This lecture was delivered at Senate House in London on November 23, 2023.

Four hundred years ago on this date and two miles from here, a reader who perused the books on offer at several of the shops in St. Paul's Churchyard, London's center of the book trade, would have encountered the same title—a new volume in folio with the air of its present moment about it—in a number of shops such as those of Edward Blount (at the sign of the Black Bear), William Aspley (on the same block as Blount, at the sign of the Parrot) or Matthew Lownes (at the Bishop's Head). These booksellers, along with the recently deceased William Jaggard and his son and successor Isaac, whose shop was located several hundred feet to the north in Barbican, were members of the syndicate that published the book in question, titled Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies—the object around which we gather this evening, that has come to be known as the First Folio. Between 750 and 1000 copies were printed and sold for about a pound each, a little less for an unbound copy. For a skilled worker in the 1620s, a pound would amount to one to two months' wages.  

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Apart from the figures such as Blount who served as both publishers and booksellers, the instigators of this event were two retired actors, the fiftyish Henry Condell and the even more elderly John Hemings, both associated with the theatrical company known as the King's Men, which was still a going concern and would remain so until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The role of Heminges and Condell in the presentation of the volume speaks a complex message to any discerning reader. On the one hand, the book carries a dedication to the "most noble and incomparable paire of brethren," William Herbert, the third Earl of Pembroke, and his younger brother Philip, at the time the Earl of Montgomery and after William's death a few years later, the fourth Earl of Pembroke (A2r). 

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The brothers had an impeccable literary lineage as sons of the poet and patron Mary Sidney and nephews of Philip Sidney. Along with the fact that they (especially William) were supporters of the King's Men, the dedication to them announces the volume as a literary occasion connected to the nascent canon of English poetry—recall that poetry was the contemporaneous word for what we would call literature today. Aspiring poets two generations earlier, in the same sort of gesture, dedicated their work to Sidney himself. Heminges and Condell's faith in Shakespeare's standing is not absolute: the dedication calls the plays "these trifles," and insists that only because the two Herberts "have been pleased to think these trifles something" has the volume "asked to be yours" (A2r-v). Coming in the wake of Ben Jonson's ostentatiously titled Workes of seven years earlier, which was itself one step ahead of its time in declaring that an author of not only poetry but plays for the commercial theater could be said to have "works," this volume of 1623 corroborates Jonson's presumption and, on the notional shelf of literature in the vernacular, clears a space for its thirty-six plays.

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In the next instant, Heminges and Condell apply a different tone in a prefatory letter "to the great variety of readers." This curious document takes its approach from how journeymen writers such as Thomas Nashe addressed their publics, in a frankly commercial way:

From the most able, to him that can but spell: There you are numbered. We had rather you were weighed. Especially, when the fate of all books depends upon your capacities: and not of your heads alone, but of your purses. Well! It is now public, and you will stand for your privileges we know: to read, and censure. Do so, but buy it first. (A3r)

Perhaps oddly, the judgment of prospective readers from the broad public matters to Heminges and Condell more than that of the elite William and Philip Herbert, from whom "so much favour" can be expected because of their demonstrated interest in Shakespeare's plays (A2r). Aristocratic patronage has already been offered and accepted, making the dedication to the Herberts the record of a past transaction, while in their "variety" common readers prompt a palpable sense of unease that manifests itself as importuning, almost heckling the reader: "How odd soever your brains be, or your wisdoms, make your license the same, and spare not. Judge your six-pen worth, your shillings worth, your five shillings worth at a time, or higher, so you rise to the just rates, and welcome. But, whatever you do, buy" (A3r). Already in these first three pages following the title page, one notices what we might call three adjacent spaces into which this publishing venture enters at once: posterity as represented by a collected works, patronage as embodied in the Herberts, and publicity—not only in the modern sense of promotion but as a making public—as shown in this address to a potentially vast and imperfectly understood mass of readers. Many books of this era are conceived as belonging to one or sometimes two of these spaces, but few manifest an appeal to all three, or attempt to gather them together into a unitary space for the purposes of the book, as a multidimensional audience it assembles for itself. Before I finish this evening, I hope to show that what that audience comes together for is something new, a gathering of worlds that reflects the gathering of readers. 

