Shakespeare's First Folio

Timeline

1. 1622–1623Jaggard printing house, London · LondonAfter Shakespeare's death in 1616, King's Men shareholders Heminges and Condell collated thirty-six plays from the company's prompt books, manuscripts, and previously printed quartos, handing them to the Jaggard workshop for folio typesetting, and had Droeshout engrave the author's bust. Ben Jonson wrote the prefatory verses emphasizing that his works transcended his age.
2. 1623London, Kingdom of England · LondonOn 8 November 1623 Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount entered sixteen previously unregistered plays with the Stationers' Company in London, and the folio went on sale. The editors were the first to divide Shakespeare's plays into comedies, histories, and tragedies, claiming to correct earlier incomplete pirated quartos with the 'true originals', bringing about half of Shakespeare's plays into print for the first time.
3. 1632–1685London, Kingdom of England · LondonThe Second Folio of 1632, Third Folio of 1663/1664, and Fourth Folio of 1685 followed the First Folio's table of contents while gradually adding apocryphal or collaborative works. This series of folios kept Shakespeare's plays continuously in the book trade and theater around the Restoration, until single-volume critical editions rose in the eighteenth century.
4. 1701Holding institutions in London, Washington, and elsewhere · Washington, D.C.From the eighteenth century onward, textual scholars used the First Folio as the primary authoritative copy-text to reconstruct Shakespeare's plays. Some 230 copies survive, with the Folger Shakespeare Library holding the largest collection. The folio is both an object of bibliographic study and the material starting point for the global dissemination of English drama.