Afterword: the Folio as Fetish

Emma Smith; Adam G Hooks

doi:10.1017/CCO9781316162552.013

Shakespeare died in 1616, and was buried with a spare gravestone inscribed with a curse warning away those tempted to disturb his bones. Seven years later a more elaborate tribute appeared in the form of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, the book that has come to be known as the First Folio. Its compilers presented the book as a memorial to Shakespeare, and indeed as Shakespeare's remains, combining his literal and literary corpus. As the image on the cover of this book shows, the Folio has become a monument to Shakespeare. It continues to serve this purpose in an exhibition whose title, 'The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare', is adapted from a phrase on the monument's plaque, and which is travelling to all fifty states in the USA in celebration of the quatercentenary of Shakespeare's death. Visitors to the exhibition can view Shakespeare entombed in his monumental book, itself safely encased in glass. The posthumous nature of the book encourages us to encounter it as a solemn memorial, and it has come to represent and define our idea of Shakespeare. However, the Folio does not give us Shakespeare. Rather, it gives us a particular version of Shakespeare, one that has proven to be exceptionally powerful and attractive: an autonomous and authoritative artist who is alone responsible for a coherent and complete body of dramatic work. But to simply accept a singular version of Shakespeare is to neglect what the Folio excludes, to misunderstand how and why it was produced, and to misjudge what it actually accomplished. The First Folio did not immediately make Shakespeare into a prestigious, let alone the pre-eminent, literary author. It was intended to be a monument, but was only transformed into and recognised as one over time. Why a book about a single book? Why yet another book about this book? Why continue to dedicate so much scholarly labour to the First Folio, when its every detail has been examined and debated for centuries? Despite - or indeed because - of this attention, there remain persistent myths and mistaken ideas about it, in the scholarly community and in the culture at large.

Afterword: the Folio as Fetish

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