In 1623, a volume of plays under the name of a single playwright was inherently a risky proposition. The market for plays was in the theater, not in books, and many plays that were performed never found their way into print. (If we take as a rough guide Harbage's Annals of English Drama, a standard reference source, we might conclude that between 1580 and 1642 perhaps forty percent of all known plays have no surviving text and were likely unpublished.) Many if not most plays were collaborative works in which two or more playwrights had a hand, and audiences were conditioned to think in terms of properties such as The Spanish Tragedy or King Lear that often surfaced over the years in multiple versions by the same company. The First Folio invites its readers to set aside all of that custom and convention and to invest in the notion of a named sole author, and that without what Jonson built upon in his Workes, the transfer of authority from poetry by the same figure. As Roger Chartier and others have noted, sole authorship here is a convenient fiction that both obscures the "collective practices of the theatre" (79) and promotes an idealized image of the playwright as the single, natural source of these works. "His mind and hand went together," Heminges and Condell claim, "and what he thought, he uttered with that easinesse, that we have scarcely received from him a blot in his papers." Shakespeare's mind, hand, and writing merge into the artifact that may be purchased for one pound, permitting us to "read him." We might say that after the thirty-six plays, the thirty-seventh fiction is the one that envelops the entire project, the making of Shakespeare as instinctive, sovereign genius.

Moreover, while half of the plays in the Folio were already known from earlier publication in quarto editions, the remaining eighteen had not been previously published, including As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and the three plays that appear first in each section: The Tempest under Comedies, King John under Histories, and Coriolanus under Tragedies. On the title page, the statement under the title, "Published according to the True Originall Copies," encodes this selling point: for a previously published play in which Shakespeare's authorship is assumed, the Folio offers a version that is "true and original" in the sense that the text is reliable and the whole play close to an origin in his already honored powers of conception (other editions, it is implied, are potentially unreliable as texts and derivative as ideas). At the same time, for newly published plays the words "true and original" mean something else, affirming (rather than assuming) Shakespeare's authorship and brandishing originality not in comparison to another edition but as a claim that this play has never been encountered elsewhere at all. The adaptability of these seemingly neutral, natural words to different expectations is a symptom of how the volume assembles disparate orientations into its own purpose-built universe.

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The division of the plays into "A Catalogue" according to the genres of comedy, history, and tragedy deserves some attention. Comedy and tragedy are categories out of Aristotle's Poetics, of course, while history seems to be an adaptation to the nature of the Shakespearean corpus, whether the playwright's own label as recalled by Heminges and Condell or their extrapolation from his practice.

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The division, at once classical and ad hoc, is very much of Shakespeare's late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century moment. Let's pause to remember where early modern humanism came from. In its sense as philology, literally the love of words or the knowledge of texts, humanism means the rediscovery of the classics, or the writings of Greek and Roman antiquity. Shakespeare experienced humanism in this sense during his childhood, when at age seven or so he took instruction at the King's New School in Stratford. The curriculum there was familiar across England: careful study of classical texts, rote memorization of Latin grammar, and lots of imitation of canonical examples. Medieval education had been centered on logic, theology, mathematics, and other relatively abstruse arts; the Renaissance saw a recentering, so that education became oriented toward the so-called liberal arts (originally grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy). What do these have in common? They take the measure of the immediate, material (rather than spiritual) world; they prepare educated men (not usually women) to have a civic, diplomatic, and cultural participation in this world rather than preparing exclusively for the next. This is the foundation of the humanities: it's about emphasizing those disciplines that make mere human beings into humane beings, that enable us to become. Why grammar, as Shakespeare and his fellow schoolboys must have asked themselves? Grammar is the core of this educational practice because it mediates between worlds and world-views, between past and present, between parts of ourselves. We think of grammar in the modern sense as something technical, but the Renaissance notion of grammar is as the art and science of language: syntax, etymology, prosody, etc. When the Roman (actually Spanish) rhetorician Quintilian looks for a translation of the Greek grammatike into Latin, he suggests literatura, which is not the modern literature yet but is something like letters: the art and science of letters. Those of us who study literature within the humanities are the direct descendants of this humanist educational philosophy.

