Thirty-six pieces in all were thus brought together. The volume consisted of nearly one thousand double-column pages and was sold at a pound a copy. Steevens estimated that the edition numbered 250 copies. The book was described on the title-page as published by
Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard, and in the colophon as printed at the charges of ‘W. Jaggard, I. Smithweeke, and W. Aspley,’ as well as of Blount. [306] On the title-page was engraved the Droeshout portrait. Commendatory verses were supplied by Ben Jonson, Hugh Holland, Leonard Digges, and I. M., perhaps Jasper Maine. The dedication was addressed to the brothers William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, the lord chamberlain, and Philip Herbert, earl of Montgomery, and was signed by Shakespeare’s friends and fellow-actors, Heming and Condell. The same signatures were appended to a succeeding address ‘to the great variety of readers.’ In both addresses the two actors made pretension to a larger responsibility for the enterprise than they really incurred, but their motives in identifying themselves with the venture were doubtless irreproachable. They disclaimed (they wrote) ‘ambition either of selfe-profit or fame in undertaking the design,’ being solely moved by anxiety to ‘keepe the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare.’ ‘It had bene a thing we confesse worthie to haue bene wished,’ they inform the reader, ‘that the author himselfe had liued to haue set forth and ouerseen his owne writings. . . .’ A list of contents follows the address to the readers.
The value of the text.
The title-page states that all the plays were printed ‘according to the true originall copies.’ The dedicators wrote to the same effect. ‘As where (before) we were abus’d with diuerse stolne and surreptitious
copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of incurious impostors that expos’d them: even those are now offer’d to your view cur’d and perfect in their limbes, and all the rest absolute in their numbers as he conceived them.’ There is no doubt that the whole volume was printed from the acting versions in the possession of the manager of the company with which Shakespeare had been associated. But it is doubtful if any play were printed exactly as it came from his pen. The First Folio text is often markedly inferior to that of the sixteen pre-existent quartos, which, although surreptitiously and imperfectly printed, followed playhouse copies of far earlier date. From the text of the quartos the text of the First Folio differs invariably, although in varying degrees. The quarto texts of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ and ‘Richard II,’ for example, differ very largely and always for the better from the folio texts. On the other hand, the folio repairs the glaring defects of the quarto versions of ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ and of ‘Henry V.’ In the case of twenty of the plays in the First Folio no quartos exist for comparison, and of these twenty plays, ‘Coriolanus,’ ‘All’s Well,’ and ‘Macbeth’ present a text abounding in corrupt passages.
The order of the plays.
The plays are arranged under three headings—‘Comedies,’ ‘Histories,’ and ‘Tragedies’—and each division is separately paged. The arrangement of the plays in each division follows no principle. The comedy section begins
with the ‘Tempest’ and ends with the ‘Winter’s Tale.’ The histories more justifiably begin with ‘King John’ and end with ‘Henry VIII.’ The tragedies begin with ‘Troilus and Cressida’ and end with ‘Cymbeline.’ This order has been usually followed in subsequent collective editions.
The typography.
As a specimen of typography the First Folio is not to be commended. There are a great many contemporary folios of larger bulk far more neatly and correctly printed. It looks as though Jaggard’s printing office were undermanned. The misprints are numerous and are especially conspicuous in the pagination. The sheets seem to have been worked off very slowly, and corrections were made while the press was working, so that the copies struck off later differ occasionally from the earlier copies. One mark of carelessness on the part of the compositor or corrector of the press, which is common to all copies, is that ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ though in the body of the book it opens the section of tragedies, is not mentioned at all in the table of contents, and the play is unpaged except on its second and third pages, which bear the numbers 79 and 80.