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The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglomerate Network and LitHub Radio.
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Dig into Spring garden deals for four days at the Home Depot now through May 10th exclusion supply. See homedepot.com pricematch for details. Hello everyone, this is Jack in 2026. Emma and I are in London now, somewhere between watching a play at the Globe Theater and having a drink at Dr. Johnson's favorite pub, I would imagine. And soon we'll be headed up to Oxford, the home of so many of our wonderful guests over the years. We're revisiting some of their episodes while we're away, including this one From June of 2023, where we talked for the second time to the amazing Emma Smith. This time it was to discuss Shakespeare's First Folio, which was celebrating its 400th birthday. This conversation comes from episode 519 I hope you enjoy it, okay? Joining me once again is Emma Smith, professor of Shakespeare Studies at Oxford University, who was here before to discuss her book, Portable Magic, a book about books rather than words. She's here today to discuss one of the world's greatest books, which also contains some of the world's greatest words, Shakespeare's First Folio, which turns 400 this year. She's written two books about Shakespeare's First Folio, the Making of Shakespeare's First Folio and Shakespeare's First Four Centuries of an iconic book. Emma Smith, welcome back to the history of literature.
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Thanks so much for having me.
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So let's start with the First Folio itself. What exactly is it?
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The First Folio is the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. So it's published posthumously, as you said. It's 400 years old this year, published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare died in 1616. And it includes 36 plays, not the poems or the sonnets. For half of the plays that it prints, it's the only witness to them. It's the only text that we have, right?
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And those plays, which often I read it or I hear it said that those plays could have been lost forever. And they include plays like Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar and the Tempest. And we really owe a lot to this First Folio.
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We absolutely do. The majority of plays from this whole period of theatrical history have not survived. And that's because their life, you know, their purpose was to be performances, not to be books. So had these not been put in a book, they wouldn't have survived. And even the plays that we would still have by Shakespeare, you know, for example, we would have a text of Hamlet, but without the kind of weight that the Folio gives, the complete works of Shakespeare, I don't think we would even be able to recognise how great that play is. We wouldn't have the same attitude to Shakespeare without these plays and without this book.
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So since it was put together after Shakespeare had died, who was working on it, how did it come to be?
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B
I think of the First Folio as a collaboration between the theatre on the one hand and the London publishing industry on the other. So the men from the theatre are two fellow actors of Shakespeare's. They're called John Heming and Henry Condell. And actually, in March 1616, we see them mentioned in Shakespeare's will just a few weeks before he dies, when he leaves money for them to buy mourning rings, rings to remember him by. And lots of people have wondered, whether either explicitly or perhaps just tacitly, there was a sense that they owed him a more lasting monument, which would be the gathering together of his literary works. So they are one side of this project, but the other side is the publishers, Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blunt. No book gets published without publishers thinking it's worth doing. You know, no work of literature really in the modern printing age has got out to readers without somebody in that business world taking a risk on it, investing in it. And the same is true here. So these are men who are looking, I guess, at the economics as well as the literary value of Shakespeare. So I feel as if it's born from two things really, perhaps affection and emotional ties on the one hand, and business and investment ideas on the other.
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So this wasn't a situation with a patron, this was a book they thought they could make some money from.
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Yes, I think that's right. I mean, it is dedicated to noblemen, but there's no sense that they put any money behind it. I think it is pitched as a book that will sell, but not with absolute confidence. Those two actors, John Hemings and Henry Condell, write a letter, an epistle at the beginning of the book, addressed to the great variety of readers. And what they keep saying through that is, please buy this book, Buy this book. Read and censure, they say, do so, but buy it first, whatever you do buy. So they are, I think, betraying a little bit of nervousness about whether this is an absolutely sort of sale worthy object at this point. And that may be because I think we can think of lots of equivalents in our own time of artists whose reputation probably is at its lowest point in the few years after they have died. They're not current, they're not fashionable, they're not topical, and nor are they old enough for people to come round at them a second time and give them that kind of vintage quality. For me, it's a bit of a doldrum for Shakespeare's reputation. And it's the belief of these theatre men and publishing men that this is going to work out as a business proposition that really preserves Shakespeare for us.
