On November 8th, 1623, publisher Edward Blount registered 18 previously unpublished plays by the author William Shakespeare with the Stationer’s Guild in London. Jacobean England did not offer authors copyright protection for their work. Instead, the guild of printers and publishers protected their own members who made the expensive investment of typesetting and printing a volume from competition from anyone (including the author) offering the same material (Taylor’s Version was not a thing of this past). Registration prevented licensed printers from offering competing editions (unlicensed printers faced loss of their hands or hanging so this was reasonably effective as deterrence). At the same time works were registered they could be reviewed and approved for sale by the revels office, a function of the Lord Chamberlain which regulated both printing and public performance of plays. For the forthcoming Folio collection of Shakespeare’s plays this was especially important because the Lord Chamberlain, William Herbert Earl of Pembroke, had placed an interdiction on the publication of any new work from Shakespeare. In 1619 printer William Jaggard had attempted to get out a selection of Shakespeare plays (known today as the “false” folio) by ante-dating previously unreleased works but the revels office had caught the deception and the effort had to be abandoned. In waiting so long to license the work, Blount has taken a substantial risk. Printing the 36 plays of the folio, over 900 pages of material, had taken almost two years and cost almost 300 pounds just for paper and printing. Blount must have had strong advance assurances from Pembroke that the work could be sold when completed.
We don’t know when the last page came off the press and the volume was first offered for sale in the bookstalls around St. Paul’s cathedral in the center of London. The first documented sale was to Sir Edward Dering, a 25-year-old antiquarian and book collector who recorded the purchase in his account book on December 5th 1623. He bought two copies. As the title page does not indicate a precise date of publication these two dates a month apart are all we have to mark the release of what has subsequently become the most valuable and arguably most important book in the English language.
This is the real story of the Folio, the people behind the scenes who wrote, edited and published the plays of William Shakespeare in 1623 as revealed by the documents and writings that survive from that time. It is a fascinating and largely unknown story, full of the literary and political figures whose lives shaped a critical moment in which our modern world began to take shape. At the center of the story are Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s friend and rival, and the man responsible for nearly everything we know (or think we know) about the author, William Herbert, Jonson’s patron, at the time the most important official in King James government, but at political and personal risk because of his opposition to a Spanish marriage for Prince Charles, and his own potentially scandalous affair with his cousin, and Herbert’s mother, a woman most people have never heard of, Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke.
I begin with Ben Jonson who, as Shakespeare Birthplace Trust chairman Stanley Wells says, “is the person who tells us most about Shakespeare.”
Ben Jonson and the Folio
Ben Jonson and the Art of Shakespeare
The Four Five Shakespeares: the Documentary Lives
Reading with Understanding: the Hermeneutic Circle
Why Ben Jonson Writes Not of Love
Jonson, the Herbert Family and the First Folio
Bauds, Whores and William Basse