Shakespeare's First Folio
Four Centuries of an Iconic Book
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
This is a biography of a book: the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays printed in 1623 and known as the First Folio. It begins with the story of its first purchaser in London in December 1623, and goes on to explore the ways people have interacted with this iconic book over the four hundred years of its history. Throughout the stress is on what we can learn from individual copies now spread around the world about their eventful lives. From ink blots to pet paws, from annotations to wineglass rings, First Folios teem with evidence of its place in different contexts with different priorities. This study offers new ways to understand Shakespeare's reception and the history of the book. Unlike previous scholarly investigations of the First Folio, it is not concerned with the discussions of how the book came into being, the provenance of its texts, or the technicalities of its production. Instead, it reanimates, in narrative style, the histories of this book, paying close attention to the details of individual copies now located around the world - their bindings, marginalia, general condition, sales history, and location - to discuss five major themes: owning, reading, decoding, performing, and perfecting. This is a history of the book that consolidated Shakespeare's posthumous reputation: a reception history and a study of interactions between owners, readers, forgers, collectors, actors, scholars, booksellers, and the book through which we understand and recognise Shakespeare.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Shakespeare's famous First Folio, published in 1623 and now a holy grail for book collectors, is the subject of this cogent "biblio-biography" from Smith (The Making of Shakespeare's First Folio). Smith dispels the notion of the folio's rarity: 233 copies were known to exist when Smith wrote her book (a 234th has since been found) and First Folio copies are offered for sale more regularly than many scarcer volumes. She analyzes shifting patterns of ownership, noting that even the very first known sale of the book attested to the purchaser's wealth. Copies were once exclusively owned by English aristocrats but gradually wound up in the hands of nouveau riche American capitalists, most famously Standard Oil chairman Henry Folger, and Tokyo's Meisei University, which acquired 12 copies during Japan's late 20th-century economic boom. In the book's most engaging chapter, "Reading," Smith collates the many marginal notations written in copies, pointing out that folio owners saw fit to correct, critique, annotate, and otherwise "improve" upon the Bard's text, especially in the first century after its publication. Smith condenses a remarkable amount of scholarship into her study, and her writing is lively and insightful. For the millions of book lovers and bardophiles who will never own a copy of the First Folio, this engrossing book will serve as a suitable surrogate.
