Shakespeare’s Book: The Intertwined Lives Behind the First Folio

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William Shakespeare was an English poet, playwright and actor. He was born on April 26, 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon. His father was a successful local merchant and his mother was a landowner’s daughter. Heminges and Condell claim that the world had been ‘abused’ with fraudulent copies of the plays that had been issued in unauthorised piratical editions. This turns the First Folio into a rescue operation, restoring Shakespeare’s works to some kind of original, pure state. As will become clear, their insistence that the Folio offers perfected works ‘absolute’ as Shakespeare ‘conceived them’ is straining the truth. But what is significant here is the suggestion that the First Folio was, somehow, righting an earlier wrong that had ‘abused’ both Shakespeare’s works and reputation through the illicit printing of ‘stolen’ plays in inadequate, ‘maimed, and deformed’ versions. McDonald, Russ (2000). A Midsummer Night's Dream (The Pelican Shakespeare). Penguin Books. p. l. ISBN 0-14-071455-3. The first recorded performance was by "a company of base and common fellows," mentioned in the Gesta Grayorum ("The Deeds of Gray") as having occurred in Gray's Inn Hall on 28 Dec 1594. The second also took place on " Innocents' Day" but ten years later—in 1604, at Court. [note 2]

Performed before 1592, when Robert Greene parodied one of the play's lines in his pamphlet A Groatsworth of Wit. See notes for Part II and I above. The never-before-told story of how the makers of The First Folio created Shakespeare as we know him today.The Venetian ambassador to England, Zorzi Giustinian, saw a play titled Pericles during his time in London, which ran from 5 Jan 1606 to 23 Nov 1608. As far as is known, there was no other play with the same title that was acted in this era; the logical assumption is that this must have been Shakespeare's play. [27]

Draper, John W. "The Date of Romeo and Juliet." The Review of English Studies (Jan 1949) 25.97 pp. 55–57 The identical dates may not be coincidental; the Pauline and Ephesian aspect of the play, noted under Sources, may have had the effect of linking The Comedy of Errors to the holiday season—much like Twelfth Night, another play secular on its surface but linked to the Christmas holidays. Only one early performance is recorded with certainty, [note 3] which occurred on Wednesday night of 1 Jan 1634, at Court. W]e pray you, do not envy his [Shakespeare’s] Friends, the office of their care, and pain, to have collected and published them; and so to have published them, as where (before) you were abused with diverse stolen, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious imposters, that exposed them: even those, are now offered to your view cured, and perfect of their limbs, and all the rest, absolute in their numbers as he [Shakespeare] conceived them. Eternal youth … 1890 German illustration imagining Shakespeare reciting Hamlet to his family in Stratford. Photograph: The Picture Art Collection/Alamy

In a kind of homage to Woolf, Greer starts with a woman about whom almost nothing is known, married to a great poet, and reimagines the story of the Hathaway-Shakespeare marriage in its context, treating Anne (or Agnes) with the greatest sympathy. Greer rescues her life story from oblivion with wit and scholarship. It’s a good companion to Hamnet, below. Without the First Folio Shakespeare is unlikely to have acquired the towering international stature he now enjoys across the arts, the pedagogical arena, and popular culture. Its lasting impact on English national heritage, as well as its circulation across cultures, languages, and media, makes the First Folio the world’s most influential secular book. But who were the personalities behind the project and did Shakespeare himself play a role in its inception

A tradition, impossible to verify, holds that Henry V was the first play performed at the new Globe Theatre in the spring of 1599; the Globe would have been the "wooden O" mentioned in the Prologue. In 1600 the first printed text states that the play had been performed "sundry times", though the first recorded performance was on 7 January 1605, at Court. It's a dramatic comedy, known for its confusing yet tantalising storyline that intrigues yet is one of the hardest by Shakespeare to understand. Like most others of its genre and age, it relies heavily on mistaken identity and desperate romance to induce humour between the artful weaving of the 16th century language. Schoenbaum, Samuel (1975). William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life. Oxford University Press. pp.24–26, 296. ISBN 0-19-505161-0.

The text of Macbeth which survives has plainly been altered by later hands. Most notable is the inclusion of two songs from Thomas Middleton's play The Witch (1615) [11] The 2020 winner of the Women’s prize for fiction, this poignant meditation on grief is characterised by O’Farrell’s outstanding immersion in the Elizabethan Stratford of the 1590s. Shakespeare is unnamed, and O’Farrell focuses on his wife Agnes (as Anne was known) to explore the death of their son Hamnet from plague in 1596. The luminous magic of this novel lies as much in what it omits as what it depicts, but the scene in which Agnes lays out her son’s body is one that few readers will forget. Dr. Chris Laoutaris is a Lecturer and Birmingham Fellow at The Shakespeare Institute in Shakespeare’s birthplace of Stratford-Upon-Avon. Before that he was a long-standing Lecturer and Renaissance Literature Course Convenor at University College London, where he also completed his PhD. His most recent publication, Shakespeare and the Countess: The Battle that Gave Birth to the Globe was shortlisted for the Tony Lothian Prize and was listed as one of the Telegraph’s 'Best Books of 2014.' His recent media appearances and special events include BBC Radio London, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National, and Newstalk Radio Dublin, and lectures for the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the Royal Palace of Holyroodhouse, in association with the National Gallery of Scotland. As well as being recently commissioned as a contributor to Cambridge University’s Cambridge Guide to Shakespeare’s First Folio, Laoutaris has written for the Financial Times and Sunday Express. He is currently working on a project for the Shakespeare Institute called "Team Shakespeare: The Men who Created the Shakespeare Legacy." Published in a "bad quarto" [note 6] in 1600 by Thomas Millington and John Busby; reprinted in "bad" form in 1603 and 1619, it was published fully for the first time in the First Folio.