By Susan Dunne for the Hartford Courant
Imagine a world without “Macbeth,” “The Taming of the Shrew,” “The Tempest” and “Twelfth Night.” Imagine a world without “All the world’s a stage,” “Beware the ides of March,” “We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” “Something wicked this way comes” and “If music be the food of love, play on.”
William Shakespeare wrote those plays, and those words. But without the First Folio, they would have been lost to history. The First Folio was published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, by two of his friends, John Heminges and Henry Condell. It contained 36 of the Bard’s plays, including 18 that had never been published in book form before. “All’s Well That Ends Well,” “Antony and Cleopatra,” “As You Like It,” “Comedy of Errors,” “Coriolanus,” “Cymbeline,” “1 Henry VI,” “Henry VIII,” “Julius Caesar,” “King John,” “Macbeth,” “Measure for Measure,” “The Taming of the Shrew,” “The Tempest,” “Timon of Athens,” “Twelfth Night,” “Two Gentlemen of Verona” and “The Winter’s Tale.”
This year is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. In commemoration, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., which owns 82 of the 235 surviving copies of the First Folio, is sending those folios on the road, one location for each of the 50 states. The closely guarded historical artifact will be on view to the public at the William Benton Museum of Art at University of Connecticut in Storrs from Sept. 1 to 25.
Some of those 18 plays had been published previously as quartos, which are little more than pamphlets. “They were like the paperbacks you pick up at the airport bookstore and then throw away when you’re done,” said Lindsay Cummings, an assistant professor of dramatic arts at UConn.
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