It is not quite true that the First Folio is the definitive version for each text. Some quartos, including bad ones, may incorporate later improvements and refinements, or, more rarely, may offer readable text where the Folio version is doubtful or vague. Even the poorest quarto can provide a useful basis of comparison between varying versions of the same text. G. Blakemore Evans cites a line from King Lear that is rendered in different early editions of the play as “My Foole usurps my body,” “My foote usurps my body,” and “My foote usurps my head” (and in fact really makes sense only as “A fool usurps my bed”). Quartos also tend to incorporate more generous stage directions, which can be very helpful to scholars and directors alike.
Sometimes there are such differences between quarto and folio editions of plays that it is impossible to know how to resolve them or to guess which version Shakespeare might ultimately have favored. The most notorious example of this is Hamlet, which exists in three versions: a “bad” 1603 quarto of 2,200 lines, a much better 1604 quarto of 3,800 lines, and the 1623 folio version of 3,570 lines. There are reasons to believe that of the three the “bad” first quarto may actually most closely represent the play as performed. It is certainly brisker than the other versions. Moreover, as Ann Thompson of King’s College in London points out, it places Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in a different, better place, where suicidal musing seems more apt and rational.
Even more comprehensively problematic is King Lear, for which the quarto edition has three hundred lines and an entire scene not found in the First Folio, while the latter has one hundred or so lines not found in the quarto. The two versions assign speeches to different characters, altering the nature of three central roles- Albany, Edgar, and Kent -and the quarto offers a materially different ending. Such are the differences that the editors of the Oxford Shakespeare included both versions in the complete works on the grounds that they are not so much two versions of the same play as two different plays. Othello likewise differs in more than one hundred lines between quarto and First Folio, but, even more important, has hundreds of different words in the two versions, suggesting extensive later revision.
Nobody knows how many First Folios were printed. Most estimates put the number at about a thousand, but this is really just a guess. Peter W. M. Blayney, the preeminent authority on the First Folio, thinks it was rather less than a thousand. “The fact that the book was reprinted after only nine years,” Blayney has written, “suggests a relatively small edition-probably no more than 750 copies, and perhaps fewer.” Of these, all or part of three hundred First Folios survive-an extraordinary proportion.
The great repository of First Folios today is a modest building on a pleasant street a couple of blocks from the Capitol in Washington, D.C. -the Folger Shakespeare Library. It is named for Henry Clay Folger, who was president of Standard Oil (and, more distantly, a member of the Folgers coffee family), and who began collecting First Folios early in the twentieth century, when they could often be snapped up comparatively cheaply from hard-up aristocrats and struggling institutions.
As sometimes happens with serious collectors, Folger became increasingly expansive as time went on, and began collecting works not just by or about Shakespeare, but by or about people who liked Shakespeare, so that the collection includes not only much priceless Shakespearean material but also some unexpected curiosities: a manuscript by Thomas de Quincey on how to make porridge, for instance. Folger didn’t live to see the library that bears his name. Two weeks after laying the foundation stone in 1930, he died of a sudden heart attack.
The collection today consists of 350,000 books and other items, but the core is the First Folios. The Folger owns more of them than any other institution in the world-though surprisingly, no one can say exactly how many.
“It is not actually easy to say what is a First Folio and what isn’t, because most Folios are no longer entirely original and few are entirely complete,” Georgianna Ziegler, one of the curators, told me when I visited in the summer of 2005. “Beginning in the late eighteenth century it became common practice to fill out incomplete or broken volumes by inserting pages taken from other volumes, sometimes to quite a radical extent. Copy sixty-six of our collection is roughly 60 percent cannibalized from other volumes. Three of our ‘fragment’ First Folios are actually more complete than that.”
“What we normally say,” added her colleague Rachel Doggett, “is that we have approximately one-third of the surviving First Folios.”
It is customarily written that the Folger has seventy-nine complete First Folios and parts of several others, though in fact only thirteen of the seventy-nine “complete” copies really are complete. Peter Blayney, however, believes the Folger can reasonably claim to possess eighty-two complete copies. It really is largely a matter of semantics.
Ziegler and Doggett took me to a secure windowless basement room where the rarest and most important of the volumes in the Folger collections are kept. The room was chilly, brightly lit, and rather antiseptic. Had I been blindfolded I might have guessed that it was a room where autopsies were conducted. Instead it was filled with rows of modern shelving containing a vast quantity of very old books. The First Folios lay on their sides on twelve shallow shelves along the back wall. Each book is about eighteen by fourteen inches, roughly the size of an Encyclopædia Britannica volume.
It is worth devoting a moment to considering how books were put together in the early days of movable type. Think of a standard greeting card in which one sheet of paper card is folded in half to make four separate surfaces-front, inside left, inside right, and back. Slip two more folded cards into the first and you have a booklet of twelve pages, or what is known as a quire-roughly half the length of a play or about the amount of text that a printing workshop would work on at any time. The complication from the printer’s point of view is that in order to have the pages run consecutively when slotted together, they must be printed mostly out of sequence. The outer sheet of a quire, for instance, will have pages 1 and 2 on the left-hand leaf but pages 11 and 12 on the right-hand side. Only the innermost two pages of a quire (pages 6 and 7) will actually appear and be printed consecutively. All the others have at least one nonsequential page for a neighbor.
What this meant in producing a book was that it was necessary to work out in advance which text would appear on each of twelve pages. The process was known as casting off, and when it went wrong, as it commonly did, compositors had to make adjustments to get their lines and pages to end in the right places. Sometimes it was a matter of introducing a contraction here and there-using “ye” instead of “the,” for example-but sometimes more desperate expedients became necessary. On occasion whole lines were dropped.
With the First Folio, production was spread among three different shops, each employing teams of compositors of varying deftness, experience, and commitment, which naturally resulted in differences from one volume to another. If an error was noticed when a page was being printed, as often happened, it would be corrected at that point in the run. A series of corrections would therefore introduce a number of discrepancies between almost any two volumes. Printers in Shakespeare’s day (and, come to that, long after) were notoriously headstrong and opinionated, and rarely hesitated to introduce improvements as they saw fit. It is known from extant manuscripts that when the publisher Richard Field published a volume by the poet John Harrington, his compositors introduced more than a thousand changes to the spelling and phrasing.