Shakespeare "Published according to the True Originall Copies"
The original manuscripts of Shakespeare's works do not survive: the sole extant composition in his hand is a precious single scene from Sir Thomas More, a multi-authored play that cannot really be described as "his". Those of his extant plays (about half) that were published in his lifetime were nearly all printed in the compact and relatively low-priced format known as quarto, which may be thought of as the equivalent of the modern paperback. Then in 1619, the publisher Thomas Pavier printed unauthorized editions of ten plays. An element of through-pagination suggests that this was intended as some kind of "collected Shakespeare".
(There was precedent for such a collection: three years earlier, Ben Jonson had become the first English playwright to collect his works for the public stage in a single volume, though he had also included the more elevated and respectable matter of his poems and court masques.) With the assistance of their patron, the Earl of Pembroke, the leading players of the King's Men (Richard Burbage, John Hemings and Henry Condell) obtained an order preventing Pavier, or anyone else, from going any further with such an enterprise.
It was probably at this time that the actors began considering the possibility of a collected Shakespeare of their own. Burbage died later in 1619, so Hemings and Condell carried forward the project. The First Folio (so named for the large size and single fold of its paper) eventually appeared in 1623. It included thirty six plays, but not the poems and sonnets. The plays were seventeen of the eighteen published in Shakespeare's lifetime (Pericles was omitted -and Troilus and Cressida nearly was, with licence to include it only being obtained at the last minute, after the whole book had been printed off, which accounts for the absence of that play from the contents list), Othello (which had appeared in an independent quarto while the Folio was under preparation), and a further eighteen plays that had never appeared in print.
Were it not for the Folio, these latter eighteen plays might have been lost to posterity. Though the Folio printing is of variable quality, the Folio text has to be the basis for the editing of these eighteen plays: there is no other. The huge textual problem in the editing of Shakespeare stems from the eighteen Folio plays that also exist in quarto texts, especially since in many of them there are substantial differences between quarto and Folio. For the eighteen dual-text plays, generations of editors since the eighteenth century have followed the principle, based on Classical and biblical textual theory, that the earliest surviving text must be the one closest to the original authorial manuscript, so they have preferred the quarto texts from Shakespeare's lifetime to the posthumously produced Folio -save in the small number of cases where the quarto text was so full of errors and inconsistencies that they had to rely on the Folio.
For this reason, all editions of the complete works published in the past three centuries have been hybrids of quartos and Folio.
The Second (1632), Third (1663-4) and Fourth (1685) Folios had corrected and modernized local details in the First Folio, while also introducing printing errors of their own. Nicholas Rowe, in his edition of 1709, began the process of modernizing the spellings, rationalizing the scene and speech headings, providing lists of the dramatis personae and so forth. By and large, what Rowe produced was a tidied-up modern-spelling version of the Fourth Folio. The only significant occasion on which he hybridized the folio and quarto traditions was in the Fourth Act of Hamlet, where he noted from the so-called "players' quarto" of 1676 that the Folio offers a much abbreviated version of the scene where Fortinbras's army marches across the stage. Only in the quarto tradition does Hamlet make an appearance in this scene and deliver his last major soliloquy, "How all occasions do inform against me . . .". Rowe accordingly imported the relevant dialogue and soliloquy from the quarto tradition.
(In the case of King Lear, by contrast, he did not include in his text such quarto only sequences as the mock arraignment of Goneril in the hovel, and Gloucester's servants' dialogue about their intention to apply first aid to their mutilated master.) Rowe was the first who may be said to have edited the Folio in the full sense of the term. He was also the last.
