Slimed With Gravy, Ringed by Drink

This year marks the four hundredth anniversary of the First Folio edition of William Shakespeare’s plays. It’s easy to see why this is now the best known and most fetishized of all Shakespearean volumes, with a market value best compared—in scholar Anthony James West’s view—with that of Russian caviar or Jaguar cars. (Although even those benchmarks understate the allure. In 2020, Christie’s sold a complete copy of the Folio at auction for nearly $10 million.) We do not have Shakespeare’s original manuscripts, perhaps apart from the three-page “Hand D” additions to Sir Thomas More, and of the 36 plays which appear in the large-format Folio, 18 (including The Tempest, Macbeth, and Julius Caesar) were never published in smaller, cheaper “quarto” or “octavo” versions: without the Folio, these plays could well be lost. And even the plays that do exist in numerous quarto editions differ, in these versions, from the Folio. The Folio text of Othello, for instance, doesn’t introduce the brute and earthy Iago with “s’blood” and other choice curses, as does the first quarto of 1622 (which was based on an earlier manuscript, likely from around the time the play was staged in 1603–4); the Folio was purged to comply with the 1606 Act to Restrain Abuses of Players, which prohibited profanity.

In his imaginative monograph Shakespeare’s Book: The Story Behind the First Folio and the Making of Shakespeare (Pegasus Books, 2023), Chris Laoutaris refers to the Folio as “the book Shakespeare made, and the book that made Shakespeare.” The way the Folio presents Shakespeare and the way it has itself been presented, with accelerating reverence over the past few centuries, has naturally affected opinions of Shakespeare’s work. But the bromides and myths that surround the Folio—it is complete; it is authoritative; it must be protected—haven’t gone unchallenged. Many of these myths were nonchalantly instituted by the Folio’s editors, John Heminge and Henry Condell, actors in Shakespeare’s company, who asserted that the Folio was “Published according to the True Originall Copies”—by which they meant according to some manuscripts, some foul papers (working drafts), and some quarto versions and theaters’ prompt books. By the time the Folio appeared, Shakespeare had been dead seven years and was in no position to dispute their claims.

It’s important to note from the outset that, despite the Folio’s claim to completeness, whole plays are—or were, for a moment—missing from the text. Troilus and Cressida was printed after the rest of the Folio, perhaps because of copyright delays, so it is absent from some copies of the book and from the contents page. The Two Noble Kinsmen and Pericles were never included, despite the possibility that, as scholar Adam G. Hooks has claimed, by the mid-17th century Shakespeare’s status “rested securely on Pericles and the early narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece.” Edward Blount, one of several stationers who helped produce the Folio, possessed the rights to Pericles and could have published it—why didn’t he? Perhaps because it was only part Shakespearean, the rest penned by the less-loved pimp and innkeeper George Wilkins; this too seems odd, though, given that other multiauthored works are present. Whatever the reason, the two plays’ absence from the Folio has troubled their reception: readers and scholars have concluded that the plays were omitted because they were of inferior quality, less canonical, less culturally valuable.

The Folio's reverend reputation and the worthy nimbus it bestowed on the plays that were included started with the way its contents were contextualized. Its monied dedicatees, William, Earl of Pembroke and Philip, Earl of Montgomery, gave the whole enterprise an air of prestige. Then there are its prefatory materials. Shakespeare’s portrait on the title page, engraved by Martin Droeshout, “has the solemn gravitas of a tomb effigy,” as Laoutaris writes in his contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's First Folio (2016). (The likeness differs from the ornamental portraits chosen for the works of other early modern writers, which often featured circular frames and symbols such as laurel leaves; the focus on Shakespeare alone is bold and stark, suggesting he is central to the work and needs no introduction.) Heminge and Condell’s assertion that “we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers” spawned the legend of Shakespeare as immaculate genius who never edited his work. One of the two poems Ben Jonson submitted to the Folio had similarly lasting effects: Shakespeare, the “Swan of Avon,” had “small Latin, and lesse Greek”; nonetheless, he was both the “Soul of the Age” and “not of an age, but for all time.” Finally, there is the Folio’s size and shape. In Shakespeare’s time, as Emma Smith notes in the magnificent The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio (University of Chicago Press, 2015; new edition 2023), “this kind of publication was usually reserved for works of conspicuous seriousness,” such as bibles and genealogies.

