![]() It’s a complicated, collaborative process, and everybody involved invariably made mistakes. In order to print this way, compositors need to know exactly how much text appears on each page, so when they set the type on pages 1 and 4, whatever text they’ve omitted between those pages is enough to fill up pages 2 and 3. The simplest version of the Folio format would print pages 1 and 4 on side A of a sheet, and then print pages 2 and 3 on the other side – fold the sheet in half, and you have a book with four sequential pages. Fold a sheet twice, you get a smaller eight-page Quarto layout. Fold a sheet once, you get a larger four-page Folio layout. One sheet of paper contained multiple printed “pages” of the final book, and how many pages depended on the number of times the paper would be folded after printing that number depended on the size of the final book. The compositors who worked in the printing houses set their type upside down and backwards onto small “compositing sticks” a line at a time, to be set into forms and printed in relief. Printing presses were large, violent machines that required multiple people to operate. ![]() ![]() Outside of the considerable labor of obtaining copies and licensing rights for the thirty-six plays, there’s also the mechanical feat of actually printing them. It takes a village to print an early modern book, and it took at least two actors and five printers to arrange the printing of the Folio. For now, we must be content simply to have the texts that we have. Theories accounting for these differences abound, but none have enough evidence to be universally accepted. ![]() Much Ado About Nothing) and sometimes they are major enough that scholars can (and do) argue over whether they’re even the same play (e.g. Quarto copies always differ from their Folio counterparts in at least some ways, since print features like spelling and punctuation were not yet standardized, but sometimes those differences are minor (e.g. Different publishers printed them in multiple variant copies, some licensed through the Stationer’s register, others not so much. Of the thirty-six plays that appear in the Folio, eighteen had already appeared in cheaper, single-edition publications called Quartos by 1623. So we know for certain that by the time Shakespeare’s words appear printed on any sort of page, they’ve not only long left his hands but also passed through countless others. Always on the hunt for new material, printers had plenty of incentives to rush titles to market without necessarily following proper procedure, and might rather go to print with “stolen and surreptitious copies” not authorized by anyone (let alone the playwright) than wait (or pay) for approval and miss an opportunity to capitalize on novelty. Though printers were technically required to license plays by entering the titles into a central master account record called the Stationer’s Register before printing them, theoretically requiring them to deal with the playhouse managers as well as other printers to secure exclusive rights to any particular title, they did not always follow their own industry’s rules. That company therefore owned that work, and could decide whether (and when) it might increase profits to sell that work to a printer - not that the printers always waited for permission. He was a man of the theatre, who produced plays for the stage as a member of a company that paid him for his work. Though plays were frequently published in various printed formats throughout Shakespeare’s lifetime, including his own, Shakespeare had little (if anything) to do with it. Publishing the Folio was a remarkable undertaking - an expensive feat of cross-industry collaboration. Published according to the True Originall Copies, also known as the 1623 First Folio, or simply “the Folio.” In honor of this significant milestone, let’s take a look at how the Folio came to be, as well as how (and why) we still use it today. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. 2023 marks the 400th anniversary of the printing of the first ever collected works of the playwright William Shakespeare: Mr. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |