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The First Folio, published in 1623 by Shakespeare's colleagues, was the first complete and faithful publication of plays by the Bard. As the pages were printed, they were checked for errors, and if any were found, they were corrected. But the pages with errors were not thrown away; instead, they were kept and used, which means that no volumes of the First Folio are perfect, and no two of them are identical.
In the 1960s, Charlton Hinman invented his famous collator to compare the pages of fifty-five First Folio volumes at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. In 1968 he published the Norton Facsimile, which included photographs of all the corrected pages he had identified. But many additional copies of the First Folio were not available to Hinman; today, some can even be found online. Might it be possible to identify the corrections in those copies and produce an even more accurate version of the plays? The scholarly team at PlayShakespeare.com has done exactly that, making this the most faithful transcription of the First Folio ever published. It includes:
All of the corrected readings identified by Charlton Hinman in the Norton Facsimile.
All of the corrected readings identified in copies of the First Folio not available to Hinman.
The original breaks in the players' lines.
The original spellings, down to the character.
Special typographical characters (such as the long s).
Historical ligatures (such as those for ct and AE).
This new edition also emulates the look of the original text, using the beautiful Fell Types digitally reproduced by Igino Marini. Although not identical to the fonts used in the original, they are very close; the Fell Types were commissioned by Oxford Bishop John Fell in about 1672, nearly fifty years after the First Folio was printed but still very much in the style of type used in Shakespeare's time.
If you've always wanted to read Shakespeare's plays as they were originally published but couldn't get past the faded and uneven page scans of the photographic facsimiles, this is the edition for you.
