,
sparked by the discovery of a drawing of the Swan Theatre in the 1880s.
Obviously the most important part of the First Folio existing is that we have these
plays recorded that would have been lost otherwise, and these have gone on to be
reinterpreted and restaged countless times over the years by visionary directors and
across genres – not just theatre, but also film and music and musical theatre as well,
for example The Taming of the Shrew which was included in the First Folio – but had
not been published prior to this – has been adapted many many times including
into the musical Kiss Me Kate and also into the Hollywood film 10 Things I Hate About You.
The First Folio is this incredible resource as well for storytellers and theatre-makers. For
example Romeo and Juliet which is a famous tragedy of star-crossed lovers, but has been adapted into
so many different forms of media, not just the Shakespearean play which we see live on stage,
but through musical interpretations like West Side Story or & Juliet. But also visionary
reinterpretations like Baz Luhrmann's film version of Romeo + Juliet which used the play script
faithfully, but reimagined it in Venice Beach in California, in America for a brand new audience.
So the First Folio is not just about Shakespeare's plays. It's the strength of these stories which
have been retold so many times through so many mediums and are recognisable and beloved
by so many different audiences because of the strength of the stories within them.