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| Title page of the First Folio (facsimile) |
In November 1623, the first printing of Mr. William
Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies was completed. Commonly known as the First Folio, this
collection of 36 of Shakespeare’s plays was assembled and published 7 years
after the Bard's death by his friends and fellow thespians John Heminge and
Henry Condell to preserve and commemorate these great works. Half of the plays had not been previously
published, and it is believed that many of them would have been lost or
forgotten completely had it not been for the efforts of Heminge and Condell. The First Folio not only immortalized William
Shakespeare but is considered one of the most influential books ever
published. Only 750 copies were
originally printed, and only 235 copies are known to remain.
To commemorate the 400th anniversary of the First Folio, the
November 2023 meeting was devoted to Shakespeare. Members presented books either by or about William
Shakespeare. While no members of the
Atlanta Antiquarian Book Circle possess a First Folio (or a Second, Third, or
Fourth Folio for that matter), one member shared a scarce copy of the first
photolithographic facsimile of the First Folio published in 1866.
The Works of William Shakespeare
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| Facsimile of the First Folio (Day & Son, 1866) |
Shakespeare, William.
Shakespeare: The First Collected Edition of the Dramatic Works of
William Shakespeare: A Reproduction in Exact Facsimile of the Famous First
Folio, 1623, by the Newly-Discovered Process of Photo-Lithography. London: Day & Son, 1866. This facsimile was produced under the
supervision of Howard Staunton (1810-1874), an English chess master and
Shakespeare scholar/editor. It was the
first true facsimile ever created; previous printers had only been able to
approximate page-for-page reprints using close-to-original typeface.
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A Catalogue of the several Comedies,
Histories, and Tragedies contained in this volume |
Staunton’s facsimile was issued serially to subscribers in
16 parts between 1864 and 1866; complete sets were then individually custom
bound by the owners. The quantity of
copies printed is unknown but believed to be small. The remaining quires which were not sold
serially were bound by Day & Son bearing a contemporary interpretation of
the Shakespeare coat of arms in gilt on the front cover and sold on the 250th
anniversary of Shakespeare's death.
Copies in the publisher’s binding are rare. This copy bears some amateur repair work but
maintains the original armorial binding.
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| Sample page, from Romeo & Juliet |
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| The Works of Shakespeare |
Shakespeare, William.
The Works of Shakespeare.
London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1899.
Edited by Israel Gollancz. Complete
in 12 volumes. This illustrated set was
uniformly bound in brown leather with gilt lettering and ornamentation and
serially issued from 1899 to 1904. Gollancz's edited The Works of Shakespeare became the definitive text of Shakespeare’s plays, poems, and sonnets for the Twentieth Century and is still used today.
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| Title page of Volume 1 |
Israel Gollancz (1863-1930) was a professor of English
Language and Literature at King's College, London, and a scholar of early
English literature and of Shakespeare, in particular. He later published a 40-volume uniform
edition of the complete works of Shakespeare in pocket-size volumes, known as
the "Temple" Shakespeare, which was the most popular Shakespeare edition of its
day. As Honorary Secretary of the
Shakespeare Tercentenary Committee, in 1916, Gollancz edited A Book of Homage
to Shakespeare, an anthology of responses to Shakespeare by an
international panel of scholars, thinkers, and prominent figures of the
time.
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| The Complete Works of William Shakespeare |
Shakespeare, William.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Philadelphia: The Shakespeare Club, n.d.
(circa 1905). Garrick Edition. With a preface, glossary, etc., by Israel
Gollancz. Complete in 10 volumes. Uniformly bound in brown leather. An American edition of Gollancz's The
Works of Shakespeare (above). Volume
I contains a biography of Shakespeare along with the first three comedies. Volumes II though IX contain the comedies,
histories, and tragedies. Volume X
contains the last 2 tragedies along with Shakespeare's poems and sonnets.
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| Title page of Volume 1 |
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| Tales from Shakespeare |
Lamb, Charles and Mary Lamb. Tales from Shakespeare. Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co.,
1903. Introductory Preface by Andrew
Lang. Illustrations by Robert Anning
Bell. The Lambs' retelling of
Shakespeare's plays for young readers is as imitation of Tales from
Shakespeare (1807) by Thomas Hodgkins.
In paraphrasing and redesigning Shakespeare for youth, the Lambs copy
the blank verse unaltered but not printed as verse. They hope "to cheat the young readers into
the belief that they are reading prose." The Tales "are meant to be submitted to the young reader as an
introduction to the study of Shakespeare, for which purpose his words are used
wherever it seemed possible to bring them in" (preface).