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A
And did they think theater goers would like it, or university students or producers and actors of plays would maybe want to take a look at it and see if there was anything in there that they could mount on the stage? Or do we have a sense of who they thought could shell out the money for this?
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It's a really great question because one of the things about this book, in fact it's the thing that's denoted by calling it a folio, is that it's a book. If you looked at it on the desk, you think that's a bible or that's an encyclopedia or something. So it's a big heavy book. And one consequence of that is it looks like a book for the study. It looks like something quite serious. You would need to rest it on a desk. You're not going to be having this in your pocket and just having a quick look at it as you might have done with the single play pamphlets we call quartos. Some of those are published during Shakespeare's lifetime and they're a much more ephemeral, almost throwaway kind of commodity. But this is a big, hefty, serious object, and so there is a paradox to it. It preserves Shakespeare's plays and without it, Shakespeare's reputation would have been very different. And, as we've already said, we wouldn't have these extraordinary texts. But it also begins the divorce between these plays and the theatre and really takes a step to establish them as things to read, study, enjoy, dwell on, but also perhaps find hard work, rather than an afternoon at the theatre, which was their sort of predominant mode before this. So the people who buy it then, I think, are people who are buying largely for their library. It's not very easy book to use for performance, although we've got some evidence that occasionally that was done. But these are mostly pretty well to do people who are buying this as part of a larger reading library. And there may have been an overlap with theatre goers, but it's not completely clear.
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Right. And just how unusual was this? I read somewhere that Ben Jonson had a collection of plays, and I don't know how similar that is to the First Folio, but was the First Folio basically the first of its kind, or did we see this with other playwrights as well?
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B
The Ben Jonson Folio is really interesting. If this book. I said this book has got sort of two parents, the theatre and the publishing industry, and if it could have had three, I think the third would probably be Ben Jonson's Folio, because Johnson, who is Shakespeare's friend, rival fellow dramatist, he has produced his own collection of works in this folio format, printed in 1616. And that is a real first. It's a first for English playtexts to be published in this serious seeming format. But Johnson also includes poetry. He writes quite a lot of poetry and his court entertainments, which are called masques. So there is a difference in the Shakespeare Folio, which has left out all of Shakespeare's poetry, probably because it doesn't seem relevant to the theatre men who have been involved in putting it together. I think Johnson is an influence. It's an influence, the sort of layout and the possibility. And it's possible that hearing that Johnson was preparing his works in this way may have encouraged Shakespeare, before he died, to think of it for his own works too,
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and maybe to have suggested to the two who ended up working on it.
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Yeah, absolutely. And Ben Jonson is very Visible in the First Folio he writes. In fact, the first words of this text are actually a poem by Ben Jonson, which is opposite the title page. And then there's a longer poem by Johnson as part of the introductory material to this book. So he has a role to play. Some people have felt it's a bigger role than I've just outlined in getting this book of Shakespeare's plays into print right now.
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What kind of a task was it? Because if we're talking about Ben Jonson and he's alive, he presumably has his own scripts or can recreate what he needs to recreate and so on. But. But I gather that Shakespeare didn't leave behind a kind of rough draft of working papers or anything like that that they would be able to pull from. So how did they get the plays?
