November 2023: Shakespeare

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

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.

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.

Sample page, from Romeo & Juliet

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.

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.  

 

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.

Title page of Volume 1

 

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).

Illustration by Robert Anning Bell

 

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.

 

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

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).

 

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.

 

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.

 

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. 

 

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.