The Book that Made the Bard: 400 Years of Shakespeare’s Folio

“To be or not to be, ay there’s the point.” Wait, that’s not how the line goes! And yet, this is Shakespeare, too. It’s Hamlet, but not as we know it. Not quite, anyway. Few Bard groupies realize that there are, in fact, three distinctly different versions of Shakespeare’s most famous play. Fewer still know why. And Hamlet’s not the only play with alternative texts floating around the drama universe. In fact, some of Shakespeare’s most beloved plays like Romeo and Juliet or King Lear exist in shockingly different versions, printed as individual texts during his lifetime or as a collected edition shortly after his death. So, which were Shakespeare’s originals? The faster-paced, less knotty individual plays or the longer stately speech-laden versions of the collected edition? The truth is, we cannot tell. Except for three pages, there is not a single manuscript of Shakespeare’s prolific writing career that survives, no diary entry, no legal dispute, no recorded conversation that tells us this is it. But we don’t have to despair—what we do have is plenty and more to explore the bard in the context of his time, and our own notions of what makes great literature.

But first, let’s review the facts of Shakespeare’s life, which fit on a commercial postcard. He was born in 1564 in a smallish town in Warwickshire, England; his family wasn’t rich, but had enough money to send him to, a woman six years his senior, because she was pregnant; they had three children, one of whom () will die as a child; at some point, Shakespeare appeared in London, first as actor, then as playwright, then as share-holder in the venture. He wasn’t one to be fooled: Someone owes him money, and he threatens legal consequences; he’s socially ambitious, and buys his family a title of the lower gentry; he’s financially shrewd, and acquires the best house in his home-town where he’ll retire to; he doesn’t care how he spells his own name, changing his signature several times throughout his life; he bequeaths his wife the second-best bed (which, it is said, is their marriage bed, also being the most comfortable most lain-in bed). He dies in 1616, aged 52.