4/11/2021 The 100 best nonfiction books: No 97 – The First Folio by William Shakespeare (1623) | William Shakespeare | The

| The Guar…

News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle

100 best nonfiction books of all time

Robert McCrum
Mon 11 Dec 2017 00.44 EST

I
n 1612, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s, the playwright Thomas Heywood,
published An Apology for Actors, in which he expressed a patriotic sentiment
about the English language, boastful at the time, which now seems
unexceptional:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/11/the-100-best-nonfiction-books-shakespeares-first-folio-1623 1/5
4/11/2021 The 100 best nonfiction books: No 97 – The First Folio by William Shakespeare (1623) | William Shakespeare | The Guar…

Our English tongue, which hath been the most harsh, uneven and broken language of the
world... is now continually refined, every writer striving in himself to add a new flourish
unto it; so that it is grown into a most perfect and composed language.

The coming of age of English at the beginning of the 17th century, after a golden
generation of extraordinary growth and innovation, is symbolised by the publication of
a landmark edition that the playwright himself had never bothered with in his own
lifetime. Indeed, it was not until seven years after his death, thanks to the First Folio,
that his work began slowly to acquire the canonical status it enjoys today.

Towards the end of November 1623, the bookseller Edward Blount, who traded at the
sign of the Black Bear near St Paul’s, finally held in his hands the text of a great volume
for which he had long been waiting: Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories &
Tragedies. Published according to the True Originall Copies. In the words of one critic: “It
is hard to overstate the importance of this literary, cultural and commercial moment.”

The book now known as the First Folio (the first authoritative
edition of Shakespeare’s plays) established “Shakespeare” for all time and it did this in
two principal ways. First, it collects some 36 plays, including 18 scripts (notably
Macbeth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and The Tempest) which would be otherwise
unknown. The trove of work thus assembled gave posterity not just a cast of immortal
characters (Bottom, Falstaff, Lear, Portia, Jaques, Prospero et al), but also a heap of
new words (including, for example, catastrophe, exaggerate, assassinate, indifference,
monopoly and paradox).

Second, it definitively connects his contemporary Ben Jonson (who declared his rival
to be “the soul of the age”) and some of the actors who had first performed these plays
with the historical person, the playwright himself, a figure helpfully illustrated by a
famous frontispiece, the engraved portrait of the artist that has become an icon of
“Shakespeare studies”.

Other facts about the First Folio, a canon of incomparable power and authority, and the
text that would help launch Shakespeare’s global literary afterlife are indisputable:
both its value (somewhere north of $5m in rare books’ sales) and its comparative rarity
(approximately 240 copies survive worldwide in public and private collections). This
First Folio also does not include collaborations such as Pericles or The Two Noble
Kinsmen. On the other hand, it does establish three categories for Shakespeare’s work –
comedies, histories and tragedies – that survive to the present. Furthermore, it
promotes a seductive myth of the artist’s genius, as “a happy imitator of nature”.
According to John Heminges and Henry Condell, the two actors from the acting
company the King’s Men responsible for putting this volume together: “His mind and
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/11/the-100-best-nonfiction-books-shakespeares-first-folio-1623 2/5
4/11/2021 The 100 best nonfiction books: No 97 – The First Folio by William Shakespeare (1623) | William Shakespeare | The Guar…

hand went together and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have
scarce received from him a blot in his papers.”

It’s been hard for This is a particularly tantalising reference. All the
some to accept that contemporary, working manuscript materials of
a man from the Shakespeare’s plays are lost. We have his signature on
lower orders could several legal documents but – apart from one scene, his
be the greatest contribution to Sir Thomas More – nothing in his hand: no
playwright who ever prompt copy, no printer’s proofs, nothing. As so often with
lived Shakespeare, when you look closely at his work, you find
layer upon layer of mystery, entwined with fathomless
ambiguity.

The First Folio does, however, have one significant and unequivocal characteristic.
Unlike Shakespeare’s producers, Heminges and Condell were determined to promote
the poet’s authorship. The name of Shakespeare had not been much of a selling point
among Elizabethan playgoers, as the sometimes anonymous Quarto editions of his
work indicate. For this Jacobean edition, however, his publishers wanted to create a
literary artefact, a legacy volume. This, triumphantly, is what the First Folio achieves.
After 1623, Shakespeare and his works are on the march across the English-speaking
world.

