Venerating the Sacred Relics of Shakespeare

An exhibition at the Folger Library is reviewed in the New York Times.

From the piece...

The First Folio is essentially Shakespeare’s collected dramatic works, posthumously compiled by his fellow actors John Heminge and Henry Condell. More important, it is the only source for 18 of Shakespeare’s plays. If it weren’t for the First Folio, there would be no extant copies of “The Tempest,” “Julius Caesar,” “Macbeth,” “Twelfth Night” “As You Like It” or “The Winter’s Tale.” All the world wouldn’t be a stage; no countrymen would lend anyone their ears; and life wouldn’t be a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.

What we would have instead are about half of Shakespeare’s plays, though since they were published as quartos — inexpensive editions, the early ones even lacking the author’s name — it is even doubtful they would have been preserved the way this imposing 900-something-page, double-column tome has been. Before the First Folio, its compilers tell the reader, “you were abus’d with diverse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors.” The First Folio promises something else.

It also shows that just after Shakespeare’s death, his stature was considerable. It was printed in a size reserved for great classics and lectern Bibles. And it was prefaced by robust front matter, including a tribute by Ben Jonson (“Thou art a Monument, without a tombe,/And art alive still, while thy booke doth live”), along with the famous Martin Droeshout engraving of Shakespeare. There is only one other volume in the English language that has been as powerful and influential — the King James Bible, published, amazingly, just 12 years before the First Folio — and it will be the subject of another Folger exhibition in September.

But this show, whose curators are Anthony James West, a research fellow at University College London, and Owen Williams, the Folger Institute’s assistant director, is not meant as a testimonial but as a survey of that book’s material life over nearly four centuries: how it fared in the marketplace and in the hands of its owners; how copies were damaged and restored; how scholars have analyzed its text; and even how it has been stolen and recovered.