Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard Read Online Free

an interest in printing his own plays, and supervised the publication of his Works in 1616.)
    For most of us, 400 years on, our first meeting with Shakespeare is in a book and on a page, which is ironic, as all evidence points towards the fact that this would be far from the way Elizabethan audiences would have received them – and more to the point, given that he didn’t seem to want them printed, far from the way Shakespeare would have intended them to be received.
    I like the idea that Shakespeare wasn’t interested in having his plays printed. It makes sense. Nowadays we get caught up reading the plays and not watching them so much, something Shakespeare seems to have practically barred his audience from doing. Don’t read my plays, come and see them!
    The result of this printing reticence, though, is that we nearly lost them all to history. Original single publications of Shakespeare’s plays are incredibly scarce, and no one yet has discovered a treasure chest of original manuscripts that Shakespeare locked away for safe-keeping.
    Half of Shakespeare’s plays, like many of those of hiscontemporaries, might have disappeared entirely were it not for two of his actors who took it upon themselves to bring all his works together and print them. Seven years after Shakespeare died, they published a book called the
First Folio
– which became one of the most important books printed in theatre, literary, and linguistic history.
----
    Folio or quarto?
    A play would be printed on paper, which at the time was very expensive to make. To save money, a piece of paper would be either
    folded into quarters – these editions were known as quartos and were much cheaper to produce, and therefore to buy, as you’d get eight pages from one piece;
or folded in half – these editions were known as folios and were more expensive, as you’d have only four sides to print on.
    Plays weren’t usually printed in folio, so for Shakespeare to have his plays collected in this way meant that people (a) felt his plays was really rather good, and (b) were willing to fork out a fairly hefty sum for a copy, which may not have been the case when he was alive, but certainly seemed to be the case seven years after his death …
    ----
    If this little book hadn’t been published in 1623, we would have lost eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays – including
The Tempest, The Comedy of Errors, Macbeth
and
Twelfth Night
– and, as the other eighteen were only scattered about in quarto, we might have lost them too (this count excludes the three plays that have been acknowledged in recent times as being written, at least in part, by Shakespeare:
Cymbeline, Edward III
, and
The Two Noble Kinsmen
).
    Of the thousands of plays written over those times, only 230 are still in existence: 39 of them – 17 per cent – are Shakespeare’s.
    Henry Condell and John Hemmings had acted and worked with Shakespeare during much of his writing career, and they got together after Shakespeare died to set the record straight. Too many versions of his plays had been printed full of mistakes by rival theatre companies trying to steal Shakespeare’s plays. There were quarto editions without Shakespeare’s name on them, editions of
Hamlet
missing chunks of the text … The new folio edition would address all that.
----
    The (bad) First Quarto of
Hamlet
…
    This was written in 1603, probably from memory, and we should be thankful that Shakespeare’s most famous speech didn’t survive only in this incarnation:
    To be, or not to be, I [ay] there’s the point,
    To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:
    No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary [marry] there it goes,
    For in that dreame of death, when wee awake,
    And borne before an euerlasting iudge,
    From whence no passenger euer retur’nd,
    The vndiscovered country, at whose sight
    The happy smile, and the accursed damn’d …
    As opposed to the version known and loved by all:
    To be, or not to be – that is the question;
    Whether