As can be easily imagined, Shakespeare’s plays were written primarily to be performed, and not to be read. Though Shakespeare authored so many plays, he never bothered about printing any of them as books. It was only after his death that his plays were compiled, and were made into respectable books. However, they were available during Shakespeare’s lifetime in the form of flimsy-looking booklets, called Quartos. Quartos were normal papers folded twice to make four pages. The people who printed these quartos did not have access to Shakespeare’s texts. Therefore, they were poorly printed, and contained many mistakes. Parts of these printed plays contained wrong passages or paraphrased texts. Some of them were adaptations. Shakespeare had not approved of them at all.
It was not common for writers to publish their works in folios. Ben Jonson defied this convention, and published a folio collection of his own plays and poems in 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death. Had Shakespeare’s friends not stepped in, and performed the most gracious act they could ever have done for the writer, probably, Shakespeare and his plays would have faded into oblivion! John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare’s close friends from the King’s Men collected 36 texts of Shakespeare’s plays in 1623, seven years after the bard’s death. This collected edition is known as the First Folio. The Second Folio appeared in 1632 and the Third Folio in 1663. Seven more plays were added to Shakespeare’s name in the Third Folio. The Fourth Folio was published in 1685 and retained all 43 plays. However, later scholars discovered that some of these plays were not, in fact, authored by Shakespeare.
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