Book of the Bard: Exploring Shakespeare's First Folio

 Sally Bavage writes:

Heart Centre Saturday 2 March                                                                              

Professor Emma Smith

The apocalyptic rain that greeted our audience members was definitely from the stage directions for The Tempest. It did not dissuade our intrepid speaker, local girl Professor Emma Smith, who braved not just the weather but the train strikes to get to Headingley by a more roundabout route than TrainLine would have suggested.

 

It was our good fortune to be treated to over an hour of presentation, anecdote and education in answer to our questions that was a tour-de-force. Emma Smith's grasp of the comedies, tragedies and histories that were collected together by Shakespeare's friends and colleagues after his death into the book now known as the First Folio is so extensive – no wonder she is your go-to expert for many TV programmes and international commentators.  Despite such depth of academic knowledge she presented her material in a light and witty way that kept everyone gripped.  ‘Brevity is the soul of wit’, said a certain playwright, and Emma Smith covered the key elements of the making of the first published collection, in 1623, of the majority of Shakespeare's output both briefly and in such entertaining style.

 

I suspect many of us are familiar with the classic picture of Shakespeare.  As Emma pointed out, it does rather look like a Monty Python version, with the head about to come loose!  That's because printers often illustrated their printed versions with a generalised body in a doublet and just added the relevant head. It wasn't actually very common to print playscripts four hundred years ago – plays were performed perhaps half a dozen times before a new work was put on and the script shelved.   After all, if the script was available to audience members then they might not go to the theatre as frequently as was the case in Elizabethan times. Travelling theatre troupes would put on the same play in town after town, not needing a comprehensive repertoire. Most of the plays written by other playwrights in the late sixteenth century received about half a dozen performances and were then lost to history.

 

The bulk of Shakespeare's plays were put together and published in what was an unusual and expensive venture which was probably not seen just as an investment but more as a way preserving his extraordinary body of work.  Emma took us through the printing process on the Gutenberg movable-type press, exploring how it would be so expensive in time and labour. This section greatly interested the representative from Waterstones who was there with copies of various of Emma's acclaimed writings (see below) - he had trained as a printer in Portugal on the same type of machine almost four centuries later, and knew that it was based on a traditional wine press

 

Fascinating to see the inky fingerprints on certain copies, to note that children somehow managed to add their drawings and to read the annotations made by owners over the years. Some had decided certain passages were 'naughty' or in poor Latin, or had added comments of their own. Although copies are now worth millions, it was not until the nineteenth century that the monetary value really shot up. Of perhaps 750 copies originally made, only 235 survive and 51 of those in the UK.  It was Emma Smith who did the research and authenticated the 235^th copy discovered in 2016 on the Isle of Bute. Local magnate Benjamin Gott of Armley owned a copy, very pleasing to a scholar who grew up in Gott's own neck of the woods.

 

We were abuzz with questions afterwards, audience members entranced by Emma's erudition and down-to-earth approach.  Sequels are never as good as the first version, Emma alleged, and asked us to compare the film Legally Blonde with Legally Blonde 2 when considering the worth of Henry IV Parts 1 and 2.  Who else but a consummate master of her craft would do that! 

 

We splashed out into the tempest together, companionably sharing umbrellas and commiserations on the weather. This wasn't The Merchant of Venice “droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven” but more Twelfth Night “the rain it raineth every day.”

 

Emma Smith was born and brought up in Leeds. She is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford, and the 2023 Sam Wanamaker Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe.

Her books include The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio and Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book, both with second editions published for the anniversary in 2023. Her This Is Shakespeare was a Sunday Times bestseller. She has broadcast extensively about Shakespeare on BBC radio and television.