In this spirit, Renaissance humanists venerate the classics; they regard the Middle Ages, incorrectly, as "dark" (the epithet chosen by the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca) because they perceive that much of the writing of antiquity was lost or put aside then, only to be rediscovered in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. It is true, however, that classical texts begin to be rediscovered at a faster clip in the fifteenth century, and that the pace quickens across the sixteenth century. Shakespeare's classics are different from those of Englishmen a generation or two before him because he has more access to the texts, and more texts create a richer encounter with antiquity. 

We gain a sense of the folds of the Renaissance when we note that in February of 1564, the artist and poet Michelangelo Buonarroti died while the astronomer Galileo Galilei was born, and in the spring of the same year the Protestant reformer John Calvin died a month or so after Shakespeare was born. Permitting ourselves to imagine exchanging Michelangelo and Calvin for Galileo and Shakespeare, we see the period turning from more abstract notions of how human beings ought to exist in relation to God, to time and space, and to history, all foundational questions of humanism and the Reformation, and toward practical observation of the world as it is. At the same mid-century moment, major editions and translations were becoming available right and left, so that someone like Shakespeare, with a foundation in Latin, perhaps some Greek, and probably a working knowledge of Italian, was often exposed to a newly translated treatise of Aristotle or other classical authors, or a modern restaging of Aristotelian ideas such as that of Philip Sidney in his Apology for Poetry, published posthumously in 1595. Our hypothetical customer in the bookstalls of St. Paul's might have come across Lodovico Castelvetro's commentary on Aristotle's Poetics (1570) or any number of derivative works that appeared over the next decades. And as the available corpus of classical thought expanded, it became a matrix with which the educated man could fully converse: searching out contradictions, staking out disagreements, and making it a part of one's everyday experience. 

Shakespeare's relation to the classics reflects that of his era, not existential or reverential in the way of earlier generations of humanists but often practical, sometimes ironic, and always for use. Aristotle wrote that the dramatic genres were comedy and tragedy. Shakespeare's company, who in their Elizabethan career before the accession of King James had been known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men, had met the challenge of mythologizing English history to accommodate the propaganda of the Tudors in plays such as Henry V and Richard III, not to mention Henry VIII with its defensive alternate title, All Is True, as though to insist that contrasting reports were fake news. One can imagine the playwright setting down his copy of Castelvetro's Aristotle and telling his company, now the King's Men, that they had invented a new genre, the history play, of and for their times. What Heminges and Condell show us in their Catalogue is a pragmatic Aristotelian division in the spirit of the generation born after 1550.

That response to classical norms, accommodating Aristotle but also expanding his observations, marks one of the ways that the First Folio announces itself as a work not only of English but of world literature. The notional book buyer of 1623 might have come across another title, published only three years earlier and also by Edward Blount, that declared itself in a comparable way. This was The History of Don Quixote, the first part of which had been translated into English for the first time in 1612 by Thomas Shelton, and which then appeared complete in two parts by Shelton in 1620. 

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It seems likely that in the final years of his career and life, Shakespeare knew Shelton's translation of Quixote because the King's Men are recorded as having performed in 1613 a play, The History of Cardenio (now unfortunately lost), whose title is likely taken from one of the most prominent interpolated tales in Quixote. Much later, around mid-century, Shakespeare was named as co-author of that play with his younger collaborator John Fletcher. Heminges and Condell omit Cardenio from the First Folio as they exclude many of the plays that are considered to be collaborations such as Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Clearly one of the principles being promoted by the Folio, perhaps the foremost one, is Shakespeare's sole authorship. The title page makes that point vividly.

