This is my photograph of the University of London copy, Senate House. Below are the Folger and BL sites.
Here is the late Queen’s copy at the Bodleian, Oxon
Here is the copy from the Walter Havighurst Special Collections Library at Miami University
Some still mistakenly believe that this editor merely updated F1 without providing any true editorial stewardship. However, A. W. Pollard (1909) asserted that this was untrue, albeit without providing any examples. The American scholar he scorned, Charles Alphonso Smith (1902), actually documents many instances that show F2 truly rethinking and revising F1. Charles I owned a copy and wrote in it. My photo, University of London, Senate House.
There are two versions of the Third Folio (1663, 1664) that differ in one crucial respect. One contains seven more plays than the other. The first, sometimes known as F3a, was once thought to be merely a reprint of F2. Yet recent scholarship has detected evidence of substantial editing. The one in the picture link above is sometimes known as F3b (1664): it added seven plays now known to be apocryphal. Here is a link to F3a (1663), the first printing. Boston Public Library.
Third Folio (F3b, 1664) from Havighurst Collection, Miami University
The last no-name editor Folio, though quartos remained anonymously edited. Rowe, Pope, Hanmer, Warburton, and even Dr. Johnson largely based their editions on F4. Senate House copy, University of London, my photo
Fourth Folio from Havighurst Collection, Miami University
Black and Shaaber, Shakespeare's Seventeenth-century Editors, 1632-1685 (1937)
Here is the Folger's online copy of a First Folio with page images, entire.
The sole surviving copy
The only known copy
The First Part of the Contention betwixt the famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster became Henry VI, Part Two, in Shakespeare scholarship, since the first part of the tetralogy showed up in F1
Lucrece
Richard III
The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke became Henry VI, Part Three.
The Edward Dowden facsimile
The British Library quarto, courtesy of ISE. The first title-page with Shakespeare's name on it.
This anonymous play has sometimes been attributed to Shakespeare or considered to be an earlier or even competing version of the F1 text. It is strange that no quarto of the comedy we know as Shakespeare's survives except the 1631 version, published just before F2.
"cut him out in little stars"
Historically famous, since the Earl of Essex was said to have the deposition scene performed in 1599 during his rebellion.
Falstaff already well known
Even more love for Falstaff
Important
The second title-page featuring Shakespeare's name.
Merchant
The play
Enjoyed
Much disputed
Two early versions
Earliest printed version of the play known, not included in First Folio.
This somewhat mysteriously published quarto and its odd prolegomena have led to much unwarranted and unseemly speculation about Shakespeare and his life.
Though the play was known and performed almost two decades earlier, it did not appear in quarto until the year before F1.
The odd doppelganger of Shakespeare's play is The Taming of a Shrew (1594), of unknown authorship but similar in many particulars. This quarto seems late, but Charles I liked Shakespeare.
John Fletcher
Frequently dismissed as a mashup of Shakespeare's sonnets and poems, since the publisher and editor, John Benson, changed pronouns and the ordering of several sonnets or combined them. Yet it is important in reception studies of Shakespeare's nondramatic poetry.
This is a collection of ten quarto play texts that William Jaggard printed for Thomas Pavier in 1619, though some of the title-pages are falsely dated. There are two known volumes in contemporary binding, one at the Folger and the other at Texas Christian University. Other copies of the Pavier editions exist singly. W. W. Greg and others theorized that the collection might have been an early attempt at a Shakespeare collection. Some spurious works (Yorkshire Tragedy, Sir John Oldcastle) are included.
Dr. Zachary Lesser's excellent recent study, Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée (2021), is the most complete and wide-ranging study. From the publisher's website:
Four years before the publication of the First Folio, a group of London printers and booksellers attempted to produce a "collected works" of William Shakespeare, not in an imposingly large format but as a series of more humble quarto pamphlets. For mysterious reasons, perhaps involving Shakespeare's playing company, the King's Men, the project ran into trouble. In an attempt to salvage it, information on the title pages of some of the playbooks was falsified, making them resemble leftover copies of earlier editions. The deception worked for nearly three hundred years, until it was unmasked by scholars in the early twentieth century. The discovery of these "Pavier Quartos," as they became known, was a landmark success for the New Bibliography and played an important role in establishing the validity and authority of that method of analysis. While more recent scholars have reassessed the traditional narrative that the New Bibliographers wrote, no one has gone back to look at the primary evidence: the quartos themselves.
In Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes Zachary Lesser undertakes a completely fresh study of these playbooks. Through an intensive bibliographical analysis of over three hundred surviving quartos, Lesser reveals evidence that has gone entirely unseen before: "ghosts" (faint, oily impressions produced when one book is bound next to another); "holes" (the tiny remains of the first simple stitching that held pamphlets together); and "rips and scrapes" (post-production alterations of title pages). This new evidence—much of it visible only with the aid of enhanced photographic methods—suggests that the "Pavier Quartos" are far more mysterious, with far more consequential ramifications for book history and Shakespeare scholarship than we have thought.
Ordering information from the University of Pennsylvania Press
