"To be, or not to be,
"that is the question."
"Our revels now are ended."
"Out... Out brief candle!
"Life's but a walking shadow."
All words written by a man to whom
I've devoted a great part of my professional life as an actor,
a man responsible for some of the most memorable lines
in British literature - William Shakespeare.
Now, wouldn't it be wonderful to see those words
in their original written form, fresh from his pen?
Well, yes, it would, but, unfortunately, we can't.
The truth is that in Shakespeare's day,
original manuscripts of plays weren't considered very important.
Once they had served their turn, they were simply thrown away.
Indeed, it's only thanks to a particular printed text
published after his death - the so-called First Folio -
that we have many of his plays, at all.
So what can we learn from this wonderful book?
We can learn that he collaborated,
worked with his fellow playwrights and actors,
that those great words weren't always his.
We can learn that his plays changed during his own lifetime.
And, more controversially, I think we can find out
something about Shakespeare the man, his biography.
The British Library has an impressive selection
of early printed versions of Shakespeare's plays.
When he died in 1616, only 18 had made it into print,
in small, cheap editions known as quartos.
18 more survive only in the large, lavish First Folio,
printed seven years after his death.
Without the First Folio for some reason it had never been printed
Shakespeare would quite literally be half the playwright that he is.
We would have lost all those 18 plays,
and they include some of Shakespeare's greatest hits -
Comedy of Errors, Taming of the Shrew, Winter's Tale, The Tempest,
Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar and Macbeth.
Well, they have a copy here in this treasure house,
the British Library.
Sonia, this is an enormous privilege for me, it's very exciting.
- Likewise. - We have four books in front of us.
This big one here...
Is the First Folio. The glorious First Folio.
The hero of our story.
The publication of this book is the single most important event
in the history of the rise of Shakespeare in print,
and, I would say, in the development of Western drama, more generally.
That's a fairly big claim, but it's true!
So who's responsible for getting this together?
Because he was dead by this stage,
so who's responsible for producing it?
Well, the Folio names John Heminge and Henry Condell
as the prime movers behind this ambitious project.
They were Shakespeare's fellow actors and business partners.
To make a worthy memorial of their friend, Heminge and Condell
not only gathered every single play of his they could,
they also chose to print on a grand scale and at great cost.
Next to the labour, it was paper that cost the most,
and the word "folio" means a book in which the paper to be printed on
has been folded only once - giving four large pages.
Folio printing was normally reserved for very important books,
mostly bibles, law text books,
royal proclamations,
and the collected works of religious writers.
So the Shakespeare's Folio is really ground-breaking.
One of the ways in which Heminge and Condell,
or the publishers, rather, market the book,
is by describing the earlier smaller quarto versions of the plays
as somehow faulty, and they use a wonderful phrase, right here,
to describe the earlier editions.
"You were abused with diverse stolen and surreptitious copies,
"maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors."
Which is effectively saying, you MAY have the earlier editions...
"That's all rubbish!"
..but you need the Folio, if you want to have the words...
of Shakespeare's, as he wrote them.
So this is a, erm...
It's a marketing ploy.
What the Folio promises is the final drafts -
the plays of Shakespeare as he wanted them to be seen.
But where are those early drafts in Shakespeare's own hand?
The pages he would have written as the company rehearsed?
The working manuscripts,
the lost manuscripts,
is what all scholars and editors...
- Would love to see! - ..would love to see.
Yes. And we have absolutely no full manuscript of a play, do we?
No. Scholars and editors started to really look
for the lost manuscripts in the 18th century and 19th century,
and even forged them when they couldn't find them.
But is there any real chance that those manuscript pages exist?
Well, I've just dug up out of my bookshelves
a copy of Hamlet - a modern copy -
but it's the rehearsal copy I used when I did a production of the play
at the National Theatre in London about 14 years ago.
And it's full of markings -
lines that have been cut here.
I don't quite why, but we moved those two lines somewhere else -
there's an arrow here.
We obviously cut that little half line, then decided to replace it.
Then numbers... One, and a one there, that little separate section.
I've no idea, actually, what they all mean.
So it's a bit of a mess, and rather difficult to understand even for me.
This is exactly what would have happened to Shakespeare's first
drafts as soon as the actors got down to work.
Covered in cuts, deletions and rewrites,
they would've become too confusing to keep.
The best place for them was the bin.
The Folio was prepared from earlier printed editions
and copies of written prompt books.
Both of these types of text had travelled far from Shakespeare's original drafts
because they reflected how the play developed as the company polished a performance.
