The nineteenth-century copyist John Harris (who was an artist by training) worked on numerous First Folios making exact pen copies of original leaves, which are difficult to identify as facsimile. Folger Shakespeare Libary, STC 22273 Fo.1 no.62 4ĭetail showing how carefully a manuscript hand imitated the printed type missing. Publishers of these books used the latest technology available to them with mixed results. At least five reproductions of the First Folio were produced in the nineteenth century. The skills of the ‘sophisticator’ and the intention of the sophistication also played a role.Īs we have seen, missing leaves were often supplied from printed facsimiles. The first one is clearly the physical condition of the Folio and how incomplete it was just before being sophisticated. The amount and quality of sophistication greatly varies from copy to copy. Folio number 36, for example, is made-up from at least five different copies. 3 Both cases are illustrated in the Folios currently on display: many of them have less than a dozen leaves supplied while a small group of copies are more heavily made-up. Several booksellers appear to have cornered the market on defective First Folios, which they either perfected and then sold at a high price, or used to make-up other copies. The others all had their leaves supplied in printed or manuscript facsimile.īy contrast, leaves missing from elsewhere in the volume were frequently supplied from other copies. This must explain why out of 18 First Folios I examined only three had their missing leaves in either of these two sections of the book supplied from other Folio copies. When taking into account the factors highlighted above, the leaves of First Folios most likely to get loose and most frequently missing (often in tandem) are those in the preliminary section (the title page, the dedications, etc) and in the play Cymbeline, which comes at the end of the book. Finding replacement leaves in other copies of the First Folio became increasingly difficult, since the copies used to sophisticate others often had these leaves missing too. Steevens reported finding crumbs of food in a number of First Folios he examined. In the supplement to his First Folio facsimile including the first census of copies extant, Sidney Lee refers to the eighteenth-century Shakespearean editor George Steevens who attributed the poor state of some First Folio copies to their presence on the dining table of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century country houses, where someone probably read from the book while others were eating, similar to reading practices in certain religious orders. Such activity could take place in various rooms of the household. In her post last week, Heather Wolfe discussed the practice of reading plays from the First Folio with a group of people. The First Folio was a book that people actively read in the early modern period it was not simply a fixture of decoration. Environment (temperature, humidity, leaking roofs, etc.) and use (frequent turning of pages, opening and closing of the book, etc.) were determining factors in the deterioration of the binding and the text block of these books. By the late 1700s, most surviving First Folios had already ‘suffered’ the vagaries of time. 1 It is, in any case, the reason why all the copies of the First Folio currently on display, like the rest of the First Folio collection at the Folger Library, have been sophisticated.įirst Folios were sophisticated from the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, when collectors had a heightened desire to own a complete or ‘perfect’ First Folio no matter how this perfection was achieved. Missing leaves in a book are the most likely motivation for its sophistication although, other explanations exist. This post will look at their “sophistication.”Ī “sophisticated” or made-up book is a defective book that has been perfected with leaves supplied from other copies, or from a pen or printed facsimile. This week we will continue our discussion of the First Folios currently on display in the Folger Shakespeare Library exhibition, First Folio! Shakespeare’s American Tour.
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