They had the flawed texts of six plays, the so-called ‘bad’ quartos, one ‘doubtful’ quarto, and eleven ‘good’ quartos. The editors of the First Folio seem to have worked from several sources. See other images of Shakespeare > The Plays Included in Shakespeare’s Folios The title page of the First Folio displayed a copper engraved image of Shakespeare by the engraver Martin Droeshout: During the four hundred years since then, there have been thousands of publications of the complete works of William Shakespeare in hundreds of languages and it is one of the most common books to be found in the bookshops of the world.

The First Folio was printed seven years after the death of William Shakespeare in 1616. Two hundred and thirty-eight known copies exist today of which a third are in the Shakespeare Folger Library in Washington. About 500 copies of the First Folio were printed and sold at the price of £1 each. It consisted of 36 plays and amounted to 900 pages – a huge book. It was a major venture, both in editing and printing. The printer and publisher of the First Folio were William Jaggard and his son Isaac. The playwright actually mentioned them in his will, leaving them money to buy themselves rings. The editors knew Shakespeare and his work intimately and had worked with him for years. It was from these that the First Folio would have been compiled. Hemminge and Condell probably had copies of the plays in Quartotexts, the scripts used by the actors in performance. The First Folio (Complete Works of William Shakespeare) were set out in the three categories of Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, a categorisation that still dogs the practice of Shakespeare criticism, education and performance today. John Hemminge and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare’s friends and fellow actors, edited the collection.

We owe this book and the fact that we have the texts of so many of the Bard’s plays to the enterprise of two actors. It is almost a miracle that the First Folio ( Complete Works of William Shakespeare) exists at all, given that playwrights tried to keep their plays out of print – mainly to avoid them being pirated – that Shakespeare never published any of his plays, and that not one of Shakespeare’s manuscripts has survived. Without it, there would be no such thing as ‘William Shakespeare’. The first collection of Shakespeare’s complete works, known as ‘ The First Folio‘, is arguably the most important document in the cultural history of Europe. Each Shakespeare’s play name links to a range of resources about each play: Character summaries, plot outlines, example essays and famous quotes, soliloquies and monologues: All’s Well That Ends Well Antony and Cleopatra As You Like It The Comedy of Errors Coriolanus Cymbeline Hamlet Henry IV Part 1 Henry IV Part 2 Henry VIII Henry VI Part 1 Henry VI Part 2 Henry VI Part 3 Henry V Julius Caesar King John King Lear Loves Labour’s Lost Macbeth Measure for Measure The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of Windsor A Midsummer Night’s Dream Much Ado About Nothing Othello Pericles Richard II Richard III Romeo & Juliet The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus Troilus & Cressida Twelfth Night The Two Gentlemen of Verona The Winter’s Tale This list of Shakespeare plays brings together all 38 plays in alphabetical order.

Plays It is believed that Shakespeare wrote 38 plays in total between 15.

Shakespeare first folio