First Folio

The 1623 collection of 36 plays by William Shakespeare, published seven years after his death. It preserves 18 plays that had not previously been printed.

John Heminges: An English actor and King’s Men shareholder who helped prepare Shakespeare’s plays for the First Folio. With Henry Condell, he claimed responsibility for gathering and publishing the plays.
Folio: A book format made from sheets folded once, producing large leaves. The format gave the collection its name and distinguished it from smaller playbooks.
The Tempest: A Shakespeare play about a shipwreck, a magician, and the island where he lives. It appears in print for the first time in the First Folio.
Shakespeare apocrypha: Plays historically attributed to Shakespeare but excluded from the standard canon. The First Folio’s contents helped define which plays counted as Shakespeare’s.
Henry Condell: An English actor and King’s Men shareholder who helped prepare Shakespeare’s plays for the First Folio. His collaboration with Heminges shaped the volume’s prefatory account of its preparation.
Quarto: A book format made from sheets folded twice, producing smaller leaves than a folio. Many Shakespeare plays had appeared in quartos before the collection.
Macbeth: A Shakespeare tragedy about a Scottish nobleman whose ambition leads him to murder and tyranny. The First Folio is the sole early printed source for its text.
Shakespearean authorship: The study of which works were written by William Shakespeare and how they were composed. The Folio’s attribution and omissions remain evidence in questions of authorship.
Edward Blount: An English bookseller and publisher who jointly issued the First Folio. His publishing partnership brought the collected plays into print.
Copy-text: The document chosen as the principal source for setting a printed text. Printers relied on manuscripts and earlier editions to establish each play’s wording.

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