The other half had appeared in print in his lifetime, in the more compact and cheaper form of “Quarto” editions, some of which reproduced good quality texts, others of which were to a greater or lesser degree garbled and error-strewn. In the case of a few plays there are hundreds of differences between the Quarto and Folio editions, some of them far from trivial.

If you look at printers’ handbooks from the age of Shakespeare, you quickly discover that one of the first rules was that, whenever possible, compositors were recommended to set their type from existing printed books rather than manuscripts. This was the age before mechanical typesetting, where each individual letter had to be picked out by hand from the compositor’s case and placed on a stick (upside down and back to front) before being laid on the press. It was an age of murky rush-light and of manuscripts written in a secretary hand that had dozens of different, hard-to-decipher forms. Printers’ lives were a lot easier when they were reprinting existing books rather than struggling with handwritten copy. Easily the quickest way to have created the First Folio would have been simply to reprint those eighteen plays that had already appeared in Quarto and only work from manuscript on the other eighteen.

But that is not what happened. Whenever Quartos were used, playhouse “promptbooks” were also consulted and stage directions copied in from them. And in the case of several major plays where a reasonably well-printed Quarto was available, the Folio printers were instructed to work from an alternative, playhouse-derived manuscript. This meant that the whole process of producing the first complete Shakespeare took months, even years, longer than it might have done. But for the men overseeing the project, John Hemings and Henry Condell, friends and fellow actors who had been remembered in Shakespeare’s will, the additional labor and cost were worth the effort for the sake of producing an edition that was close to the practice of the theater. They wanted all the plays in print so that people could, as they wrote in their prefatory address to the reader, “read him and again and again,” but they also wanted “the great variety of readers” to work from texts that were close to the theater life for which Shakespeare originally intended them. For this reason, the RSC Shakespeare, in both Complete Works and individual volumes, uses the Folio as base text wherever possible. Significant Quarto variants are, however, noted in the Textual Notes.

All three parts of Henry VI were printed in the Folio, where, incidentally, they were first referred to as the First, Second, and Third Parts of Henry VI. The play we now know as Part I made its first appearance in the Folio, while Part II and Part III had been printed in the early 1590s under the names The First Part of the Contention of the two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (see Introduction). The Folio text of Part I is the only early version we have, and seems to have been set from authorial papers, its multiple authorship in some way attested to by the different spelling habits and inconsistent speech headings from scene to scene that would have been in some measure smoothed if a scribe had prepared the copy. Other deficiencies in performance considerations seem to attest that the copy used by the printer was never used in the theater (which is not to say that the play wasn’t performed—we know it was). The quarto and octavo texts of Contention and True Tragedy respectively are much shorter and linguistically poorer than their Folio counterparts, leading many to hypothesize that they are memorial reports of versions that had been shortened for performance. The Folio texts, Part II and Part III, are substantially longer, better versions which bear similar evidence to Part I of being set from authorial—as opposed to scribal/theatrical—papers.

The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:

Lists of Parts are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, not including Henry VI, so the list here is editorially supplied. Capitals indicate that part of the name which is used for speech headings in the script (thus “Duke Humphrey of GLOUCESTER, Lord Protector, the king’s uncle”).

Locations are provided by Folio for only two plays, which does not include the Henry VI plays. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations (“Another part of the palace/battlefield,” etc.). Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes, where they are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before.

Act and Scene Divisions were provided in Folio in a much more thoroughgoing way than in the Quartos. Sometimes, however, they were erroneous or omitted; corrections and additions supplied by editorial tradition are indicated by square brackets. Five-act division is based on a classical model, and act breaks provided the opportunity to replace the candles in the indoor Blackfriars playhouse the King’s Men used after 1608, but Shakespeare did not necessarily think in terms of a five-part structure of dramatic composition. The Folio convention is that a scene ends when the stage is empty. Nowadays, partly under the influence of film, we tend to consider a scene to be a dramatic unit that ends with either a change of imaginary location or a significant passage of time within the narrative. Shakespeare’s fluidity of composition accords well with this convention, so in addition to act and scene numbers we provide a running scene count in the right margin at the beginning of each new scene, in the typeface used for editorial directions. Where there is a scene break caused by a momentary bare stage, but the location does not change and extra time does not pass, we use the convention running scene continues. There is inevitably a degree of editorial judgment in making such calls, but the system is very valuable in suggesting the pace of the plays.

Speakers’ Names are often inconsistent in Folio. We have regularized speech headings, but retained an element of deliberate inconsistency in entry directions, in order to give the flavor of Folio. For example, in Part I and Part II GLOUCESTER is always so-called in speech headings but is sometimes “Duke Humphrey” or “Protector” in entry directions; in Part III, QUEEN MARGARET is always so-called in speech headings but often simply “Queen” in entry directions.

Verse is indicated by lines that do not run to the right margin and by capitalization of each line.