Portland events celebrate 400-year anniversary of Shakespeare’s First Folio

It’s hard to imagine a writer who has had as enduring an impact on the English language as William Shakespeare. Phrases like “neither rhyme nor reason,” “too much of a good thing” or “it’s Greek to me,” color our language today centuries after the playwright immortalized them with quill and paper. But many of these linguistic contributions would have been lost to history were it not for the First Folio. Published in 1623, seven years after his death, it contains three dozen of Shakespeare’s plays, half of which were never printed in his lifetime.

To honor the 400th anniversary of the First Folio, a monthslong celebration is taking place across Portland. It includes a variety of live performances, an exhibit at the Central Library, film screenings of “Romeo and Juliet” and other adapted works, and free public talks that draw cultural points of contact with Shakespeare-era England. Jonathan Walker, a professor of English at Portland State University, joins us to talk about creating and organizing “Shakespeare’s First Folio: 1623-2023,” which runs through May.

Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller:  From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. In 1623, seven years after Shakespeare died, 36 of his plays were published in what became known as the First Folio. It was a world changing book. Without it, about half of Shakespeare’s plays would have been lost forever, meaning no “Macbeth,” no “Julius Caesar,” no “Twelfth Night” or “As You Like It.” To mark the 400th anniversary of this First Folio, a month-long celebration is taking place across Portland. It includes a variety of live performances, an exhibit at the Central Library, film screenings of “Romeo and Juliet” and other adapted works and free public talks. Jonathan Walker is a professor of English at Portland State University. He created this celebration and joins us now to talk about it. Welcome to the show.

Jonathan Walker:  Thank you for having me.

Miller:  I want to start with this basic fact that, without this book, these plays would have disappeared. What does that mean? Why weren’t they somehow preserved before Shakespeare died?

Walker: That’s a great question. There were 19 of Shakespeare’s plays that had been printed in earlier smaller formats. But there’s really very little evidence that Shakespeare tried to preserve any of his work in print. He was a man of the stage. He owned shares in the company to which he belonged and wrote plays for. So 18 of his plays simply could have been lost to history.

Miller:  How much of this is about Shakespeare and how much is about and what theater was? I mean, you can go to a bookstore now and you can buy plays, people can read them. Obviously, a lot of us had to/got to read Shakespeare as literature in classes. But would that have made sense to people in Elizabethan times? Just sitting with a candle reading a play?

Walker: For some it would have, yes. But I think the question of literacy comes into play because literacy rates were so much lower in the period. The pastime of going to the theater was much more widespread, I would say, than actually reading plays. There were lots of plays that were available and in print. And they were relatively cheap. But again, literacy rates had an impact on that.

Miller:  Relatively cheap for a single printed play?

Walker:  Yes.

Miller: But what about this First Folio? Can you describe it? I mean you’ve held it right? One of the hundreds of copies or however many there are. What was that like?

Walker: It was cool. I was in graduate school. I was at the Newberry Library in Chicago. And the First Folio is a very large book. And at the time, it was the most expensive dramatic book that had ever been produced for the English reading public. When it was produced, there was no guarantee that it was actually going to sell and make money.

Miller:  So did it? Was it a commercial success?

Walker: It was eventually a commercial success. [It was] printed in 1623 [and] in 1632 a second folio appeared, which tells us that it had sold out in nine years. And so they replenished the market with a second folio.

Miller:  So who would have bought these gigantic books?

Walker: At the time, they were, as they are today, sort of an elite commodity. Rich people bought them. The Bodleian Library, for instance, purchased a copy very early in 1624. And there is a whole list of clerics and other noblemen who had purchased the book early on.

Miller:  Do you have a guess as to what Shakespeare would have thought about this sort of big compendium, a written version, for the elite, of his plays?

Walker: It’s a good question and I don’t have an answer for it because, frankly, we know so little about Shakespeare the person. We do know that he was a man of the theater, like I said, for decades. But the only evidence that we have that he ever put anything through the press himself were his two early poems, long narrative poems in the early 1690s, that were dedicated to a nobleman and were designed basically to get patronage. But again, no firm evidence that he tried to put in any of his plays through the press.

Miller: How do you think about the cultural impact of this book’s publication? Where do you even start?

Walker: It’s a good question because the cultural impact begins to be created in the context of the Folio itself. There are four poets who add commendatory verses, dedicatory verses basically, in front matter of the book.

Miller:  Like a blurb?

Walker: In a sense. I mean their poetry [was] celebrating Shakespeare and celebrating the book itself.

Miller: So more like an introduction, with a new introduction by so and so?