Indeed, the Barbican printshop of William Jaggard, another of the stationer-publishers behind the Folio, produced a glut of genealogies and other such staid books. The Folio calls itself a “catalogue” of Shakespeare’s plays perhaps, as Ben Higgins writes in the well-researched Shakespeare’s Syndicate: The First Folio, Its publishers, and the Early Modern Book Trade (Oxford University Press, 2022), in reference to Jaggard’s back catalog of other catalog volumes. Jaggard has sometimes been viewed as a bit of a pirate. He was partly behind the Pavier-Jaggard Quartos of 1619 (or “false folio,” so called because Jaggard did not own the titles to some of the 10 plays included, and printed them with false dates under other printers’ names, and because two of the plays are no longer thought to be Shakespeare’s) and the anthology The Passionate Pilgrime (1599), which published non-Shakespearean work under the poet’s name—a liberty by which Shakespeare was, according to Thomas Heywood, “much offended.” But Higgins states convincingly that Jaggard did less to taint the Folio than he did to align it with works “encyclopaedic in scope and authoritative in content.” Blount, meanwhile, both published the Folio alongside Jaggard and stocked it at his shop at the sign of the Black Bear near St Paul’s Church. Like Jaggard’s backlist, Blount’s had stout symbolic capital: his imprint was linked to now-canonical authors such as Michel de Montaigne, Christopher Marlowe, John Lyly, and Samuel Daniel.

The natural high point of the Folio’s veneration was a scramble to identify the book as an ideal. In Smith’s excellent companion volume Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (Oxford University Press, 2016; new edition 2023), one chapter is titled “Perfecting.” Most authors’ books get away with just being good; Shakespeare’s, apparently, has to be infallible. In line with this view, much of the Folio’s impact has been guided by the question of whether it’s the word of the Bard, “the text nearest to Shakespeare’s stage, to Shakespeare’s ownership, to Shakespeare’s authority,” according to Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke, or a text lamentably damaged by the many hands that manufactured the prompt books, managed the printing environment, or later handled the finished volumes.

The first side assumes that the Folio came to us in its idiosyncratic form (with many inconsistencies, or aberrations, of main text and pagination) on purpose, either because that’s how Shakespeare wanted it or because that is how the plays were staged. Smith writes succinctly of Allan Park Paton’s belief that the “frequent and invariably intelligent employment of capital letters” in the Folio’s Macbeth must be intended as a guide to understanding and performing the work. In 1948, Richard Flatter explored this at length in Shakespeare’s Producing Hand, a monograph on Shakespeare’s “Marks of Expression,” i.e., the Folio’s irregularities, which he read as punctilious stage directions. To this day, some actors and directors uphold the idea of acting “from” the Folio text.

But these minute facetiae have had much more eccentric—and uncannily far-reaching—outcomes, too. The seed of authorial skepticism that Delia Bacon planted in The Philosophy of The Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded (1857) was later provided air and sustenance by Ignatius Donnelly in The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon’s Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays (1888). As Smith writes, Donnelly’s “instinct about the plays’ authorship was … satisfactorily corroborated by instances of the word ‘Bacon’ in Shakespeare’s plays.” Amid the book’s peculiarities, Donnelly found a code he credited, along with the plays themselves, to the philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon. The Baconian line would go on to improbably stimulate wartime decryption practices: William Friedman, an assistant to Elizabeth Gallup, a proponent of Baconian authorship, later took over the US Army's Signal Intelligence Service.

The scholar Charlton Hinman, meanwhile, found through close attention to the variants held in the Folger Shakespeare Library (which was due to reopen after renovations this November, making its trove of 82 First Folios a focal point; the reopening has been delayed) that the irregularities in fact resulted from the working methods used in Jaggard’s printshop. He argued that the variations in spelling, pagination, and so on were the results of different working methods and experience levels in the team of five to 10 compositors who put the book together. They are known now as Compositors A, B, C, and so on, and, in the case of Compositor E, by name: John Leason, the teenaged, cack-handed typesetter whose technique improved as his apprenticeship to the older Compositor B progressed, but who still left a trail of antique typos in his wake. The others merely have consistent differences of presentation. Compositor A, for instance, favors “doe, goe and here,” while Compositor B prefers “do, go and heere.” (Their preferences can be found in other Jaggard books as well.)

During the 19th century, the market value of First Folios—emblems of imperial British culture and high status—escalated. Owners responded to the strangeness of the text by trying to improve it. Some tried to Frankenstein a “perfect” Folio into existence, subjecting Folios to “Grangerizing” (adding newly illustrated matter), “vampment” (filling gaps with facsimile leaves, or leaves cannibalized from other copies), and similar debased, debasing practices; many surviving Folios are a hodgepodge of materials. But among Hinman’s other discoveries was that there is no such thing as a singular “correct” Folio text. Because each Folio was proofread as the compositors went along, and each will have since weathered further alterations, no two copies will be textually identical, and no amount of grifting and grafting will change that.