I would like to suggest, however, that the conception of the First Folio goes further, that we are being invited to see him as the singular author of not only thirty-six plays, and not even "works" in the manner of Jonson, but something itself singular. Its nature depends on who is being addressed. To the Herbert brothers that something might be the "present worthy of" their Highnesses, as Heminges and Condell call them; to the great variety of readers, as we observed, it is the book on sale. To the presumed general reader of the Folio, however, it is a world, or better a universe made of many worlds, and the publication in 1623 represents the worlding of Shakespeare. 

Let me develop what I mean. Until the appearance of the Folio, Shakespeare's plays were available as either or both of two kinds of phenomena: as performances to be experienced by an audience in the theater, and as books in quarto format to be read (silently or aloud, singly or in a group) by those who purchased them. In either phenomenon, the play is a bounded sample of alternative reality—a world. It might take place in Venice, Vienna, or London; it might be set in antiquity, the present, or any time in between. We are obliged to receive each such sample as it is presented to us: Aristotle authorizes unities of time and space that are not always followed but nonetheless confirm the distinctness of each fictional world, and as a practical matter of either theatergoing or reading we cannot experience a line, a scene, or an entire play from one world in juxtaposition to the same from another world. 

At the start of Shakespeare's career, in what might be the first soliloquy within his extant plays, Antipholus of Syracuse, a young man in search of his family, locates himself in relation to the wider world: "I to the world am like a drop of water / That in the ocean seeks another drop." From the perspective of youth, Antipholus registers his own fragility against the background of a world assumed to be stable and all-absorbing. Then at the presumed end of Shakespeare's career, in one of Prospero's final speeches, Shakespeare returns to the idea of people melting into the world but with a difference that reveals the perspective of an old man who might be Prospero but might be Shakespeare himself: 

Our revels now are ended.
These our actors 
(As I foretold you) were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air,
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Now as people melt into the world, the world itself melts around them. What in youth seemed to be an insight into the frailty and vulnerability of the individual—which in The Comedy of Errors is portrayed as a search for one's identity through one's counterpart (identity from idem, the same), one drop finding another—has been transmuted into a general condition in The Tempest. There is no stable identity, no ocean into which to get absorbed, no world. Not only our selves but everything around us is illusion.

The contrastive reading of an early and a late play I've just offered is always feasible, of course, but the format of the plays in quarto editions does nothing to encourage it. Each play is presented there as a discrete fiction, sometimes singular as in Love's Labor's Lost, which makes only one appearance in quarto, and sometimes iterative, as in Titus Andronicus and Hamlet, both of which have two quartos with significant differences between them. When the differences between quartos are severe enough, as in Hamlet, we might be tempted to say that they represent alternate worlds with a setting and some characters in common. What the quartos resist by their nature is the notion of Shakespeare as author of one thing, a universe of many perspectives.

Think back to that bookstall with Shelton's translation of Don Quixote alongside the First Folio. Cervantes and Shakespeare, along with Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and other notable writers, belong to a generation born between about 1550 and 1565. (We think Cervantes was born shortly before, while Shakespeare is at the younger end of that range.) As makers of fiction, that generation has a number of influential convictions, and none of them is more powerful than the understanding that if a fictional world will do justice to a recognizable reality, will show posterity how it feels to be alive in a certain time and place, it must be made from multiple perspectives. Among the achievements of Don Quixote is to gather the kinds of fictions that conventionally would have occupied discrete books of fiction—such as pastoral, chivalric, courtly, utopia, picaresque, and so on—and make them come into contact with each other within the fiction. How does a shepherd critique a knight? What does a woman from a courtly fiction say to a woman from a picaresque? When a Christian newly converted from Islam joins a communal meal in a humble Spanish inn, what happens? Boccaccio and Chaucer anticipate this kind of friction in their collections of tales, of course, but even they tend to bring the tellers of vastly different tales into contact, not the characters. Sidney and Thomas Nashe, whom I mentioned a few moments ago as a journeyman member of the 1550s generation, explore multiple perspectives in fiction in the manner of the picaresque, where the protagonists come into contact episodically with characters of varied backgrounds but the characters do not mix otherwise. 

