Who preserved Shakespeare's plays?

Answer 1

The first, official compilation of Shakespeare's plays was a volume entitled Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies.

It was compiled and published in 1623, seven year after Shakespeare's death, by his colleagues in the King's Men acting company, John Hemmings and William Cordell. It containesd 36 of the plays and is alsio known as The First Folio.

Answer 2

William Shakespeare did. The chances that he did not contribute at least something to all of the plays people attribute to him are infinitesimally small. The evidence is quite clear that:

1. William Shakespeare was a real person who was born and died in Stratford.

2. William Shakespeare from Stratford was a member of the playing company called The Lord Chamberlain's Men and the King's Men and was a close friend with the other members.

3. The plays which were published with Shakespeare's name on them were exclusively associated with the Lord Chamberlain's/ King's Men for as long as he was a member of that company.

4. William Shakespeare was depicted as a writer by those who knew him best within a couple of years of his death.

5. There is no contemporary record of any other person called William Shakespeare who could possibly be mistaken for Shakespeare the writer.

6. Nobody in the history of the world has used the name of a well-known living person as a nom de plume.

Some think that Edward de Vere the 17th Earl of Oxford wrote the plays but there is no good reason to think he did and a number of good reasons to think he didn't.

Answer 3

Shakespeare was a professional actor himself, and a member of Richard Burbage' Lord Admirals Men Theatre company. Most of Shakespeare's plays would have been written for performance by his own company, and would have been copied out as a 'Book' (what we now think of as a 'Prompt Book') as well as individual parts having been copied out for each player to learn.

A few of Shakespeare's plays were published during his lifetime (publishing plays was quite unusual in the early years of Elizabethan theatre) but most of Shakespeare's plays were published for the first time in the First Folio in 1623.

The First Folio was a collected plays of William Shakespeare. It was assembled by John Hemmings and Henry Condell - two other members of Burbage' company, who seem to have been close friends of Shakespeare. (Shakespeare himself had died in 1616).

Scholars have done a lot of research on where Hemmings and Condell found their text for Shakespeare's plays, but in most cases it seems likely that they were using the company's 'Book'.

This would make a lot of sense. Shakespeare's style of playwriting had gone out of fashion, so there would be more money in selling the plays for reading than in attempting to perform them commercially - and the Burbage company probably still had all the 'Books' of the plays that were in use when the plays were still being performed.

Answer 4

Various people. I'm not by any means intending to be exhaustive here, but here is the early publication history of a few well-known Shakespeare works.

Hamlet: First published in 1603 in quarto form by Nicholas Ling and John Trundell and printed by Valentine Simmes. Published next in 1604 by Nicholas Ling and printed by James Roberts. The same publisher and printer set up another edition in 1605. In 1611 it was published again by John Smethwick, who published two further editions. All of these were quartos. Hamlet was included in the Folio edition of the collected plays, published by Edward Blount, Isaac Jaggard and William Jaggard in 1623.

Romeo and Juliet: First published in 1597 by John Danter, then in 1599 by Cuthbert Burby and printed by Thomas Creede, and again in 1609 by John Smethwick, who published a further edition in 1622, all in Quarto. Romeo and Juliet was also in the Folio of 1623 of course.

The sonnets were first published as a collection in 1609 by Thomas Thorpe, printed by George Eld. However, two of them had previously appeared in the collection The Passionate Pilgrim in 1597, published by William Jaggard.

Titus Andronicus was first published in Quarto by John Danter in 1594, by Edward White (printed by J.R., probably James Roberts) in 1600, and again by White in 1611. And of course it was also in the Folio.

Is your head spinning? Actually the process was quite simple. Let's take Edward White. He was a bookseller who kept a shop under the sign of the gun by the little door on the North side of St. Paul's Cathedral. He wanted to sell copies of Shakespeare's play Titus Andronicus. So he registered himself at the Stationer's Register as being the publisher, and took the script across to James Roberts's print shop. Roberts printed it and gave it back to White who took it to his shop to sell. Sometimes the publisher was an independent entrepreneur who would arrange to distribute through a bookseller, but this was the general pattern.

Answer 5

Shakespeare's friends, fellow actors and partners in the King's Men, John Heminges and Henry Condell, were responsible for arranging for the publication of Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies Histories & Tragedies, better known as the First Folio, in 1623. Apparently they went through whatever Shakespeare scripts could be found lying about the Globe and Blackfriars Theatres, bundled them together, and took them to Mr. Jaggard the printer, if this can be called compiling them.

Answer 6

The first publication of Shakespeare's plays was called First Folio. They were published by a man called Thomas Thorpe.

Answer 7

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