Which brings us to that frontispiece by the Dutch engraver Martin Droeshout. As the
Shakespeare scholar Emma Smith has noted, this portrait “exists in three separate
states”, indicating the trouble taken with the likeness. Droeshout’s engraving projects
what Smith calls “an abiding sense that the man and his plays must be deeply
interconnected… The book [the First Folio] presents us with a person, a personality,
through his work.” In thus branding their volume, his publishers were leaning on a
secure and careful image of Shakespeare himself to encourage its market and
champion its contents.

This in turn, brings us back to Ben Jonson, whose salute to Shakespeare faces the
Droeshout portrait. Jonson’s role is crucial because his testament to Shakespeare and
his work dominates the opening page of the First Folio. “Who is Ben Jonson?” we
might ask. In brief, he is Shakespeare’s great rival, a playwright who had already gone
to great lengths to oversee a collected edition of his own dramatic works, a man
convinced of his own importance, mildly obsessed with posterity. Garrulous,
argumentative, jealous, proud and deeply committed to exposing hypocrisy and
corruption, Jonson is never a man to kowtow to nobility or privilege.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/11/the-100-best-nonfiction-books-shakespeares-first-folio-1623 3/5
4/11/2021 The 100 best nonfiction books: No 97 – The First Folio by William Shakespeare (1623) | William Shakespeare | The Guar…

How does Jonson make his contribution to this collected works? He writes in strikingly
generous (almost awestruck) terms about a man he had mercilessly satirised in his
lifetime. Opposite the portrait of his friend, he identifies the image of a writer whose
work, he declares, far surpasses the quotidian limits of his ordinary life. It’s Jonson
who coins the “sweet Swan of Avon” (ie the declaration that the author of the First
Folio is from Stratford), in his dedicatory poem, and it’s Jonson who declares that he is
“the applause, the delight, the wonder of our stage”, and then – a few lines later – that
he is “not of an age, but for all time” and claims him, with proprietorial certainty, as
“my gentle Shakespeare”. Here, beyond question, is one great literary figure paying
posthumous tribute to another. This must confound those conspiracy theorists for
whom “Shakespeare” is simply an alias, an elaborate code for other hands.

You have to ask yourself, confronted with this documentary evidence, why on earth
would Jonson, who never took instruction from anyone, who was notoriously
awkward and who had competed with Shakespeare throughout his professional life,
take part in a cover-up.

There are countless examples of how impossible it is to imagine Sir Francis Bacon or
Edward de Vere (the 17th Earl of Oxford) or anyone else writing these plays. Tiny
details betray the work of a man steeped in everyday life: for instance, the brilliant
detail from the history plays of the problem of fleas breeding in the corners of taverns
where men have been pissing.

This brings us back to Shakespeare’s provincial origins. As many have noted, it’s been
hard for some to accept that a man from the lower orders, not formally educated at
Oxford or Cambridge, could be a genius, the greatest playwright who ever lived.
Combined with a natural human appetite for mystery, this has flourished into the
“Anonymous” fantasy maintained by the Shakespeare-deniers. The First Folio is the
obvious refutation of this nonsense. In the real world of serious literary criticism, it
remains, in the words of the RSC’s Complete Works, an edition based on the First Folio,
“unquestionably the most important single book in the history of world drama”.

A signature sentence
We have but collected them [the plays] and done an office to the dead to procure his
orphans guardians, without ambition either of self-profit or fame, only to keep the
memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our SHAKESPEARE, by humble
offer of his plays to your most noble patronage.

Three to compare
Stephen Greenblatt: Will in the World (2004)
James Shapiro: Contested Will (2010)
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/11/the-100-best-nonfiction-books-shakespeares-first-folio-1623 4/5
4/11/2021 The 100 best nonfiction books: No 97 – The First Folio by William Shakespeare (1623) | William Shakespeare | The Guar…

Emma Smith: The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio (2015)

comments 117
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/11/the-100-best-nonfiction-books-shakespeares-first-folio-1623 5/5