Oppidan Library publishes Shakespeare's First Folio on CD.
Oppidan Library has completed a new rendition of Shakespeare's First Folio, and made it available on CD. This edition is a scan of 30 of the best preserved copies of this historic volume, rendered in original spelling and syntaxt.
Salt Lake City – March 29, 2005 (PRWeb – via Newswire.net)
The First
Folio of William Shakespeare has been re-published as ASCII text, on CD, by
Oppidan Library.
The 1623 publication entitled "Mr. William Shakespeare's
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies" has come to be known as the "First Folio"
of William Shakespeare. The First Folio is comprised of approximately 900 pages
containing 36 of Shakespeare's plays. The First Folio is the first collected
edition of Shakespeare's plays. Subsequent publishers used the First Folio as
the basis of their editions of Shakespearean plays.
William Shakespeare's
fellow actors, John Hemminge and Henry Condell, edited the original First Folio
collection. The plays were categorized by Hemminge and Condell as Comedies,
Histories and Tragedies. They, no doubt, had copies of the plays in the form of
scripts, from which the content of the First Folio originated. Not one
manuscript written by William Shakespeare has survived.
The printer and
publisher of the First Folio was William Jaggard and his son Isaac with Ed.
Blount. Approximately 500 copies of the 'First Folio' were printed and sold at
the price of £1 for each copy. Approximately 238 known copies exist
today.
There are many variations to the text of many early editions of
Shakespeare's plays. Eighteen of the William Shakespeare plays exist in earlier
editions, eight of which are extremely corrupt, possibly having been
reconstructed from an actor's memory or from rough drafts. Printers of that day
also made changes to appeal to potential customers, paying little concern to the
author's views on any changes.
The art of printing has changed
significantly through the centuries. Part of the interest - and challenge -
associated with reading Elizabethan Era texts is created by the spellings. Many
of the spelling errors contained in the First Folio can be attributed to the
technology of printing in that era. For example here are the first few lines of
Hamlet, as they are presented in the First Folio:
Barnardo. Who's
there?
Fran. Nay answer me: Stand & vnfold your selfe
Bar. Long liue
the King
***
Printers often ran out of certain words or letters they
had often packed into a "cliche". Being unwilling to unpack the cliches, some
substitutions were liberally made, such as the exchanges of u for v, v for u,
above. Presuming Shakespeare did not actually write the play in this manner, the
explanation for these spelling errors is that the printer probably packed "liue"
into a cliche at a time when they were out of "v"'s possibly having used "vv" in
place of some "w"'s, etc.
Many "scholars" have an extreme attachment to
these errors, and many have accorded them a very high place in the "canon" of
Shakespeare. Shakespeare most likely did not write in nearly as many of a
variety of errors we credit him for, even though he was in/famous for signing
his name with several different spellings.
The text of the First Folio
presented by Oppidan Library was scanned from 30 original copies of
Shakespeare's First Folio and it is an exact rendition of that text, given the
limitations of ASCII formatting.
There are textual differences between
various copies of the first folio. According to David Reed, Chief Editor at
Oppidan Library, these variations are due to the original printer's habit of
setting the type and running off a number of copies and then proofing the
printed copy and correcting the type and then continuing the printing run. The
proof run wasn't thrown away but incorporated into the printed copies.
http://www.oppidanlibrary.com
http://www.oppidanlibrary.com/firstfolio.htm
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Source : http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/3/prweb222773.htm