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| Illustration by Robert Anning Bell |
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| More Stories from Shakespeare |
Chisholm, Louey, ed.
More Stories from Shakespeare.
New York: E. P. Dutton, n.d. (circa 1900). Part of a series of classic literature retold
for children, published in the early 1900s.
This is the second of the Shakespeare titles.
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| The Annotated Shakespeare |
Shakespeare, William.
The Annotated Shakespeare.
New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1978. Edited, with Introductions, Notes, a
Biography, and Bibliography by A. L. Rowse.
Complete in 3 volumes. Alfred
Leslie Rowse (1903-1997) was a poet and Elizabethan historian. Late in his career, he turned his attention
to Shakespeare, authoring 9 books on the Bard.
He made bold claims and "discoveries" about both Shakespeare's life and
works, often failing to cite other scholars and dismissing their critiques of
his views. In Shakespeare the Man
(1978), he even claimed to solve the identity of the "Dark Lady" of
Shakespeare’s sonnets, an assertion rejected by most scholars. Many of Rowse's questionable and disproved "discoveries" can be found in The Annotated Shakespeare. This set, in very good condition, includes the
publisher's slipcase and each volume retains its dust jacket.
Books About Shakespeare and his Works
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| A Short Life of Shakespeare with the Sources |
Williams, Charles. A Short Life of Shakespeare with
the Sources. London: Oxford University Press, 1933. An abridgement of William Shakespeare: A
Study of Facts and Problems (1930), in 2 volumes, by Edmund Chambers. Charles Williams (1886-1945) was a poet and
novelist who late in his career moved to Oxford where he joined the Inklings,
C. S. Lewis's literary society. In
addition to abridging Chambers's tome, Williams wrote a play about Shakespeare,
A Myth of Shakespeare (1930), and profiled the playwright in his Stories
of Great Names (1937).
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| Coined by Shakespeare |
McQuain, Jeffrey and Stanley Malless. Coined by Shakespeare: Words &
Meanings First Penned by the Bard.
Springfield, MA: Merriam Webster, 1998. A dictionary with 208 entries of words or
phrases first used by William Shakespeare.
Where similar books focus on oft-repeated unusual phrases and familiar
quotations from Shakespeare, Coined by Shakespeare focuses on what are
now ordinary words common to the English lexicon, such as excitement,
marketable, quarrelsome, discontent, lackluster, reinforcement, and
never-ending. McQuain and Malless cite
the play where the word is first used and trace subtle shifts in its meaning
from Shakespeare's intended meaning within the context of the play to its usage
today. The book also contains a
chronology of Shakespeare's plays and quizzes about those works.
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| Will in the World |
Greenblatt, Stephen.
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. Greenblatt (b. 1943) is an American
Shakespearian historian who has authored five books on Shakespeare as well as
editing The Norton Shakespeare (2015).
Greenblatt's biography explores significant events, people, and
circumstances in Shakespeare's own life and shows where these personal details
show up in his plays. Greenblatt, for
example, delves into the death of Shakespeare's own son, Hamnet, in 1596, and
then shows where Shakespeare seemingly writes through his grief in the deaths
of several plays' characters, most notably Ophelia’s burial ceremony in Hamlet
(1600-1601), which Greenblatt calls "the most famous burial scene in
literature." When published, Will in
the World was quickly acclaimed by both scholars and general readers,
attracting more readers than other contemporary books on Shakespeare. It was a finalist for the 2004 National Book
Award for Nonfiction.
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| The Book of William |
Collins, Paul. The
Book of William: How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009. Collins (b. 1969) traces the history of the
First Folio through time and place to show how it has been received across centuries
and culture to become the "immortal" text and one of the most influential
booked ever printed. He considers the
humble transfer of the book through the generations of a family to the
astronomical prices garnered by Sotheby’s auction house. He explores the Eighteenth and Nineteenth
century quests for lost copies of the First Folio and modern-day hunts for
unknown, yet-to-be-discovered copies.
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| Shakespeare: The Illustrated Updated Edition |
Bryson, Bill. Shakespeare:
The Illustrated Update Edition. New
York: Harper, 2009. Bill Bryson (b.
1951), a journalist and nonfiction author, first published Shakespeare: The
World as Stage in 2007. The
biography explored the social, cultural, and political context of Shakespeare's
work. It also attempted to separate fact
from fiction about Shakespeare's life, teasing out known and provable facts
from myths, theories, and unprovable lore.
This aspect of Bryson's biography drew much attention and resulted in a
need to update the text. The updated and
illustrated edition was released two years later as interest in the book
remained strong.
