Bodleian First Folio

In looking for something that “exemplifies the social nature of print or manuscript ‘publication’,” I began thinking about the numerous works that touch on the publication cycle in early modern England. These discuss the variety of people that had a hand in printing Shakespeare. I thought about works like Double Falsehood, ostensibly a collaboration across time of Lewis Theobald (in the early eighteenth century) and Shakespeare and John Fletcher (a contemporary and known collaborator of Shakespeare’s). This case seems aligned to the kinds of problems Darnton is talking about, but maybe only in a very broad, general way.

So, yet again, I find myself at the First Folio. The First Folio and its publication are very social in nature, and specifically the copy in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. The First Folio itself was published seven years after Shakespeare’s death, removing any control he himself may have had over the works and their publication – a circumstance that Johns points out with Brahe. Authorship of Shakespeare’s plays was, however, communal in many ways because the plays technically belonged to the company and the publisher (one of whom, in this case, was a bookseller). This speaks more, I think, of a different conception of authorship than we have today. The Bodleian First Folio, however, is interesting because it has escaped restoration and rebinding. The Bodleian acquired it at publication, but it was sold off in the 1660s and not bought back until the early twentieth century. This edition bears the markings of reader interactions with the text, preserved through its lack of restoration. The Bodelian’s web site says that, “[i]ts unique marks of wear connect us with the tastes of early readers, and we can see how their hands have worn the pages of Romeo and Juliet almost to shreds, while leaving King John virtually pristine.” While, as Darnton says, “reading remains mysterious” and “texts shape the response of readers,” here we can see how readers have physically shaped the text, and potentially shaped the reception of some of its parts over others.

This edition, too, is being shaped by modern "printing" technologies. It is viewable online in high-resoultion to be flipped through from the comfort of your PC, Mac, or laptop, and who knows what effects that publication decision will have on the rest of the circuit of tees text.

You can view the Bodelian's First Folio here and get more info about it here.