Chris Laoutaris’s survey of the scene around the landmark publication the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s works, paints a lively picture of multiple operations threatening to win over the competition.  Even with the Bard , commercial interests were at least as important as aesthetic and cultural ones.

 In Shakespeare’s era there was no separation between painting, publishing and selling books. The captial’s trade on the churchyard of Old St. Paul’s, with preachers orating from the open air pulpit.

The true story of how the First Folio creators made “Shakespeare”, as 2023, marks the 400^th anniversary of Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, known today simply as the First Folio. It is difficult to image a world without The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Anthony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale and Macbeth, but these are some of the plays that were only preserved thanks to the astounding labour of love that went into creating the first collection.

Laoutaris lists over 20 separate printing houses operating from 1582-1640, including Tiger’s Head, the Brazen Serpent, the Angel.

Shakespeare’s book describes how the First Folio came into being; neither textual analysis nor Shakespearean biography was its remit. First Folio is a book on Shakespearean matters in which Shakespeare poignantly does not appear, Laoutaris begins with the playwright’s sudden death aged only 52, in 1616.  His will mentions his associates John Heminges and Henry Condell, and the actor Richard Burbage, the great interpreter of Shakespearean roles.  Both Heminges and Condell were to become the major partners in a syndicate representing Shakespeare’s former company, the King’s Men, vowing to commemorate his works. Laoutaris explain persuasively that the impetus for the vast project was the death of Burbage, only three years after the playwright.  The grief eclipsed that for the death of James I’s queen, Anne of Denmark. The publishers banked on exploiting this rush of emotion for star and author before both reputations sank into oblivion.

Ben Johnson, Shakespeare’s friend and rival who had overseen publication of his own collected works in 1616, as this time status of playwrights was being elevate with frontispieces marking the change from authors’ mere “Playes” to the grander “Workes”.

The laborious printing process, on sheets on quality paper made from linen rags. The editors’ main headache was that the rights to single plays had already been sold to various holders.

The 235 full or partial survivors of the original print run of 750, now scattered around the world, are filled with such delightful variation.

The emphasis on the genius of Shakespeare can make you forget that his works have always been part of a curated published exercise.

Shakespeare’s Book: The Intertwined live Behind the First Folio, charts for the first time, the manufacture of the First Folio against a turbulent of seismic political events and international tensions that intersected with the lives of its creators. Shakespeare scholar Dr. Chris Laoutaris uncovers the friendships, bonds , social ties and professional networks that facilitated the production of Shakespeare’s book, as well as the personal challenges, tragedies and dangers that threatened its completion. How Shakespeare himself, before his death, may have influence the ways in which his own public identity would come to be enshrined in the First Folio, shaping the transmission of his legacy to future generation and determining how the world would remember him ”not of an age, but for all time”

Shakespeare’s Book: The Intertwined Lives Behind the First Folio by Chris Laoutaris, William Collins £25, 368 pages.