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

’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
    The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
    Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
    And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep –
    No more, and by a sleep to say we end
    The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
    That flesh is heir to. ’Tis a consummation
    Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep –
    To sleep – perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub …
    There are three known editions of
Hamlet
– the First Quarto of 1603, the Second Quarto of 1604, and the Folio version. Other editions were published, but these are considered to be amalgamations of the first three. The First Quarto wasn’t discovered until 1823, and while being shorter than the other two, it does include an entire scene and many interesting stage directions that the others don’t have. When the editors of the First Folio came to
Hamlet
, it looks as if they used a combination of manuscript and Second Quarto. With so many versions, each so different from the other, determining the ‘authentic’ text of
Hamlet
, as Shakespeare intended, has proved somewhat difficult.
    ----
    So now, thank goodness, we have the plays. We’re able to watch and read them over and over and over. Not only can we read or see them performed as much as we like, we have the luxury of being able to come to them with over 200 years of study behind us.
    I say 200 years rather than 400, because after the Puritan movement took Shakespeare and many other writers out of the common eye, he didn’t really became popular again until the late 18th century, largely thanks to the actor David Garrick and his Stratford-upon-Avon festival – but more on this in Act 5. Still, 200 years of study is an awful lot, and by standing on the shoulders of giants, the depth of analysis we can now put Shakespeare’s plays under is limitless.
    But because we hold Shakespeare in such regard – as high art and important Literature – and scrutinise his plays so intensely, we forget that reading them is simply not the way they would have originally been received.
    The Elizabethans would watch and listen to a play in the theatre, and then leave it behind at the end of the afternoon. It’s easy for us to get hold of a copy of one of the plays. But if you were an Elizabethan lucky enough to have had an education and had learnt to read, the play-texts, already scarce in quantity, would have been relatively expensive.
    After Shakespeare died, the publication of the FirstFolio meant that his plays were more readily available than ever before. So, suppose you could read, and you
could
spare the equivalent of 44 loaves of bread and afford the book, you might well buy the Folio and read the plays to remind yourself of the performance you saw, as we would buy a copy of a film we like.
----
    How much bread is Shakespeare worth?
    When the
Collected Works
was printed in 1623, the book would have been stitched together, but not normally bound (it wouldn’t have had a leather cover). An unbound copy would have cost around 15 shillings, and you could get a bound copy for £1.
    But, good question, how expensive was that in Shakespeare’s time?
    Somebody once worked out that the average cost of one of these books is equivalent to the price of 44 Elizabethan loaves of bread.
    Using the same measure, we can see how the price goes up over the years. It became more and more valuable as Shakespeare became more and more popular, and had risen to the equivalent of 105 loaves in 1756; then a big jump to 900 by the 1790s, most likely due to David Garrick’s revival of Shakespeare with his annual festival of Shakespeare; 5,000 loaves in the 1850s – and 96,000 by the beginning of the 20th century.
    Today, the figures are astronomical. An edition of the Folio sold at auction for over $6 million in 2001. The cheapest loaf in my local supermarket is 20 pence. That’s (approximately) 17 million loaves for a copy of the original edition today, against 44 loaves in the early