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The First Folio is the term applied by modern scholars to the first published collection of William Shakespeare 's plays; its actual title is '''''Mr. William Shakespeares''''' {Link without Title} '''''Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies'''''.More generally, the term "first folio" is employed in other appropriate contexts, as in connection with the first folio collection of Ben Jonson 's works ( 1616 ), or the first folio collection of the plays in the Beaumont And Fletcher canon ( 1647 ). Printed in Folio format and containing 36 plays (see List Of Shakespeare's Plays ), it was prepared by Shakespeare's colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell in 1623 , about seven years after Shakespeare's death. Although eighteen of Shakespeare's plays had been published in Quarto prior to 1623, the First Folio is the only reliable text for about twenty of the plays, and a valuable source text even for many of those previously published. The Folio includes all of the plays generally accepted to be Shakespeare's, with the exception of '' Pericles, Prince Of Tyre '' and '' The Two Noble Kinsmen ''. It does not include his poems. PRINTING THE BOOK The contents of the First Folio were compiled by Heminges and Condell, the members of the Stationers Company who published the book were the booksellers Edward Blount and the father/son team of William And Isaac Jaggard . The Jaggards were printers as well as booksellers, an unusual but not unprecedented combination. William Jaggard has seemed an odd choice by the King's Men , since he had published the questionable collection '' The Passionate Pilgrim '' as Shakespeare's, and in 1619 had printed new editions of ten Shakespearean quartos to which he did not have clear rights, some with false dates and title pages. It is thought that the typesetting and printing of the First Folio was such a large job that the King's Men simply needed the capacities of the Jaggards' shop. (At any rate, William Jaggard was old, infirm, and blind by 1623, and died a month before the book went on sale; most of the work in the project must have been done by his son Isaac.) The First Folio's publishing syndicate also included two stationers who owned the rights to some of the individual plays that had been previously printed: William Aspley ('' Much Ado About Nothing '' and '' Henry IV, Part 1 '') and John Smethwick ('' Love's Labor's Lost ,'' '' Romeo And Juliet ,'' and '' Hamlet ''). Smethwick had been a business partner of another Jaggard, William's brother John. |
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