There was, and is, no guarantee that cuts or new lines
came from Shakespeare in the first place.
And, in fact, no guarantee that all the plays were written by him -
apart from the guarantee the Folio gives itself.
At the beginning of this book it says quite clearly
"William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories and Tragedies -
"and nobody else's" - but we know that's not true.
Quite. We know that Shakespeare collaborated with other dramatists,
so the title page should also list names of other playwrights, including
John Fletcher, Thomas Middleton, to name but two.
For nearly than two decades I've been working at the National Theatre,
and the fact that Shakespeare had helping hands
is well known to its director, Nicholas Hytner.
Current scholarship suggests that around half
of all the surviving plays from that period
were, in some degree or other, collaborations.
And, of course, we know now that there are several plays
which have always been ascribed to Shakespeare alone
which do have other hands involved - quite often Middleton.
Macbeth, Measure for Measure, do have bits by Middleton.
Maybe they were added after Shakespeare died,
maybe they were added for later performances as...
as the audience's taste developed.
But collaboration is what they did.
That was the norm, wasn't it?
It was. The romantic idea of sole authorship would have been mysterious to them.
And then, erm...
we got the catalogue, with the three groupings -
the Comedies, the Histories and the Tragedies.
And the very first play...
The Tempest.
"Our revels now are ended.
"These our actors, as I foretold you,
"are vanished into air, into thin air.
"And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
"the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
"the solemn temples, the great globe itself,
"yea, all which it inherit,
"shall dissolve,
"and leave not a rack behind.
"We are such stuff as dreams are made on,
"and our little life is rounded with a sleep."
Elaborately printed, I'd say.
It looks very polished.
There's a pretty ornament at the top of the page
and then a generous amount of space for the title.
Then, crucially, act and scene divisions,
which make the play, or the texts, look more classical.
It's in Latin, too. "Actus primus. Scena prima."
And then generous...generous directions.
"Solemn and strange music and Prosper on the top invisible.
"Enter several strange shapes,
bringing in a banket" - or banquet -
"and dance about it with gentle actions of salutations,
"and inviting the King, etc, to eat, they depart."
Now that's actually quite elaborate and quite unusual, isn't it?
- That type of stage direction? - That's right.
So therefore it's trying to present Shakespeare as a slightly
different type of writer, isn't it?
As a literary dramatist, as opposed to a playwright
who collaborated with other playwrights
and wrote plays for the commercial stage.
Now in my head that was a later development.
But, in fact, this is only pretty recently after his death,
- that they're beginning to present him as... - That's right.
..a literary playwright, and, indeed, as a national playwright.
The veneration of Shakespeare as the natural genius
and future national poet starts here.
So there it is, the First Folio,
a quite astonishing collection of Shakespeare's plays.
I was trying to work it out recently
but I think I've been associated with about half of them,
performing them on radio, on stage, and on film,
but I'd like to focus on three in particular,
his masterpiece, King Lear,
the puzzling, mysterious Timon of Athens,
but first...Hamlet.
There are three versions of Hamlet.
We have it in the Folio,
but it was printed twice in Shakespeare's life time,
in smaller quarto editions,
and the British Library has these, too.
The quartos were so called because a piece of paper would be taken
and then folded twice into quarters,
so effectively you would have eight small pages of printed text.
These were budget editions, unlike the more expensive Folio,
and, unfortunately, they were very often untrustworthy -
being printed without the consent of the playwright,
or indeed the company of actors, who actually owned the plays.
A very good example of this is the first quarto of Hamlet -
"To be, or not to be."
And, in this case, that indeed is the question.
The first quarto here...
that came out in 1603.
This is a very different version from the longer second quarto
or the version that's included in the Folio.
Now this got a reputation.
It was given a nickname, wasn't it?
- It was called the Bad Quarto. - The Bad Quarto.
There have been many theories about the less reliable quartos.
It's been suggested that competing publishers
sent reporters to performances to take them down in shorthand,
and also that minor cast members
were bribed to remember as much of the play as they could.
- The theory is... - That would explain shortcomings!
- He would have to have remembered the whole of... - This is a good example.
We've got the book open
at the very famous speech
and would you like to have a go and read it?
Yes, I'll have a go.
"To be, or not to be.
"Aye, there's the point.
"To die, to sleep, is that all?
"Aye, all.
"No, to sleep, to dream,
"I marry there it goes,
"for in that dream of death, when we awake,
"and borne before an everlasting judge
"from whence no passenger ever returned,
"the undiscovered country..."