One may only guess at what prompted Cervantes to fashion a fictional world out of many perspectives: perhaps his experience crossing social classes (born in poverty, he rose to work in the household of a cardinal), in war, or under captivity by pirates; maybe it was simply his dismal record as the author of a conventional pastoral romance twenty years before. In any case, the appearance of Don Quixote in 1605 established a model for fiction that became the template for a new genre of prose fiction, the novel, instantly rendering its motley antecedents dated, if not obsolete. While the first part of Quixote in 1605 goes to some lengths to obfuscate the presence of an author, identifying itself as a translation of a story by an obscure Muslim historian, in the second part of 1615 Cervantes steps forward as creator of the work. In view of how many of its prose fiction precursors treat their authorship with a greater level of ambiguity or diffidence, the emergence of Cervantes as the professed author of the first novel counts as an event in world literature.

Now consider what the First Folio offers us. Thirty-six plays appear in an arrangement controlled by the categories of comedy, history, and tragedy. Except for when certain plays belong to a sequence, for example the so-called Henriad consisting of Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV, and Henry V, the worlds of the plays are separate and distinct; a single character may even appear in dissimilar worlds conditioned by different genres, such as Falstaff in the two parts of Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor. One by one the plays take their samples of alternative realities: past and present, here and there, us and them. The Folio assembles them into an inventory of worlds and declares this entire universe to be under the charge of the master worldmaker William Shakespeare and represented in its first-appearing work, The Tempest, by his surrogate Prospero.

All plays by definition are made of different perspectives, of course, but much in the way that the Quixote treats each genre of prose fiction that preceded it as one available perspective among many, the Folio treats each play as a container of perspectives to be experienced alongside all the others. Above all, it shows Shakespeare to be the author of many plays but at the same time, one thing. 

Of course, the celebration of the author tends to mask the role of another figure whose agency grows in both Don Quixote and the Folio: the reader. Both works address him or her directly in a prefatory letter, a gesture that is seldom seen in earlier prose fictions or quarto editions of Shakespeare's plays. Perhaps the aggressive approach to readers by Heminges and Condell, putting them in their place as merely customers, is a backhanded acknowledgment that as perspectives multiply and fictional worlds grow more complex, a new kind of power is now in play, that of the reader to mediate and interpret. 

A few minutes ago I offered a rudimentary contrast between two passages, one from The Comedy of Errors and the other from The Tempest, the presumed bookends of Shakespeare's career. The rough interpretation I made, two ways of thinking about the self in relation to the world, was based solely on a single observation encouraged by the presence of the two plays in the First Folio, sixty-five pages apart. That kind of observation could become the starting point of many kinds of analysis: philological (perhaps attentive to the changing senses of a word such as world), philosophical (or how the passages expose two concepts of the self encountering the world), psychological (or the difference between young and old), historical (how Elizabethans and Jacobeans might differ in the ways they see England in relation to the world), and much more. It would take an unusual member of Shakespeare's theatrical audience to notice and develop that contrast from watching the plays; it might take an even more unusual reader, perhaps a scholar, to do the same from the quarto editions (that is, if any had existed for these two plays, and if scholars paid any attention to Shakespeare during his lifetime). With the appearance of the First Folio, however, it takes only an attentive reader who might very well notice these mutually enriching passages separated by only a few pages. Unlike what is possible in the novel, the characters of these plays will never cross paths in an inn. They must, however, coexist in the experience of the reader, who is free to notice how various characters conceive of their worlds, their moral lives, love, and everything else, even within the same genre, let alone different ones. What in an earlier iteration of a play or a prenovelistic prose fiction might have been elements received as fairly inert to intervention—say, vocabulary, plot devices, or philosophical statements—become ripe for collation in worldmaking books such as Quixote and the Folio, and with collation the reader's agency begins. 

