Shakespeare · 1623
Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies
How two fellow actors saved half the canon from script loss and put the surname on the title page of English literature's most consequential single volume.
Draft entry · awaiting review
Seven years after Shakespeare's death, the stationers Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount published a folio of thirty-six plays — eighteen of which had never appeared in print. Without that book, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night, The Tempest and a dozen other staples might survive only as echoes, acting traditions and fragmented quartos.
John Heminges and Henry Condell, shareholders in the King's Men, addressed readers as 'the great variety of readers' and presented the texts as faithful to the company's practice. Ben Jonson's prefatory poem 'To the memory of my beloued, The AVTHOR MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE' crowned him the 'soul of the age' — rhetoric that helped turn a Warwickshire tradesman's son into the national monument the name still carries.
More stories of Shakespeare
- The Globe burns during Henry VIIIA cannon shot in a history play set the thatch alight in 1613 — theatre as fireworks, and the surname tied to Southwark spectacle.
- Holy Trinity and the grave curseStratford burial, ledger stone and the rhymed warning against moving his bones — parish fact meets tourist folklore.