Taken from William Shakespeare: an illustrated biography, by Anthony Holden (Little, Brown 2002)
The two actors who edited the plays, John Heminge and Henry Condell, commissioned a portrait of Shakespeare to accompany the text, a sign of his celebrity as well as the move from representing expensive books as high-status objects expressing the hard labour of dedicated scholarship.
It is a sad truth that, as far as we can tell, a significant majority of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays disappeared, so Shakespeare's folio provides us with an idea of a world we could have lost. In practical terms the 1623 folio is a vital resource, as it contains 18 plays, including Macbeth, Julius Caesar and The Tempest, that would otherwise have been lost.
How were Shakespeare’s works preserved and passed down to us? It sounds like a rather dry and specialist question, but it is often important to know why the past looks the way it does, especially when considering books, in particular those that are so fundamental to the cultures in which we live.
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