Three years ago, a copy of William Shakespeare’s First Folio exchanged hands for nearly $10m at Christie’s, New York, becoming the most expensive work of literature ever sold at auction. What made the price all the more extraordinary was that this was not a unique artefact, like a medieval manuscript, but one of 233 known to have survived, from about 750 copies. The British Library alone owns five of them.
Nevertheless, the First Folio holds a hallowed space, both within the English-speaking world and beyond. Though the majority of copies are in the US, more than a dozen have found their way to Japan. From today’s perspective, this is not surprising. Shakespeare is the world’s most performed playwright, whose name is as familiar in the classroom as on the stage.
Published in the autumn of 1623, seven years after the playwright’s death, the First Folio was not only responsible for preserving 16 of his plays, of which there was no previous record, for posterity – including Twelfth Night, Macbeth and The Tempest – but played a key role in doing the same for their author. “Without this book,” wrote the Oxford professor Emma Smith, “half of Shakespeare’s plays would have been lost, and without them, Shakespeare would not be a global cultural figure.”
Yet few would have guessed, at the time of its publication, that it would so dwarf the collected plays of that other Elizabethan dramatist, Ben Jonson, who took the unprecedented step of publishing his own in folio seven years earlier, thereby encouraging two actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, to do the same for their old friend and colleague.
The 400th anniversary of the Folio falls in November but has been marked all year throughout the UK, with a bespoke website to ramp up the excitement – which Shakespeare, the theatre impresario, would have loved.
It is an opportunity not only to celebrate but also to interrogate the history of a book whose real value is not the prices it commands, nor even its importance to live performance (subsequent editions included more plays, and cleaner texts), but the social history it has accumulated along the way.
The cost of the Folios, as Prof Smith points out, meant that their first buyers were high-status men, who saw them as a good investment at a pound a pop, and offered them the protection of carefully tended libraries. One well-thumbed and partial copy, on show at the Maritime Museum in Greenwich, is believed to have been bequeathed in 1686 to its current owner, Dulwich College, by an actor-turned-bookseller who once played Falstaff, albeit well after Shakespeare’s time.
Yet in the 17th century there was no consensus that Shakespeare was a genius. It was only in the 18th century that the price of the Folio took off, in lockstep with the playwright’s reputation, becoming a trophy for the mega-rich and – as the scholar Michael Dobson has argued – “the holy book of a new secular religion, bardolatry”.
Despite the face on its frontispiece, the First Folio was in fact not the work of a single author any more than are the plays themselves, produced by the company in which Shakespeare was an actor and shareholder as well as a writer. Compiled from the company’s performance scripts, organised into the history, comedy and tragedy categories we know today, its greatest value is as testimony to the genius of collaboration.
