cross-posted from: https://derp.foo/post/374706
In many ways, the First Folio made Shakespeare Shakespeare. The narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece had appeared in 1593 and 1594 to wide acclaim, and in 1609 the Sonnets further established Shakespeare’s reputation as a poet. But Milton’s epitaph speaks of a “Dramatick Poet”—a playwright. By and large, the plays had not been published during Shakespeare’s life. Had they been published, anyone could have staged them. Performances brought money, so it behooved the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to keep the plays to themselves.
Complete copies of plays were hard to come by, even for the actors who performed them. Paper was expensive, and pirating was rife, so actors received something more modest than a script. On a long, narrow cylindrical sheet—a roll, from the French rôle—each player received his lines only, framed by very few cue-words. Thus, the actor playing Hamlet would know little of Gertrude’s or Claudius’s lines or motives prior to rehearsal.
Even so, by the time Shakespeare died in 1616, some of his plays had been published in editions known as quartos—four pages folded to produce eight leaves, sixteen pages in all. Some of these plays seem authentic, printed perhaps to make money during times of plague when the theaters were closed. There are also “bad quartos,” pirated or constructed from actors’ memories of their individual rolls. Other quartos were falsely attributed to Shakespeare in order to monetize his reputation. It was an important event, then, when the authorized First Folio appeared seven years after Shakespeare’s death. This year marks the four-hundredth anniversary of its publication.