Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies: Published according to the True Originall [sic] Copies (London: Thomas Coates for Robert Allot, 1632)
The First Folio preserved Shakespeare’s plays — the Second secured his lasting legacy.
This copy of the Second Folio of the plays of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was presented to the College by Henry Osbaston in 1637, the year of his matriculation at St John’s.
Produced nine years after the First Folio (1623) and sixteen years after Shakespeare’s death, the Second Folio was issued by a new consortium of stationers who had acquired the rights to the plays. Though largely a page-by-page reprint of its predecessor, it underwent substantial editorial intervention, much of it carried out in the printing house. While new typographical errors were introduced, there were also clear attempts to correct faults in the earlier text. Scholars have identified almost 1,700 differences from the First Folio, around 800 of which are still accepted by modern editors.
Like many early modern plays, these texts did not survive in a single authorial manuscript. Actors worked from individual ‘parts’ rather than complete scripts, and the collected plays had therefore to be assembled from a patchwork of playhouse manuscripts and earlier printed quartos. Even these quartos were not based on a single, authoritative script: Shakespeare’s plays circulated as working theatrical documents, and printers gathered whatever copy they could obtain.