Walker: Sort of, yeah, exactly. But also you can imagine them as being promotional, trying to get this book to sell.  And in those verses, they talk about the book in terms of a kind of monument - that Shakespeare has been dead for seven years and we have all of his plays or most of his plays at this point and we’re going to put it out there. And for as long as this book is in the world, Shakespeare will live on. So it’s in 1623 when this sort of cultural legacy really begins. And the book sold, in 1623, for the equivalent of about $212 in today’s money. And the last copy to go to auction in 2020 sold for just under $10 million. So that’s sort of an economic view of the book. But it is some index to the cultural significance of it as well.

Miller:  And then there’s also just the sort of counterfactual world of what is a world without “Macbeth” like? What’s a world without “Julius Caesar?” These are plays that some of the language phrases that either he invented or grabbed out of popular use and made famous, made them indelible in the world, which may not exist. And the plays may not exist. The stories, as we know them, may or may not exist. How do you reckon with that?

Walker: I don’t know. It’s difficult to imagine those plays not existing.

Miller: Not having the phrase “out, out damned spot”?

Walker: Yes, precisely. One way of thinking about this question is that we know that there are other plays that Shakespeare wrote that have been lost. There is a play called “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” which survives. But there is reference, in the period, to another play called “Love’s Labour’s Won.” So presumably this was a two-part play.  And we don’t have that play anymore.

There is probably another play called “Cardennio” which is based on “Don Quixote.” And that play, too, is gone. So it’s difficult to say what it is that we’ve lost. But with the 18 plays that the Folio preserves, the way the stage history of those plays, the adaptations, the film histories, all of the other art that has been created based on those texts, all of that would not exist. So that gives some sense of, perhaps, what we would have lost.

Miller:  Is there a connection between this Folio and the fact that, for centuries, there has been debate about who wrote what? How much of the words attributed to Shakespeare came from him, as a sole creator? Is there a direct connection?

Walker: Between the Folio and…?

Miller: Exactly, because here we have a book with his name on it with all of his plays. It seems like that would be the locus of the concern?

Walker: Yes [and] no. The fact that it’s published seven years after he’s dead, so he has no power over the shaping of the First Folio itself. This too is a very complicated question. I would say one thing: drama is one of the most collaborative art forms. And so it involves actors. It involves lots of cooperation between multiple individuals. So, in that respect, I would say that Shakespeare’s plays are necessarily collaborative in nature. But even the writing of the plays, in the period, Shakespeare probably wrote some of his plays entirely on his own, maybe even many of them. He was the principal playwright for his particular playing company.

But the usual practice of playwriting, in the period, involved collaborative writing. Often, not even in conjunction with one another. Playing companies would often dictate the subject matter of a play and farm it out to different playwrights who might be working in isolation. And so ultimately this comes down to not being able to identify, word for word, what Shakespeare wrote and what somebody else wrote. Although there are those who have tried to do that.

But I think implicit in your question is also the authorship question of whether Francis Bacon or Queen Elizabeth or Christopher Marlowe or somebody else actually wrote the plays instead of Shakespeare and Shakespeare is just the sort of prop. I don’t find any merit in that suggestion whatsoever. So I think we can say Shakespeare wrote most of the plays. They were necessarily collaborative. And Shakespeare is kind of the name that we give this body of work, while also recognizing that he wasn’t entirely working in isolation.

Miller:  Zooming to the present. In a few minutes we’re going to be talking about a new version of “Henry IV Part One,” part of a long standing tradition of reappraisal and reimagining of Shakespeare’s works, but increasingly by BIPOC artists and playwrights and directors. What do you make of these efforts? And how do they fit into a history, at this point, of thinking about Shakespeare?

Walker: I think in the brilliant adaptations and rewritings and reimaginings…that there is historical precedent actually in Shakespeare’s day. Some of the Shakespearean texts that we have, for instance, exist in multiple forms, radically different forms. And so their plays, in Shakespeare’s time on the stage, would have been cut and rearranged and adapted for different contexts. Also to focus on the appropriateness of the play in particular contexts. And so we don’t need that kind of historical permission to make the adaptations that… the one Henry Ford [College], for instance, is doing. But I think that it speaks to any criticism of being purist.

Miller:  Because there never was a pure time. They’ve always been reworked and rejiggered?

Walker: Absolutely. Even from that very period. Yes.

Miller:  Jonathan Walker, thanks very much.

Walker: Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Miller: Jonathan Walker is professor of English at Portland State University [and] the creator and lead organizer of the month-long festival known as Shakespeare’s First Folio 1623 to 2023.

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