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It's a really, really great question. And we don't completely know. So for half of the plays, they have been printed before. There are print copies, but many of those print copies have been marked up, perhaps with some additions or corrections or something in order to be reset for this Folio Vol. But for half of the plays, we've got no printed copies. So probably what John Heming and Henry Condell contributed was the access to Playhouse copies. So it's probably important to remember that a playwright like Shakespeare in this period is not writing really for himself or his own literary archive or his own literary posterity. He's writing scripts for a theatre. And those scripts are pretty much the property of that theatre. They become part of the kind of repertory of plays that the theat can put on. So Hemings and Condell probably bring these scripts of the unpublished plays from the theatre. And I think once we start to remind ourselves that Shakespeare's plays were originally what we would now call scripts, that immediately, for me, makes them a bit more fluid, a bit less fixed and a bit less final, more a kind of instruction or an enabler for performance rather than a text primarily for reading. And so some of the differences and questions there are about Shakespeare's texts in print probably come from the sense that the underlying scripts, none of which have survived, were working documents in the theatre. And they were documents that probably did get updated when the play was revived. New jokes. A different actor playing a particular role might have a slightly different take on it. Maybe it needed to be shorter. Maybe there was one aspect that didn't seem quite so relev anymore. So those scripts that come from the theatre are probably, as I say, documents that have a sense of the play as a moving Property rather than a fixed text.
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You know, that's something I've never really thought about before. We have such a paradigm for our view of the theater, where the playwright would write out or type up a script in today's world and then print out copies for all the actors, and they would memorize their lines and then show up at rehearsal. And then maybe you'd make a few changes there based on. On what you hear from them or what you see as the play is acted out and so on. But I never really thought about how someone would have been teaching the actors their lines, or it would have been more oral instruction. They couldn't have easily made copies of all of the written works, but there must have been some element of teaching that would. You know, anything communicated orally might have changed kind of during that process and we wouldn't have a record of how things had changed.
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Yeah, absolutely. You're so right. I think that it's really good to remind ourselves that actors in this period never saw the whole script as a written document. They got their own parts, what are called cue scripts. So they got the lines that they were going to deliver, plus the two or three words. That was the cue they needed to listen to in order to get that. So you're right that there aren't copies of the plays circulating. Just being able to print out or run off on a photocopier has made us much more careless, hasn't it? If you had to copy out each of the documents that, you know, sort of distribute, you'd probably be a bit more circumspect about how many really needed to have one.
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You need to have a few monks on staff.
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Exactly. There was a scribe, was most definitely a scribe in the theatre, who was doing office work at this time was to be a scribe, you know, copying things out. But you're also, I think, really interesting about the role of the play script or the play text in our modern theatre, because at that point, you just described when the playwright gives out the script to the actors, probably at that same point they send the script to be published as a book to coincide, or maybe they already have done, to coincide with the performance. So you can buy the script when you go to the theatre, but that script then won't take account of the things that have been changed during rehearsals. So the script will already, on the very first night of rehearsals, in most cases, be slightly different from the words that you hear if you go to the theatre. And that's. I think, anybody who's involved in theatre recognises that's part of the magic of it. And I think if you're a playwright, you have to accept that, that your every last word and every last phrase as you have written it, is not going to find its way uninterrupted into the theatre. That's just not how it works.
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Right. And then we get the First Folio, which kind of preserves these words and gives them a kind of formality, a kind of heft or a kind of imprimatur stamped on them, although Shakespeare didn't get a chance to review it and endorse and everything like that. But I gather that scholars can also find some earlier examples or some later examples and kind of have come to view the First Folio as what you'd call it, an excellent starting point. And maybe with revisions to the First Folio based on some other sources, we generally are on our way to having something that we feel comfortable is pretty close to what Shakespeare would have written.
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I think that whole question of what Shakespeare would have written and what we're trying to get back to in those kinds of discussions is just such a fascinating one. So are we trying to get back to the play as it was first performed? And we've already sort of talked a bit about how that might not be exactly the way the writer had written it down. Once the actors get hold of it, once it's there in performance, it changes a bit. Do we think that an author like Shakespeare can change his mind? And in that case, do we think the first draft or the latest one is the most relevant? Are we looking at the plays as the theatre company? The King's Men have kept them updated so that they are current for performance, or are we trying to get back to how this play was performed in the autumn of 1595 or something? Right. It's a really, really fascinating question what we are trying to get to. And in some ways it boils down to whether we think Shakespeare is a playwright in a collaborative mode like the theatre, or really, if he's a poet. We would think about a poet, yes. Every word they have chosen is absolutely the word and you couldn't possibly change it. I don't think we would think that even now about a playwright necessarily.
