Collins, Paul. The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009. Print.As you shop for the Shakespearean on your list, don't neglect this book. It's a well-written, more-popular-than-scholarly account of the history of the First Folio. I tend to like to dwell in the footnotes—I read Shakespeare, for the most part, in the Arden editions, rich in scholarly footnotes. The Book of William isn't scholarly like that, but it still manages to satisfy my desire for scholarship even while it tells more of a narrative.
The book also reminded me of a number of things that I had forgotten—that, due to the 1666 fire of London, the third Folio is even rarer than the first (53), and what the relationships between Shakespeare's earliest editors (most notably, Rowe, Pope, Theobald, and Johnson) was (59ff), and how Shakespeare began to be published in extensive and cheap print runs (85-86).
If you're a Shakespeare lover, you can unobtrusively forward this URL to your friends and family—they'll know what to do from there!
Click below to purchase the book from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).
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