This was the format for important works of philosophy, science, theology, and literature (the major precedent for a folio Shakespeare was Ben Jonson’s Works, 1616). The decision to print the works of a popular playwright in folio is an indication of how far up on the social scale the theatrical profession had come during Shakespeare’s lifetime. The Shakespeare folio was an expensive book, selling for between fifteen and eighteen shillings, depending on the binding (in modern terms, from about $150 to $180). Twenty Shakespeare plays of the thirty-seven that survive first appeared in quarto, seventeen of which appeared during Shakespeare’s lifetime; the rest of the plays are found only in folio.

The First Folio was published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, and was authorized by his fellow actors, the co-owners of the King’s Men. This publication was certainly a mark of the company’s enormous respect for Shakespeare; but it was also a way of turning the old plays, most of which were no longer current in the playhouse, into ready money (the folio includes only Shakespeare’s plays, not his sonnets or other nondramatic verse). Whatever the motives behind the publication of the folio, the texts it preserves constitute the basis for almost all later editions of the playwright’s works. The texts, however, differ from those of the earlier quartos, sometimes in minor respects but often significantly–most strikingly in the two texts of King Lear, but also in important ways in Hamlet, Othello, and Troilus and Cressida. (The variants are recorded in the textual notes to each play in the new Pelican series.) The differences in these texts represent, in a sense, the essence of theater: the texts of plays were initially not intended for publication. They were scripts, designed for the actors to perform–the principal life of the play at this period was in performance. And it follows that in Shakespeare’s theater the playwright typically had no say either in how his play was performed or in the disposition of his text–he was an employee of the company. The authoritative figures in the theatrical enterprise were the shareholders in the company, who were for the most part the major actors. They decided what plays were to be done; they hired the playwright and often gave him an outline of the play they wanted him to write. Often, too, the play was a collaboration: the company would retain a group of writers, and parcel out the scenes among them. The resulting script was then the property of the company, and the actors would revise it as they saw fit during the course of putting it on stage. The resulting text belonged to the company. The playwright had no rights in it once he had been paid. (This system survives largely intact in the movie industry, and most of the playwrights of Shakespeare’s time were as anonymous as most screenwriters are today.) The script could also, of course, continue to change as the tastes of audiences and the requirements of the actors changed. Many–perhaps most–plays were revised when they were reintroduced after any substantial absence from the repertory, or when they were performed by a company different from the one that originally commissioned the play.

Shakespeare was an exceptional figure in this world because he was not only a shareholder and actor in his company, but also its leading playwright–he was literally his own boss. He had, moreover, little interest in the publication of his plays, and even those that appeared during his lifetime with the authorization of the company show no signs of any editorial concern on the part of the author. Theater was, for Shakespeare, a fluid and supremely responsive medium–the very opposite of the great classic canonical text that has embodied his works since 1623.

The very fluidity of the original texts, however, has meant that Shakespeare has always had to be edited. Here is an example of how problematic the editorial project inevitably is, a passage from the most famous speech in Romeo and Juliet, Juliet’s balcony soliloquy beginning “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” Since the eighteenth century, the standard modern text has read,

What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,

Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part

Belonging to a man. O be some other name!

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet.

(II.2.40–44)

Editors have three early texts of this play to work from, two quarto texts and the folio. Here is how the First Quarto (1597) reads:

Whats Mountaque? It is nor hand nor foote,

Nor arme, nor face, nor any other part.

Whats in a name? That which we call a Rose,

By any other name world smell as sweet:

Here is the Second Quarto (1599):

Whats Mountaque? it is nor hand nor foote,

Nor arme nor face, o be some other name

Belonging to a man.

Whats in a name that which we call a rose,

By any other word would smell as sweete,

And here is the First Folio (1623):

What's Mountaque? it is nor hand nor foote,

Nor arme, nor face, O be some other name

Belonging to a man.

What? in a names that which we call a Rose,

By any other word would smell as sweete,

There is in fact no early text that reads as our modern text does–and this is the most famous speech in the play. Instead, we have three quite different texts, all of which are clearly some version of the same speech, but none of which seems to us a final or satisfactory version. The transcendently beautiful passage in modern editions is an editorial invention: editors have succeeded in conflating and revising the three versions into something we recognize as great poetry. Is this what Shakespeare “really” wrote? Who can say? What we can say is that Shakespeare always had performance, not a book, in mind.

Books About the Shakespeare Texts

The standard study of the printing history of the First Folio is W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio (1955). J. K. Walton, The Quarto Copy for the First Folio of Shakespeare (1971), is a useful survey of the relation of the quartos to the folio.