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Right. But we would tend to value Shakespeare's ideas more than, let's say, a director who wanted to cut things for time, or some anonymous actor who doesn't like the way some of his words sound coming out of his mouth and they make changes to it, or something like that. We would want it to be as close to the original source as possible. But on the other hand, how do you know that this wasn't a change? That Shakespeare himself thought, oh, yeah, that's better, or I have a better idea for this, or I think this is dragging on a little too long, let's tighten it up, and so on.
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Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, there's a really good example in King Lear. So King Lear was printed as a single pamphlet play in 1608, so quite relatively close to the time when it was performed before King James. And then it's published again in the 1623 folio. And these are different texts. They're different in hundreds of small ways. You know, a word changed or something, and then in some larger ways, you know, whose speeches are given to some scenes that are in one version, not the other, and so on. We've had lots of goes at explaining why are these two texts different? And if we could work that out, then we would say, well, which is the right one? You know, which is the nearest to Shakespeare? And I think what most scholars, although not everybody has come to think is these are both Shakespearean plays and they represent the life of a play called King Lear at different points. And one might be a version for one context, and the other is one that Shakespeare continues to work on. Maybe he's not quite satisfied with it, maybe he has something particular in mind where he needs King Lear to be performed again in a slightly different way. But we've come to think, which is one of the things, that the First Folio maybe threw us off a bit, we've come to think that Shakespeare did revise his own plays, whereas what Heming and Condell tell us in the beginning of the First Folio is that he didn't and that he wrote like a genius. It just popped fully formed out of his head onto the paper. And they say, we have never had a blot on his papers. You know, there's been no second thoughts, no crossings out, no revising. Now, that seems probably unlikely to be true, but it began a myth about that made sort of Shakespeare's writing practices seem different from every other writer there had ever been in the world. Who? You ever see writers, drafts and manuscripts, you see the craft and the time that it takes to draft and redraft and get the right word or get the right structure.
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Right. And didn't Ben Johnson say, I wish there were a few blots?
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Yeah, Woody had blotted a thousand. Yes, yeah. Johnson was really one of those. They didn't have the word Frenemy. But I think he of was one of those friend enemy figures. Yeah, absolutely.
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I'll introduce another wrinkle to this. My understanding is that when they were printing the first folio, it would take so long for a copy to make its way through the press that they would find typographical errors and so on, and they would just correct them. So a later copy 750 might be in better shape than copy number one of the First Folio.
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Yeah, that's right. So the only kind of proofreading, proof correction that the folio seems to have had is what we call stop press correction. Slightly misleading term, because what actually happens is maybe the first impression of a particular page of type comes off the press and it's given to someone in the print room to check. But while they're checking it, the press keeps going. So they continue to print uncorrected versions of the sheet. And then when the person comes back with corrections, they stop the press, open it up, open up the case that's got the type in it, make the changes, tie it all back down again, firm it all up, and carry on. So that means that for the corrected pages in the first folio, any copy of this book will have really a random combination of corrected and uncorrected. It's not true that copy number one is. And copy 750. All right. They are all a mixture. And even this is partly because time is money, as we know, but also money is money. And the money that was really heavily invested in printing went on paper. Paper was a really high cost in this period. So even the copy that had been checked over and marked up with corrections, even that paper was not thrown away. It was just put in the pile with the others. So we now know of six marked up with corrections sheets in copies of the First Folio. So they show us how the book was corrected, and they also show us which anybody who's been involved in proofreading any document will recognize that if you correct an error, you usually make another one in the course of doing it. There's something else you don't see or you push something else out or something like that. So we see this is a book with millions of words and with thousands of errors. That's just the way of it, just, you know, just as it would be. But it is kind of fascinating to see the work that's been done not consistently through the whole book, but particularly on the tragedies. The last section of the book that's been done, to check it over for Errors.
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A
Right. And they missed a couple of plays or plays that we believe now were written by Shakespeare. I guess Cardenio and Love's Labors won. Do we know why they missed those? Were those not attributed to Shakespeare in their time?
