The 1623 volume, Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies, aka the ‘First Folio’, was 400 years old in 2023. Why is it so special?

I should begin by putting all my cards on the table. I’m fascinated by Shakespeare and his books, including the First Folio. In the immediate pre-Covid years, I took my family on an international library tour. Perhaps what made for an even more unexpected family holiday was that it was also a First Folio tour.

We called first on the Weston Library in Oxford and saw, up close, the famous Bodleian copy — unceremoniously offloaded by the Bodleian Library in the seventeenth century, then eagerly repurchased in 1905.

We also visited the British Library’s substantial Shakespeare holdings and the even larger collection of First Folios at Meisei University in Tokyo. Our tour included the largest Shakespeare collection of them all, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, home to a remarkable 82 First Folios. (There are 233 known surviving copies, although some are damaged or incomplete, and others have pages from later editions added.)

Some people ask if the First Folio should even be attributed to the Bard. My position on this controversial yet tedious question, ‘Who wrote Shakespeare?’, is entirely orthodox. All the ‘secret author’ theories — which nominate Francis Bacon, Henry Neville, Edward de Vere and any number of others as the ‘real Shakespeare’ — are emphatically and demonstrably baloney.

All the same, my attitude and orientation towards Shakespeare diverges from some writers in this crowded field. I’ve made a career out of irreverent — and sometimes spicy — writing about respectable and even nerdy subjects. Perhaps more than any other subject in my chosen categories of libraries, publishing, finance and legal history, Shakespeare invites — even demands — irreverence and spice.

Moreover, as an Australian writing in Australia about Shakespeare today, I feel I can write from a sceptical distance. Four centuries plus 17,000 kilometres adds up to a lot of objectivity…

[See the full story at https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/stories/all-will-world]

This story appears in Openbook winter 2023.

https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/all-time-shakespeare-print

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