![]() This same approach to a body of writing as a coded text, needing to be deciphered and reinterpreted, characterizes anti-Stratfordians. Watson was married five times or that Professor Moriarty was really Count Dracula. Members of the latter have produced reams of scholarship, all based on minute analysis of the Holmesian canon, to prove - for example - that Dr. Anti-Stratfordians also offer what is, in effect, a shared-world fandom, like that among Trekkies or Baker Street Irregulars. Why? Partly because we admire rebels and freethinkers, those who give a Bronx cheer to the stuffy power elite in any field. Nonetheless, all sorts of people find it fascinating. Smith notes that setting up the elaborate “spatio-verbal” patterning that Donnelly’s theory requires is quite impossible, given the vagaries of Renaissance printing. ![]() Having acquired a facsimile of the First Folio, Donnelly detected coded messages throughout, all of them proclaiming lawyer and philosopher Francis Bacon as the true author of the plays. The other is “The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon’s Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays” (1888) by Ignatius Donnelly, a Wisconsin politician and author of the pseudoscience classic “Atlantis: The Antediluvian World” (1882). One is Charlton Hinman’s “The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare” (1963), which used a machine - the now famous Hinman collator - to gain new understanding of the 1623 volume by comparing pages from multiple copies. “At first glance it seems to be dilapidated and imperfect but turning its pages and seeing the annotations of an early owner who ‘knew’ some of the actors and comments on the plays gives us a thrilling direct connection to Shakespeare’s time.Much of this excellent book tracks what individual copies of the First Folio meant to various “owners, dealers, forgers, collectors, actors” and “scholars.” But in the chapter titled “Decoding,” Smith zeroes in on two groundbreaking volumes in Shakespeare studies, both obsessed with numbers. ![]() Julie Gardham, senior Librarian, Archives & Special Collections, University of Glasgow, said: “It is always a joy to show our First Folio to students at the University. The copy is particularly important for its early annotations that were made by a reader who had evidently seen Shakespeare’s plays being acted contemporaneously. In common with most other surviving First Folios, the book shows considerable signs of wear and use, and many of its pages are stained and dirt engrained. It is a complex ‘made up’ volume, formed from combining two or three different imperfect copies to create a whole. The University’s First Folio, held in the Library’s Archives & Special Collections, recently underwent conservation work. Julie Gardham, Senior Assistant Librarian, and Keira McKee, Book Conservator, with the University of Glasgow’s First Folio copy. The University of Glasgow has an extensive range of rare and internationally important collections. The National Library of Scotland’s Head of Rare Books, Maps and Music, Helen Vincent said: “We’ve seen everyone from school children to actors to researchers fascinated by the First Folio and the stories it contains, so we’re looking forward to bringing it to a wide audience in our Treasures exhibition." 235 are known to have survived with 50 copies still in the UK, 149 in USA and 36 in other corners of the world (nine of which are listed as ‘missing’). The First Folio collection contains 36 plays, 18 of which were here published for the first time, thus saving such works as The Tempest and Macbeth from probable extinction.Ībout 750 copies of the 1623 First Folio were printed. ![]() Today the First Folio is a literary and cultural monument, as several of those involved in collecting and printing Shakespeare’s plays four hundred years ago hoped it would be. Only 18 of Shakespeare's plays appeared in print during his lifetime, and some of these were in corrupt or pirated editions. “But the First Folio remains a monument to the enduring power of literature to help us make sense of ourselves and others, and to imagine new and better worlds.” William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies became the ‘First Folio’ is a long and complicated one, bound up with shifting ideas of literary prestige, the theatre, and national identity. Shakespeare’s popularity was not then what it would become later. “Yet in 1623, the publishing of the First Folio was an expensive and risky undertaking. The First Folio collection contains 36 plays ![]()
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