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We don't know. So these two plays, there's evidence that they did exist and that they were by, or at least in part by Shakespeare, but they have not been printed and therefore they don't survive. But there are two plays, at least in part by Shakespeare that were printed elsewhere, but not in the Folio. So Pericles and the Two Noble Kinsmen. So those two are left out of the Folio for some reason. And we know we talked before about how they got hold of the copy to print from. If other stationers, other publishers had already printed copies of some of the plays, they weren't always all that happy to give up the rights. Some of them drove quite a hard bargain. And there's a man called Henry Walley who owns the rights to Troilus and Cressida, and he really plays hardball. So much so that the Folio printers have prepared and printed copies of the catalogue page, the list of the plays included, and they've left Troilus and Cressida off it because they just don't think they're going to get it. And then they do, for some reason. And so they slot in this play, which has no page numbers because it was. It's kind of out of sequence. But when they think they're not going to get Troilus and Cressida, they bring in another play to fill up the space. And that play is Timon of Athens. So they obviously knew that Timon of Athens was partly by Shakespeare. We mostly now think it's partly by Shakespeare and partly by Thomas Middleton. They knew it was there, but they weren't going to include it until there was this kind of snafu with Tortoise and Cressida. So that insight, for me, makes it look as if perhaps they are. Are marginalizing some of those plays that they know to have been jointly written with other authors. They are focusing, although not entirely the First Folio on sole authorship.
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Right. And what was the copyright scenario? How did one get the rights to a play? Had Shakespeare sold them? Or is the. This publishing phenomenon where people can stake a claim to one as long as they're first? Or how does that work?
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The system of copyright sort of hardly exists, but there's a system of rights to publish, which is overseen by the Stationer's Company, and they have a register in which they encourage their members to lodge their right to print certain books. So at the point when a stationer agrees with an author or another agent that they're going to publish a particular text, they write their claim to that in the stationer's register. And that's one of the places that can be referred back to if there's a case of dispute. And sometimes there are disputes and the stationer's company steps in and says, yeah, actually this guy had the pre ownership of it, so all your copies are going to be burnt. You've usurped the rights to publish there.
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Okay, well let's take a quick break and then come back with more about the First Folio, including how it's been used for the last 400 years. Hey folks, launching a business is fun, but there's so much to do and so much risk. What if I put out a podcast and nobody listens? What if nobody buys my products? That's why it's great to have one. Go to partner on your side. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. From household names like Heinz and Mattel to brands just getting started like Gymshark and Death Wish Coffee. Choose one of Shopify's hundreds of ready to use templates to build a beautiful store that matches your brand and benefit from all of Shopify's behind the scenes tools like campaigns, inventory, shipping, payments, analytics and more. If you get stuck, Shopify is there to help with their award winning 24. 7 customer support. It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com literature go to shopify.com literature that's shopify.com literature
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B
I think what the First Folio does is to establish the collected Shakespeare as a dominant publishing format. So what we get in the rest of the 17th century is a second, third and fourth edition of this same book. There is some circulation of individual playtexts, but not so much. In fact, probably the existence of these big collected editions really restricts the ability of the plays to circulate individually. And that happens all through the fourth folio is in the date of that is 1685. So all through the rest of the 17th century, Shakespeare exists in versions of this big single volume folio book. And then as the century turns, as we get into the 1700s, then we have a century really of editors. Editors start to look at these plays. They want to answer questions about how they're in, should be interpreted and what's the correct reading. What's more Shakespearean, what was the life of Shakespeare? What kind of things did he read to produce these plays? And so we start what is one of the most sort of energetic sectors of 18th century publishing is very contentious and sort of rivalrous Shakespeare editions and these are mostly again complete works, but this time in multiple small volumes, much more manageable, much more readable. And that's the format in which Shakespeare really circulates through the 18th century and all through that period. So from the time when the second edition of the Folio comes out nine years after the first in 1632, right through to the end of the 18th century and in addition by someone like Edmund Malone, all through that period, Copies of the First Folio, the 1623 book that we are celebrating this year were really not that desirable. The First Folio was a sort of secondhand book. It was not a rare or a valuable book. It sold for a lower price than one of the new modern editions. And we know of quite a number of owners who trade in for a later version, thinking that that's a better, more modern or up to date thing to have.
