Shakespeare as Author: The First Folio

The First Folio of Shakespeare is perhaps the single more important piece of literature in the English language. Twenty of Shakespeare's plays appear in print for the first time in the Folio; plays such as Julius Caesar, All's Well that Ends Well, Macbeth, Antony & Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, would be lost to us if not for the Folio.

Prefatory poem by Ben Jonson
and title page of the 1623 First Folio.

After Shakespeare's death in 1616, his friends and fellow actors John Heminge and Henry Condell assembled 36 of the 38 known plays (Pericles did not appear in the First Folio, but the Third Folio in 1663; The Two Noble Kinsmen did not appear in any Folio but finally a quarto in 1634; another play, Cardenio, is lost) for publication in a Folio-sized book. At the time, a Folio was a size and publication reserved mainly for history, religious, and other weighty subjects, not plays. The First Folio was approximately 13 inches tall and 8.5 inches wide, weighing almost five pounds. Publishing the Folio was a way to not only preserve their friend's work, but also to control the forms the plays appeared in, as there had been many unauthorized and "bad" quartos of plays over the years. Working from what appear to have been either manuscripts by Shakespeare himself or original play scripts, the Folio solidified the texts (mostly) of the plays and elevated Shakespeare from playwright to national poet. As Ben Jonson, who published his own collected works in Folio format in 1616, said in his dedicatory eulogy in the Folio,

To draw no envy (Shakespeare) on thy name,

Am I thus ample to thy Booke, and fame;

While I confess thy writings to be such,

As neither Man, nor Muse, can praise too much.

To have another playwright and poet such as Jonson eulogize him in such as way (and called the "sweet swan of Avon"), as well as a Folio of his works was to immortalize Shakespeare as a great writer. While his place in the pantheon of great English writers has ebbed and flowed, it has never been in doubt since. Without the Folio, an unauthorized-by-the-author publication, Shakespeare would not be the Shakespeare we know.

Shakespeare was not an author as we know an author to be today, with intellectual rights ingrained in his psyche and a desire for his works to be under his control, but the effects of the works that were printed had long-lasting effects on English literature as a whole and on our idea of what an author is.