First Folio

I mean, they're beautiful.

Shakespeare's First Folio.

And you can see Beatles lyrics on the back of envelopes.

Jane Austen's writing desk and Leonardo's notebook have all been on show there.

It's said that the new flow of Shakespeare's works ceased around the time of de Vere's death.

And in 1623, it was de Vere's family that apparently financed the first folio of Shakespeare's works.

One of the dedicatees of this being de Vere's son-in-law, Philip Herbert.

Maybe de Vere was Shakespeare, maybe he just had a deep appreciation for the arts and his family wanted to honour that after his death.

And it's argued by Andy Strauss that Marlowe's later works are almost indistinguishable from early Shakespeare.

And Shakespeare was actually accused of trying to reach above his ranks in trying to match university educated writers like Marlowe.

Like Shakespeare is widely considered to be inspired by Marlowe and his first folio works such as Henry the Sick, The Taming of the Shrew and Titus Andronicus are often attributed to Marlowe.

They did have a very, very similar writing style, but Shakespeare could have just been inspired.

And it all started here with the fact that the Folger has done, God help us all, a D&D adventure using items from their archives and using the physical space of the Folger themselves.

as well as a new board game that's coming out from Fort Circle that's all First Folio.

And the Dice Tower is a printing press? It's so exactly my shit.

I was just thrilled a bit.

And Cole Worley, who people might know as the designer of Ark and Root and John Company and a whole bunch of other cool as hell games, said that he thought First Folio was super fun and...

I concur with that, uh, agreement.

And, uh, but I have to say moving backwards in time to the stuff held by the Folger in the 20th century is a rude awakening.

But the plot of the story is of Shakespeare's own creation, with the action, unusually for a later play, being confined to just a few hours of its culmination.

The only original text that we have for The Tempest is in the first folio, where the play is placed as the first play in the collection, leading the comedies.

That placement is assumed to be a recognition of the play's popularity by Hemmings and Condell, and perhaps also because it was the last solo authored play.

The text is noted as including more stage directions than any other in the collection, suggesting that the text was taken from an authoritative prompt copy, or possibly that these were embellished as the folio was being prepared, using the memory of actors who had participated in a production.

I was like, can you throw me a bone of some kind of distinction that will make this film compete with bigger budget, real Shakespeare films.

But I had a dream where something said, go to this paragraph in the first folio by Shakespeare.

This is the Rosetta Stone for the whole book.

This will, the following A, B, C, D.

And I love this line.

In the first folio, it's spelt with an E on the end, humane.

And I know there are many people who will say there are typographical inconsistencies in the folio between how certain words are spelt.

Sometimes it's human, sometimes it's humane.

Akimi notes that evidence of Black women's engagement with Shakespeare disappears around the 18th and 19th centuries, a time when their experiences were less likely to be documented or preserved.

The items featured include a copy of Shakespeare's first folio, purchased by a British family that owned enslaved people, a record of enslaved people forced to work on the family's sugar plantation, and handwritten notes by Toni Morrison for her play Desdemona.