Slimed With Gravy, Ringed by Drink

This year marks the four hundredth anniversary of the First Folio edition of William Shakespeare’s plays. It’s easy to see why this is now the best known and most fetishized of all Shakespearean volumes, with a market value best compared—in scholar Anthony James West’s view—with that of Russian caviar or Jaguar cars. (Although even those benchmarks understate the allure. In 2020, Christie’s sold a complete copy of the Folio at auction for nearly $10 million.) We do not have Shakespeare’s original manuscripts, perhaps apart from the three-page “Hand D” additions to Sir Thomas More, and of the 36 plays which appear in the large-format Folio, 18 (including The Tempest, Macbeth, and Julius Caesar) were never published in smaller, cheaper “quarto” or “octavo” versions: without the Folio, these plays could well be lost. And even the plays that do exist in numerous quarto editions differ, in these versions, from the Folio. The Folio text of Othello, for instance, doesn’t introduce the brute and earthy Iago with “s’blood” and other choice curses, as does the first quarto of 1622 (which was based on an earlier manuscript, likely from around the time the play was staged in 1603–4); the Folio was purged to comply with the 1606 Act to Restrain Abuses of Players, which prohibited profanity.