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A
Like a car.
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B
Exactly, exactly. The car analogy is absolutely right. You know, I've been thinking that the First Folio is a bit like a car that when you drive it off the forecourt, you know it's lost a third of its value or something. And I think that's. That happens with this book too.
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A
Right. And I read even the Bodleian, of all places, sold off their copy of the First Folio when the Third Folio came out.
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B
Yeah. This is such an embarrassment to the poor Bodleian, which is my, you know, my university library in a completely wonderful place. Yeah. But they, too, they were treating the First Folio a bit more like a medical textbook or a legal textbook. You know, if you had the chance of a new, updated version, you'd jump at it, wouldn't you? You wouldn't want people to be consulting some outdated old thing. They think of this volume of plays as having been sort of perfected and improved by being redone and newer. Whereas, in fact, what happens in those versions is, although some things do get improved, the standard of. Of bits and pieces of Latin, for example, is much higher in the Later Folio, somebody has had a look at that and tidied it all up, but in other ways, it's just like any form of resetting, retypesetting and reprinting. It's just introduced more mistakes.
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And this is jumping ahead a little bit. But I also am wondering, just. The First Folio, it's got this aura around it because it was the earliest and the first, but it's not quite the same as it would be if it were handwritten by Shakespeare, for example. So I could see where you would think, oh, well, they've improved this. So let's not expose our audience or our readers and the scholars who are working here. Let's not expose them to the earlier one, which presumably has more mistakes and so on, but we'll get a nice new copy of the improved one for them to work with.
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B
Absolutely. When you look at it like that, you think in a way, that's what a library should be doing, keeping up to date, keeping material up to date. But it just turned out to be a wrong call. They did give the book back after it turned up and they launched what was actually in UK higher education, the first ever fundraising campaign from former students to try and buy this book so that it didn't go to the. I'm quoting here, of course, fabulously rich sort of money mad Americans. It was a time at which in the life of these books where they were really very, very desirable for super rich men who'd made a lot of money in American industry at the end of the 19th into the 20th century. They're real Gilded Age kind of objects, first folios in that world. And the Bodleian is trying to keep this particular copy and get it back home to Oxford, which it does manage to do.
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A
It is a little less interesting to me once it became such a collector's item that it was. Was kind of the subject of auctions and so on. And what I love are the copies that you were tracing for your book that would have annotations or markings or a sense that this was just a book in a library or a book in someone's private collection, but they were really using it, that it was them taking in Shakespeare and seeing what was there, rather than, oh, this is a good investment or this is I'll own one of the rarers things in the world, or something like that. But what were you finding as you were tracing the individual copies for your book?
- [37:11]
B
I absolutely agree with you. I love that period. That first century probably of the life of these books is a century in which they circulate pretty well in sort of well to do, but not by any means super rich households. And we can see that people make marks in them. They are sometimes doing corrections or improvements or something as they see it to the text. Sometimes they're just kind of doodling in the margin. There's a wonderful copy where a little girl called Elizabeth Okal, we know that because she's put her name on it at the beginning of the 18th century, draws a house with a chimney and some sort of smoke puffing out of it in a lovely bit of white space at the bottom of one of the pages. There are a couple of. My favourites are the number of copies that have a cat's paw walking across the book. Or one of those really telltale, you know the circle that's round the foot of a wine glass. There's one of those in one of our library copies which I enjoy very much. The idea that you would have put your. This is a big book. You might have put a glass down or made a mark on it. And you're right, this is all a period where people are not afraid, they're not in awe, they're not reverential about this book or its contents. And so because of that, we get a whole host of information and insight into people's lives. We get people who are doing little sums or drafting out letters or bits and pieces like that, doing sketches, signing their names as well as, you know, sorting out, pulling out the quotations that they think are most valuable, most interesting, giving a little bit of commentary about whether they think the plays are any good or not. So it's an amazing reception history of Shakespeare, but much more as well.
