Status Updates From Shakespeare

Heminges and Condell are unquestionably the greatest literary heroes of all time. It really does bear repeating: only about 230 plays survive from the period of Shakespeare’s life, of which the First Folio represents some 15 percent, so Heminges
and Condell saved for the world not only half the plays of William Shakespeare, but an appreciable portion of all Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.

The idea of the First Folio was not just to publish plays that had not before been seen in print but to correct and restore those that had appeared in corrupt or careless versions. Heminges and Condell had the great advantage that they had
worked with Shakespeare throughout his career and could hardly have been more intimately acquainted with his work.

It was formally called Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, but has been known to the world ever since—well, nearly ever since—as the First Folio. A folio, from the Latin folium, or “leaf,” is a book in which each sheet has been folded just once down the middle, creating
two leaves or four pages. A folio page is therefore quite large—typically about fifteen inches high.

By 1642, when the Puritans shut Theatres down.
Shakespeare’s plays might have been lost, too, had it not been for the heroic efforts of his close friends and colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell, who seven years after his death produced a folio edition of his complete works. It put into print for the first time eighteen of Shakespeare’s play.

The most famous line in the will appears on the third page, where to the original text is added an interlineation, which says, a touch tersely: “I give unto my wife my second-best bed with the furniture” (that is, the bedclothes). The will does not otherwise mention Shakespeare’s widow. Scholars have long argued over what can be concluded about their relationship from this.

Whatever else he was, James was a generous patron of drama. One of his first acts as king was to award Shakespeare and his colleagues a royal patent, making them the King’s Men. For a theatrical troupe, honors came no higher. The
move made them Grooms of the Chamber and gave them the right, among other privileges, to deck themselves out in four and a half yards of scarlet cloth provided by the Crown.

Imagine what it must have been like to watch Macbeth without knowing the outcome, to be part of a hushed audience hearing Hamlet’s soliloquy for the first time, to witness Shakespeare speaking his own lines. There cannot have been, anywhere in history, many more favored places than this.