![]() (Some surviving copies of the First Folio indicate that Troilus and Cressida was intended to be placed elsewhere in the book, with printing halted when copyright presumably was not yet available.) This was a complex endeavor: the copyright of one play, Troilus and Cressida, must have been secured only at the last minute, as it is printed first in the “Tragedies” without being listed in the table of contents. They would have tracked down the various publishers holding copyright of many of Shakespeare’s plays as well as the surviving texts of those plays that were unpublished. The First Folio was shepherded into print by Shakespeare’s fellow shareholders in the King’s Men company, John Heminge and Henry Condell. In this copy, a former owner has written the title in by hand. The absence of Troilus and Cressida in the Catalogue, though it is printed in the book, hints at difficulties the publisher may have had in obtaining copyright of this play. The Catalogue (table of contents) of the First Folio suggests that Shakespeare’s peers thought of his plays as categorized into different genres. They might well not have been searched out without a sense that all of Shakespeare’s works – at least his dramatic works – were “for all time,” as the Folio was first to argue. Some of these editions survived in just a few copies or even a single copy. The early quartos are the rarest of Shakespeare’s texts, precisely because they were not much valued for so long. Not until the 18th century, when Shakespeare’s reputation had grown considerably and when his editors began a concerted hunt for all early Shakespeare editions to help them generate “authoritative” texts of the plays, were many of these earlier publications located and studied. These 18 had been published in the smaller, less culturally prestigious quarto format (and one in a smaller edition) seen as appropriate to plays, themselves not valued highly (see “ Jonson’s Workes”). ![]() Had the First Folio not inaugurated an account of Shakespeare as a playwright of particular importance, all of whose works were to be valued and seen as a collective body, many of the other 18 plays it included that had already been published by 1623 might similarly have been lost to time. Yet even this measure of 18 otherwise unpublished plays understates the role of the First Folio in preserving Shakespeare’s corpus. The frontispiece image of William Shakespeare has become famous, even as the poem opposite, written by Ben Jonson, urges the reader to see the author as more truly represented by the “wit” within the pages of the book. ![]()
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