Special Collections has some of the earliest printed versions of the Bard’s works.

The earliest printed copies of plays in the Elizabethan era were simple “prompt books” filled with stage directions. They were printed for the acting companies, with players often sharing a single copy.

But after Shakespeare’s death in 1616, some printers sensed a larger market and began collecting his works into larger volumes called folios. The first folio was printed in 1623 and represented years of work assembling the rights and editing the text of 36 plays over 800 double columned pages.

To this was added the Bard’s portrait, created by Martin Droeshout. It was estimated that about 1,000 copies were printed and sold for about £1 each. The First Folio includes all of the plays generally accepted to be Shakespeare’s, with the exception of “Pericles,” “Prince of Tyre” and “The Two Noble Kinsmen,” and the two “lost plays” “Cardenio” and “Love’s Labour Won.”

In 1632, a second folio was published by another group of printers. The Second Folio included more than 1,700 changes in the text — mostly corrections of spelling, grammar and typographical errors.

TCU’s Special Collection has a copy of the Second Folio and other early published works of Shakespeare. They are part of the William Luther Lewis Collection, which represents more than 300 authors of English and American literature and includes 1,500 titles dating from the 15th to 20th centuries. The collection was donated to TCU in 1955 by the Amon Carter Foundation.

On the Web:
library.tcu.edu/spcoll/Shakespeare/ShakespeareWeb/titlepage.htm