Folio 400 - Printing Shakespeare
Folio 400 - Printing Shakespeare
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interesting and discerning material related to all aspects of Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies,
First Ed. 1623.

Prof. Grace Loppolo

Prof. Grace Ioppolo

Revising Shakespeare, or why we need to celebrate the Quartos as well as the First Folio

16th March 2023
We rightly celebrate the 1623 First Folio for preserving the canon of thirty-six of Shakespeare’s plays, however, half of the plays in the Folio had been published previously in Quarto format and are also worthy of celebration.
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Matthew Shaw, Photo by John Cairns

Matthew Shaw

‘Not a fine or a perfect copy’ (Dibdin). Shakespeare’s First Folio at The Queen’s College, Oxford

28th February 2023
Matthew Shaw, Librarian at The Queen’s College, takes us through the history of the college’s copy of the First Folio, detailing who has made their mark on the book along its journey to the present day.
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a pair of 17th-century type cases - Joseph Moxon, Mechanick exercises, or, The doctrine of handy-works: applied to the art of printing. London: Joseph Moxon, 1683.

­Tiffany Stern

On Bears, tongues, sining and other typos

30th December 2022
It’s easy to think that the First Folio must be a well-constructed book because it is so important. Actually though, it is as subject to error and mistakes as any other book of the early modern period, perhaps more so (it is, after all, big).
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Lord Brotherton

Rhiannon Lawrence-Francis

‘Just you wait, Henry Huntington-just you wait!’-The Brotherton Collection

14th September 2022
During an intensive eight year collecting period from 1922 until his death in 1930, Lord Brotherton amassed over 35,000 books, 400 manuscripts, 4,000 deeds and 30,000 letters.
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Liber D page 69 Entry of First Folio 8 November 1623 (entry only) 01

Dr. Ruth Frendo

Enter The First Folio (and George Steevens)

14th September 2022
Dr. Ruth Frendo, an Archivist at The Worshipful Company of Stationers & Newspaper Makers, discusses the Stationers’ Register for Shakespeare’s First Folio and introduces us to an eighteenth-century scholar that left his mark.
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Munro Folio Contents Page

Siobhan Keenan

The First Folio Actors & the First Shakespearean ‘Star’, Richard Burbage

5th September 2022
Richard Burbage was not only a leading sharer in Shakespeare’s acting company and one of England’s first theatre entrepreneurs, as joint owner of the Globe and the Blackfriars theatres, he was also one of England’s first ‘star’ actors.
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the-catalogue-sqr-perspective

Sir Stanley Wells

Garlands

23rd April 2021
“We owe an incalculable debt to Shakespeare’s fellow actors John Heminge and Henry Condell who put the volume together.”
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Keats Poem - King Lear

Sir Jonathan Bate

Give me new Phoenix Wings to fly at my desire

21st April 2021
In his facsimile First Folio copy, John Keats wrote a poem in the half-page space between the end of Hamlet and the beginning of King Lear.
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Fifty Folio Facts 06_Detail

Nick de Somogyi

Fifty First Folio Facts

10th April 2021
Assembled by Nick Somogyi and illustrated by Pete Le May
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David Crystal

Professor David Crystal

Sounding the First Folio

11th March 2021
What the First Folio plays sounded like to their Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences.
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The Life of Henry the Fift

Professor Emma Smith

The Munro First Folio

22nd February 2021
“Shakespeare’s high cultural status in the age of empire really transformed the First Folio into an iconic object.”
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Farah Karim-Cooper

Professor Farah Karim-Cooper

First Folio; first encounter.

16th February 2021
“The first thing I did, oddly enough, was sniff it.”
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Folio 400 - Printing Shakespeare

The First Folio is one of the great wonders of the literary world. Published in 1623, seven years after the death of its author, it was the first printed edition of Shakespeare’s collected plays.  Without this achievement, we would have lost half of his dramatic work. This website is dedicated in gratitude to the 400th birthday of this foundational book on the 8th November 2023.

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