- [39:04]
A
Right. And we know of, is it a couple hundred copies that are currently known to exist?
- [39:11]
B
Yeah, we've got about 230 copies. The uncertainty is that some are really amalgamations, pretty much of single leaves. There's a point this book was so valuable that you could buy a bit like has happened to the Gutenberg Bible as well, you know, a single leaf or a couple of leaves or something that you could buy. And some of these are really just sort of put together again from those kinds of quite separated sheets. But, yeah, we've got a good number. And it's a good thing to remind ourselves that this is not a particularly rare book by the standards of the early modern period. It's much less rare than the. Those individual quarto texts, for instance, which often survived just in two or three copies because they were so relatively fragile and easily lost, easily forgotten about. Whereas this is a big book that's being kept quite safe on library shelves and in most cases, actually is in pretty good condition.
- [40:11]
A
Right. So even if you. Whatever you thought of it, just the size and the weight and the heft of it would suggest you weren't going to be casually tossing it around or tearing it up or just forgetting about it during a move or something. But it would be absolutely.
- [40:25]
B
Exactly. Yeah, we've got big books like that, haven't we? We may never even look at them, but they're somehow there. They can't be lost. They're there on the shelf and there they sit, you know, decade after decade. And certainly for some first Folios, that was also the case. So the size is a really important part of the survival of copies of this book, but also the survival of Shakespeare's reputation and Shakespeare's availability for performance and study and so on.
- [40:54]
A
Now, I was reading about one first folio that was discovered in, I think, April of 2016, and it had Just been found in a house. And then I saw in this article I was reading, it was authenticated by Professor Emma Smith of Oxford University. So is this something. Is this a side gig of yours that they call you in when they find first folios or suspected first folios on a shelf that's been. Or a school library or something?
- [41:22]
B
I wouldn't yet say. I wouldn't say it in the plural, but certainly that was an extraordinary. I think that's probably a once in a lifetime gig. Yes, it's interesting. This was found in a library, you might think that's not very surprising, and found in a. A library of the Bute family on a Scottish island just off the west coast of Scotland. And in fact, to be fair to the Bute family, they were pretty clear that they had it. They felt sure it was a Shakespeare first folio and they asked me to come and look at it and I said, I don't believe it is one. I think this is a book that has been so studied, it's been so valuable, we've got all these different lists of, from different periods of who owns them and where they are. It's just really not possible that one would be in plain sight all this time. But anyway, I was persuaded to go and have a look and I was absolutely and utterly wrong. It was indeed a first folio, interestingly, split into three volumes. The title of the book, Master William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, sounds a little bit as if it could be sort of three volumes for those three genres. And in fact, this copy in the 18th century had been split into three. But it was, yeah, a pretty amazing experience.
- [42:35]
A
Yeah. Did you have any anxiety about that? Hoaxers are so good. I wonder if you felt like you would know it immediately or if there was anything in particular you thought you could look for, or if you just could tell from your work, based on going through lots of first folios before that, you would be able to spot it if somebody was trying to invent a new first folio.
- [42:59]
B
Well, I did feel very, very nervous about it. And in fact, the reason that the timing of the sort of announcement of this discovery was about sort of eight months after I'd first been to look at it, because I needed to make. I knew I didn't have all the information to authenticate. And that's information about watermarks. For instance, we know from all the extant copies what the range of watermarks are in the jagged print shop paper stocks for this book. So that's a very Very. It's very difficult to. It's pretty impossible, actually to fake a watermark because it's de. Deep in the composition of the paper. You can see it shining a light through the paper usually. So I didn't have with me. I don't just have on there at top. Probably somebody does somewhere, but I don't have in the top of my mind what all these watermarks are. So I knew I needed that list, for instance, and various other kinds of documentary lists, so I needed to go back and do the authentication properly. But I felt absolutely sure when I went that it was going to be a fake and that they were going to hate me forever because I was saying, I know it looks like it, but really it isn't. And this is why. And this is why. Which was partly why I hadn't want to go and kind of rain on their parade. But the fact that this is the only copy in three volumes done in the 18th century and with a note in from a very B list 18th century editor called Isaac Reid. I thought if you were going to go to the trouble of faking this book, you would probably fake it to look more like a proper one, all in one volume. That's to say. And if you're going to go to the hassle of faking it, why wouldn't you give it a more glamorous kind of provenance? Why wouldn't you? You'd probably be tempted to over claim a bit. So the fact that it was so unusual in its format in these three volumes rather than one was a really early sign to me that perhaps it wasn't the fake that I firmly expected when I walked into the room.
