Shakespeare's First Folio Shakespeare's First Folio British
Library G.11631 title page Copyright © The British Library Board
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firstname.lastname@example.org This is the first collected
edition of the plays of William Shakespeare, published in 1623,
only seven years after his death. Two of his fellow actors and
closest friends, John Heminge and Henry Condell, undertook the
work of editing the text and supervising the printing by Isaac
Jaggard and Edward Blount. Only half of Shakespeare’s plays had
been published previously, all in smaller format and some poorly
edited. The engraved title page shows Martin Droeshout’s now
famous portrait of Shakespeare. What’s a folio? The word ‘folio’
comes from the Latin for a leaf, and usually means a leaf in a
manuscript. But in printers’ jargon it had another sense: it
referred to page size. More than one page was printed at the
same time on a single large sh