BOOKS Four hundred years ago, in November 1623, a volume of plays appeared on a bookstall1 in the market in St. Paul’s churchyard2. Two years in preparation, the book was entitled Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. Shakespeare had died seven years earlier, and two of his actor colleagues, Henry Condell and John Heminges, were determined that his art should not die with him.
BARD’S FIRST COLLECTION
The printing of the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays was a slow, intricate3 process, using the writer’s own manuscripts (none of which survives today), theatre prompt4 copies and old, small quarto5 editions. Only half of the thirty-six plays in the book’s nine hundred pages had been published before, so Condell and Heminges’ act saved for posterity such literary classics as Macbeth,…