There is, we might say, a phenomenology of such works. Elements that might not matter in less capacious books come under our notice, something like the way a worldly person observes things even at home that might escape another's attention. Among details of this sort are mistakes. In a fiction that occupies one world, a mistake is often only a mistake; but when we have been in other worlds, we can imagine other ways of interpreting it, perhaps as holding greater meaning in another light, another context, another language so to speak. Two examples of this phenomenology of the mistake come to mind in the two worldmaking books I have been discussing. Don Quixote notoriously features a lot of unstable names. Sometimes the narrator tells us that a character's exact name is unknown or equivocal, and sometimes the names simply change from one part of the story to another. Is that a sign of the author's distraction? Or does it indicate that the book traverses worlds, where names may be rendered or understood in various ways according to who is observing? (Have you ever gone by different names in the various "worlds" of your life, say from childhood to your job to parenthood?) The great mid-twentieth-century philologist Leo Spitzer argued that the names in Quixote reveal the instability of observable reality in the novel and ultimately witness the power of the novelist who holds it all together. In other words, for Spitzer the flux in names, far from a sign of mistakes, is inseparable from the achievement of the novel.

For my second example, Shakespeareans in tonight's audience will pardon me, I hope, for adducing perhaps the most famous crux in the canon, the Folio's description in Henry V of Falstaff's death. The Hostess is narrating the offstage deathbed experience of this larger-than-life figure who represents excess in every way, and she puts it thus: "for after I saw him fumble with the sheets, and play with flowers, and smile upon his finger's end, I knew there was but one way: for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and a table of green fields." 

The "table of green fields" has usually been thought to make no sense; every possible explanation has been offered. (My favorite one is Alexander Pope's conjecture that it must be a stage direction: this interpretation led to the newly theorized existence of a stagehand named Greenfields who would at that moment for some unknown reason carry a table onstage.) The editor Lewis Theobald proposed an emendation in 1726 that has been generally accepted, in which "table" becomes "babbled" ("a' babbled of green fields"), which evokes a sentimental image of the dissolute Falstaff reverting in his last moments to the memory of a pastoral childhood. A number of other readings have been proposed, several of them persuasive. I take no position on the possible versions, but only observe that what in a quarto might be a stubborn enigma becomes in the Folio an occasion for critical reflection as we look for other usages of the word "table," other words that resemble it, other deathbed scenes, and all kinds of context—in other words, a multiplicity of possible Shakespearean worlds—that would eventually prompt a Theobald to suggest "babbled." His emendation does not merely fix a troublesome passage, but opens a set of new possibilities for Falstaff and annexes a world onto that of Henry V. The phenomenology of the mistake in the Folio means that even a word, a line, or a passage that seems self-evidently wrong can end up as right when we are able to understand it in light of other plays and thus to enlarge the world in which we encounter it.

In 2023, then, four hundred years after the publication of the First Folio, we celebrate an event that introduced to posterity and a wide public a volume not only for England or Britain but for the world, a book not only of plays but of worlds. I feel certain that one hundred, two hundred, and four hundred years from now, our successors will gather to commemorate the same book on the terms that make sense to them.

Bibliography

Blayney, Peter W.M. The Bookshops in Paul's Cross Churchyard. Occasional Papers 5. London: The Bibliographical Society, 1990.

Chartier, Roger. Cardenio Between Cervantes and Shakespeare: The Story of a Lost Play. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.

Gurr, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare's London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Harbage, Alfred. Annals of English Drama 975-1700. Revised by S. Schoenbaum. Rev. ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964. 

Shakespeare, Willliam. Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. Edited by Helge Kökeritz. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954.

Smith, Emma. Shakespeare's First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 

———. The Making of Shakespeare's First Folio. 2nd ed. Oxford: Bodleian Library Publishing, 2023.

Spitzer, Leo. "Linguistic Perspectivism in the 'Don Quijote.'" Representative Essays. Edited by Alban K. Forcione, Herbert Lindenberger, and Madeline Sutherland. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. 25-71.

Theobald, Lewis. Shakespeare Restored: Or, a Specimen of the Errors, As Well Committed As Unamended, by Mr. Pope in His Late Edition of This Poet. London, 1726. 

West, Anthony James. The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.