It put into print for the first time eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays: Macbeth, The Tempest, Julius Caesar, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew, King John, All’s Well That Ends Well, Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale, Henry VI, Part I, Henry VIII, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, Timon of Athens and Antony and Cleopatra. - P154
Jonson rather pugnaciously styled the book his ‘Workes’, prompting one waggish observer to wonder if he had lost the ability to distinguish between work and play. - P156
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.* - P156
Publication was not a decision to be taken lightly. Folios were big books and expensive to produce, so the First Folio was very ambitiously priced at £1 (for an edition bound in calfskin; unbound copies were a little cheaper). A copy of the sonnets, by comparison, cost just five pence on publication – or one-forty-eighth the price of a folio. Even so, the First Folio did well, and was followed by second, third and fourth editions in 1632, 1663–64 and 1685. - P157
Four in particular – Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Richard III and Coriolanus – were unnaturally long at 3,200 lines or more, and were probably seldom if ever performed at those lengths. - P161
The most notorious example of this is Hamlet, which exists in three versions: a ‘bad’ 1603 quarto of 2,200 lines, a much better 1604 quarto of 3,800 lines, and the 1623 folio version of 3,570 lines. There are reasons to believe that of the three the ‘bad’ first quarto may actually most closely represent the play as performed. It is certainly brisker than the other versions. - P162
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