3 - Editions and Textual Studies (1) and (2)

Summary

Genuinely monumental studies of Shakespeare’s texts tend to appear, with curious regularity, once every nineteen years: the recent milestones being 1963 (Hinman’s Printing and Proof-reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare), 1982 (Blayney’s The Texts of ‘King Lear’ and Their Origins), and now 2001 with the publication of Anthony James West’s The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book, the first of four projected volumes presenting the results of West’s decade-long census of the extant copies of the First Folio. Through a combination of careful archival research and tireless legwork, West has located 228 copies – a remarkable seventy more than were listed in Sidney Lee’s 1902 Census of Extant Copies. The first volume in West’s study reports on the sales and prices of copies of the First Folio since it left the press in 1623 through 2000; the forthcoming Volume ii will provide concise descriptions of each extant copy including its location, condition, provenance, and binding; West is currently engaged in the further Herculean labour of collating all of the 228 copies world-wide and recording full bibliographical descriptions of each, to be presented in Volume iii; Volume iv will then round out the project with a cultural history of the First Folio, a biography of the book.