Four hundred years ago, in 1623, a book appeared under the title Mr. William Shakespeares comedies, histories & tragedies. Published according to the True Originall Copies. Known today as The First Folio, the tome featured 36 of the Bard’s plays collected as a posthumous tribute to him by his fellow-actor friends John Heminge and Henry Condell. It has since become one of the most coveted and influential works of literature in the world – a First Folio fetched a record $9,978,000 at auction at Christie’s in New York in 2020.
In Shakespeare’s time plays were not generally prized as literature and were more usually printed in small, cheap, ‘quarto’ formats. By publishing so many by one man in the much larger, prestigious folio format (a bound copy cost £1, the price of 44 loaves of bread) Heminge and Condell