Those alterations often take in what we might today deem charming evidence of 17th- or 18th-century direct engagement. In the words of critic Percy Fitzgerald, the books are “usually found frayed, maimed, soiled, smeared, imperfect, leaves and sheets torn out.” They are often corrugated, slimed with gravy, ringed by drink, footprinted by cats, underlined, illustrated (sometimes horribly, as with a clutch of manicules around the scene in Titus Andronicus where Lavinia has just lost her hands), and used as scrap paper for practicing signatures or tallying sums. Readers sometimes spot, or think they have spotted, spelling, semantic, or metrical errors.

In rare cases, annotations have caused genuine excitement. Claire M. L. Bourne and Jason Scott-Warren identified John Milton as the annotator of a copy owned by the Free Library of Philadelphia. In a 2022 article in Milton Quarterly, the two scholars write that “besides the Milton family Bible … [this is] the first English vernacular book to be identified as having belonged to Milton.” It shows Milton to be “a reader alive to the minutiae of poetry as a craft.” His frequent use of “vext” to describe weather in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained began, it now seems, with his underlining of “still-vext” in the Folio Tempest, which the Oxford English Dictionary records as the earliest such usage. References to Shakespeare are an undersong in Milton’s work, but it is wondrous to see some clearly noted.

The many markings Milton made on his First Folio also reveal some of the differences between the Folio and quarto texts of plays including Romeo and Juliet. As Higgins observes, “There is nothing obviously wrong with Juliet’s line ‘Proud can I never be of what I have’ when she rejects the idea that she should feel delighted about her betrothal to Paris, but Milton still altered the line to Q5’s ‘Proud can I never be of what I hate.’” There is a difference between the “forceful and impassioned” fifth-quarto Juliet and the “rueful” First Folio version. This character difference is stranger still considering that the Folio lacks the play’s now-famous starting sonnet, an early modern trigger warning that winds the clock of tragedy, making the quarto technically more fated and fatal, sadder, and that Milton supplies by hand in his Folio text. Milton clearly backed inclusive and zigzagging reading methods. So does Higgins.

The grief that collectors sometimes feel on learning that Folios have been scrawled or drooled on is perhaps akin to literary stalwarts’ anger when Shakespeare is adapted in surprising ways. Yet it was always thus. To look on four-plus centuries of Shakespeare adaptations is to look on something like theater’s version of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style (1947)—a collision of genres and sensibilities within a set of preexisting narrative constraints. Greg Doran’s enjoyable memoir My Shakespeare: A Director’s Journey Through the First Folio (Bloomsbury, 2023) recounts renditions of As You Like It with a knitted set and The Tempest with impressive live special effects devised by the English actor Andy Serkis. Nahum Tate’s 1681 revision of King Lear had Edgar and Cordelia fall in love and Lear retire happy (the original ending was deemed too gloomy); Bertolt Brecht’s unfinished adaptation of Coriolanus, which he worked on in the early 1950s, is inflected by the politics of Mao Zedong. Even more curiously, Forests, a 2012 production conceived by the Catalan director Calixto Bieto, collages Shakespeare’s mentions of trees into a play-length sylvan scene.

What seems to still vex people most about this sort of thing is the assumed adjustment of the author’s words. But Shakespeare is known to have produced some of the plays, even those in the Folio, in collaboration with other playwrights, such as John Fletcher, on Henry VIII, and Thomas Middleton, on Timon of Athens. (The language in these plays is apparently bygone in comparison with that of Shakespeare’s younger contemporaries—favoring “hath” and “them” over Fletcher’s “has” and “’em,” “thou” and “I did go home” over Middleton’s “you” and “I went home”—and this is worth noting, Smith points out in The Making of, “given how we praise Shakespeare’s linguistic inventiveness.” It is possible too, however, that Shakespeare’s variants are merely regional—that is, more rustic.)

