As Darwinism chipped away at biblical authority, the Victorians invested another big old book with meaning and value, substituting the First Folio as a kind of secular scripture. Shakespeare’s high cultural status in the age of empire really transformed the First Folio into an iconic object.
The Munro copy that is reproduced on this website is a fine example of this book in an early nineteenth-century rebinding. The book we now know as the First Folio is no exception, and copies carry clues, from doodles to lost pages and from inscriptions to bindings, that bear witness to the circumstances of their production and reception. Writing in books, sometimes engaging directly with their content but equally often simply using up blank paper, was standard. And standard accounts of reading in this period described it as an activity undertaken with a pen. Most books were sold unbound in order for purchasers to customise them to their own requirements. We tend to assume that the printing press produced identical copies, but in fact, early modern printing practices meant that books of the period comprised different combinations of corrected and uncorrected sheets. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies is unique. Other common book formats are quarto and octavo, which are both also printing formats, involving two and three folds in the sheet respectively.įamous folios (in both senses) include the Gutenberg Bible, printed in about 1455, and the First Folio collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, printed in 1623 however, their actual size is rather different.Every copy of the book published in London at the end of 1623 as Mr. Third, folio is also used as an approximate term for a size of book, typically about 15 inches (38 cm) tall, and as such does not necessarily indicate the actual printing format of the books, which may even be unknown as is the case for many modern books. This will be on the right hand side of the opening of any book composed in a script that is read from left-to-right, such as Latin (as used in English), Cyrillic, or Greek, and will be opposite for books composed in a script that is read from right-to-left, such as Hebrew and Arabic. This usually appears abbreviated: "f26r." means the first side of the 26th leaf in a book. Second, folio is used in terms of page numbering for some books and most manuscripts that are bound but without page numbers as an equivalent of "page" (both sides), "sheet" or "leaf", using "recto" and "verso" to designate the first and second sides, and (unlike the usage in printing) disregarding whether the leaf concerned is actually physically still joined with another leaf. Ordinarily, additional printed folio sheets would be inserted inside one another to form a group or "gathering" of leaves prior to binding the book. Each leaf of a folio book thus is one half the size of the original sheet.
#Folio meaning shakespeare full#
The term "folio" (from Latin folium 'leaf'), has three interconnected but distinct meanings in the world of books and printing: first, it is a term for a common method of arranging sheets of paper into book form, folding the sheet only once, and a term for a book made in this way second, it is a general term for a sheet, leaf or page in (especially) manuscripts and old books and third, it is an approximate term for the size of a book, and for a book of this size.įirst, a folio (abbreviated fo or 2o) is a book or pamphlet made up of one or more full sheets of paper, on each of which four pages of text are printed, two on each side each sheet is then folded once to produce two leaves. Wikipedia Rate this definition: 0.0 / 0 votes
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