- [45:01]
A
That's interesting that that sort of answers a question for me, which is what it's like to work with the different first folios that you've seen. It suggests that the. The sort of commonality they have is their difference.
- [45:14]
B
Absolutely. What these books show is the kind of lives they have had for 400 years, you know.
- [45:21]
A
Yeah.
- [45:22]
B
They're old ladies now and they've got great stories to tell and some have had a bit of work done and don't look quite as old as they really are, and showing all the age and experience that they've got. So one of the things I feel. I still feel this. I've seen. I saw about 120 copies when I was working on my book, but I'm carrying on. I've seen a couple this year that I hadn't seen before. I'm going to make a trip To South Africa, where I've never been, where there's a copy later in the summer. And what I always feel about them is just a sense of excitement that you don't know really what you're going to find. And often you can just turn the pages and there doesn't seem to be anything, they seem very clean. And then there's suddenly a part of the book where someone has really gone to town on annotating or, you know, making marks or the shape of a pair of scissors or something that's been left in the book or a pair of glasses or something. So just suddenly, you know, something, you turn over the page and a whole world in which this book was playing a part kind of just emerges for a. So they're brilliantly charismatic books. I love working with them and I never feel, oh God, another First Folio.
- [46:42]
A
So if I gave you the choice between owning a First Folio and owning, let's say, a modern day set of paperback copies of the Shakespearean plays that are in the First Folio, and I said you only get to own one or the other, the First Folio or the paperback copies for the rest of your life and you're not allowed to resell them, that would kind of tip the scales a little bit toward the First Folio. Which would you choose?
- [47:10]
B
I think I would choose the First Folio, even though there would be. It's a really, it's a really difficult question, because if you strip. It's a really smart question too, because what you're doing is pointing out that in some ways the contents of this book, as in the formal contents, the plays of Shakespeare, are not presented here in their most usable form. And if what you're interested in is what do these plays say and how might you put them on stage or something, then the modern paperback editions would be much, much better at doing that. So I wonder if that's me talking myself round to saying I would have those modern paperback editions. I can't believe that I would pass up the chance to have a First Folio. And I think what I would spend my time on is some of the things that editors used to call accidentals or incidental material. That's things like stage directions or the little prefixes before a speech that tell you who is doing the speaking. And these are things which just tend to get edited into conformity, uniformity by modern editions. And they're often very sort of quirky and strange. I think a lot about a stage direction in Coriolanus, where the stage direction is the stage is as if it were the Roman Senate. I think that's quite interesting, isn't it? It is the Roman Senate, but as if it were. And some of those little sort of itches I think I would enjoy. So, yeah, I'm going to stick with my initial gut reaction, which was First Folio.
- [48:46]
A
Okay, so I gave you the choice of. Of portable magic, emphasis on the portable, and emphasis on the magic, and you chose the latter?
- [48:54]
B
Yeah, I did.
- [48:57]
A
Okay. Emma Smith, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [49:02]
B
Thank you.
- [49:10]
A
Okay, that was Emma Smith back in June of 2023. My thanks to her for. For joining me for that conversation. We have Laurie Frankel coming up for Mother's Day, and then a fun episode in honor of episode 800, the delightful Indira Ghosh will be joining us. And then it's a journey to Bath and Jane Austen, much like the one I am currently taking as part of the History of Literature podcast tour. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.