Then there is the fact that, based on what we know of Shakespeare’s work and its environment, the plays were shaped not only by the poet’s hand but by the company for which he wrote them. The King’s Men’s star actors were Richard Burbage and William Kemp: Burbage’s acting was protorealistic and reflective, and roles written for him almost certainly included Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Coriolanus, and Prospero; the clown Kemp, meanwhile, is “so intrinsic to the roles Shakespeare wrote for him [almost certainly including Bottom, Falstaff, and Dogberry],” writes Smith in Shakespeare’s First Folio, “that on occasion his name replaces that of his character” in the text. When Kemp left in 1599, the position of head clown was taken by the more sardonic, musically talented Robert Armin (both are listed in the Folio), and the “fool” in Shakespeare changed—this was the time of Twelfth Night’s subtle and ironic Feste, and of the wise fool, who shares one of Feste’s lines, in King Lear.

Lastly, what we know of Shakespeare’s character—archives imply that he was at least at times a grain-hoarding, tax-dodging, coat-of-arms-coveting entertainer—indicates that, could he see the quantity of fresh collaborations with his work, he would be not just lenient but pleased, especially in view of his declining print presence in later life (“the number of editions published in the first 10-year period is almost equal to that of the next twenty years,” as Smith observes). And he would want to know, of course, where he might find his cut of the royalties.

Cue the Play on Shakespeare series, published by ACMRS Press, the publications division of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University. The series, which grew out of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s plan to “translate” Shakespeare for the current century, bills itself “a new First Folio for a new era.” The 39 newly-commissioned versions of Shakespeare’s plays were written primarily by contemporary dramatists, who were asked to follow the reasonable principle laid out by series editor Lue Douthit: tamper in the name of clarification but submit to “do no harm.” The project was inspired by something the linguist John McWhorter wrote in 1998: “[the] irony today is that the Russians, the French, and other people in foreign countries possess Shakespeare to a much greater extent than we do … [because] they get to enjoy Shakespeare in the language they speak.”

The various “translators” reach varying planes of success. Amy Freed’s Taming of the Shrew is proficient in expounding mystifying phrases, and makes only sound amendments to, for instance, Petruchio’s central speech—apart, perhaps, from her changing “full-gorged” to the much less jugular “full-fed” and “haggard” to “lady hawk,” which clumsily reverses the original’s ancillary associations (e.g., in “a haggard woman”). Elsewhere, for every change that clarifies, another obfuscates Shakespeare’s intentions. In Lisa Peterson’s Hamlet, “chief good and market of his time” becomes “chief good and reason for his life,” destroying the complicating, mercenary hendiadys of “good [i.e., both moral benefit and vended object] and market” (she might have tried “good and profit”). There is also an issue around meter: many have high schoolers’ strict fixation on iambic pentameter (except for Migdalia Cruz’s Macbeth, which seems at least to recognize that other meters and metrical substitutions are in play), also neglecting line endings’ importance.

These instances expose the project’s fatal flaw: Shakespeare wasn’t just a great playwright, but a great poet who wrote plays. Poet-translators might have imitated him more passably. A well-read poet knows that the devices of the trivium, the rhetoric and Latin composition studied in the playwright’s youth, were anything but trivial to his creation. What’s more, a grasp of historical diction will show that modern borrowings such as “kowtow” (Chinese, early 19th century) and “bamboozled” (unknown, early 18th century) have no place in the verbal universe of Coriolanus. The worst offender is David Ivers’s As You Like It, which he unwisely admits he’d “sometimes … write while drinking a glass of Maker’s Mark.” The characters come out with such garbage—“Now I’ll be firm to say the pancakes sucked and the mustard rocked”; “My boss of sort is Marxist in state”; “Here comes the Dad”—that the overwhelming impression is of, yes, inebriation.

But this project’s botches shouldn’t warn us off its noble goals. A better guiding spirit than McWhorter might be the linguist Morris Swadesh, who wrote that language change occurs at such a rate that in ten thousand years our modern English—including the essay you’re reading now—will be opaque to “native” English speakers. We move unstoppingly toward a not-so-distant time when Shakespeare will require as many glosses, lectures, and unfathomably kooky movie adaptations as the Middle English works of the Gawain Poet. The difficult fact we must reckon with is not that Shakespeare is for all time, but that he isn’t.

At the conclusion of The Making of, Smith observes that the 233 surviving copies of the Folio are often kept “behind glass. … But since most copies of the First Folio have been rebound and are in good working condition, they do not need actually to be treated with particular reverence.” She reminds us that it has “a long history as a practical book” and can still be “a living object” for people to engage with firsthand, within reason. Similarly, the plays will be maintained in their original condition(s) somewhere, never supplanted, even if they are updated—with appropriate attention to their poetry, we must yet hope—for reading or performance. They, like the books they are bound in, should not be revered in sterility but sometimes touched and transformed—as they have been all along.