- Yeah, he doesn't quite know where he's going, does he? - No.
- The brain of the man who's reporting it... - Attempting to remember.
Remembering lines that, of course,
we remember as being the ones that are memorable.
"The undiscovered country from whose borne, no traveller returns."
And then the half-remembered lines,
"For in that "dreame of death" rather than "sleep of death".
In an attempt to stamp Shakespeare's authority upon the play,
the second quarto followed about two years later.
Played uncut it lasts an impossible four hours.
It's version of "to be or not to be"
is more familiar than the Bad Quarto,
but the truth is, when we perform it,
we shamelessly pick and choose our favourite lines.
What you're about to hear is a mixture of the second quarto
and the First Folio.
"To be, or not to be, that is the question
"Whether 'tis nobler in the mind
"To suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
"Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
"And by opposing, end them.
"To die...
"To sleep no more.
"And by a sleep to say we end
"The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
"That flesh is heir to.
"'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
"To die, to sleep.
"To sleep...
"Perchance to dream
"Aye, there's the rub
"For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
"When we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause.
"There's the respect that makes calamity of so long life.
"For who would bear the whips and the scorns of time
"The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely
"The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
"The insolence of office
"And the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes
"When he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin?
"Who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life
"But that the dread of something after death.
"The undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns
"Puzzles the will
"And makes us rather bear those ills we have
"Than fly to others that we know not of.
"Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all
"And thus the native hue of resolution
"Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought
"And enterprises of great pith and moment
"With this regard their currents turn awry
"And lose the name of action."
Between the Second Quarto version of Hamlet
and its appearance in the Folio,
significant differences were made -
some passages were taken out, others were added -
and we don't made know who made those decisions,
whether it was Shakespeare alone
or the result of his collaboration with fellow practitioners.
After all, in theatre today, there's always considerable negotiation
when a new play is put on
between the playwright, the director and the actors.
Passages that the playwright might have sweated blood over
are taken out in the final version and other bits are added.
But that's always the final stage of the process.
What we want to see, is Shakespeare at the beginning,
Shakespeare in the garret, as it were,
and that's simply not possible -
or is it?
Now, I'm going to move on to another play I want to look at
which is a real puzzle, which is Timon of Athens.
- Oh, Timon. - Can we find it in the Folio?
Erm, now, Timon is a play I'm very, very fond of because
I...did a version of it at the National Theatre in London,
and...
it's a mess!
Famously.
It's a famous mess.
We don't even know whether it was meant to be in the Folio in the first place.
Not printed before its appearance in the Folio,
Timon of Athens is a profoundly ugly morality tale
about foolishness, ingratitude and bad faith.
It tells the story of a wealthy man who loses all his money
and who then asks his friends for help,
friends who'd enjoyed his generosity when times were good.
Predictably enough, they leave him high and dry.
He leaves the city, becomes a recluse, a hermit.
He becomes the embodiment of rage and hatred.
He becomes this.
"Let me look back upon thee.
"O thou wall, that girdlest in those wolves, dive in the earth
"And fence not Athens!
"Matrons, turn incontinent!
"Obedience fail in children!
"Slaves and fools, pluck the grave wrinkled senate from the bench,
"And minister in their steads!
"To general filths convert o' the instant, green virginity,
"Do it in your parents' eyes!
"Bankrupts, hold fast Rather than render back
"Out with your knives, And cut your trusters' throats!
"Bound servants, steal!
"Large-handed robbers your grave masters are, and pill by law
"Maid, to thy master's bed
"Thy mistress is o' the brothel!
"Son of 16, pluck the lined crutch from thy old limping sire,
"With it, beat out his brains!"
The writing is vital, full-throated,
but Timon of Athens is almost impossible to play
because Timon's torrent of bile goes on for what seems like an eternity.
I've always imagined Richard Burbage,
the man for whom Shakespeare probably wrote this part,
saying to his colleague, "For God's sake, give me rest.
"You can't do this to me. I can't sustain this for a whole hour."
"Do what you do with other characters
"and give me a rest around about the fourth act."
So what we have here - although it might look finished
in the First Folio - is, I think, a draft.
And not all Shakespeare's work.
Timon was a collaboration with Thomas Middleton,
whose stock in trade was sly and bitter satire.
The first half of Timon is mostly his work,
the second half is mostly Shakespeare.
So why is it unfinished?
What went wrong?
Timon of Athens is the odd one out in the Folio.
It certainly seems when you're working on it
that it can never have hit the stage.
And it doesn't add up, it doesn't fit together.
Once upon a time, it was thought that it was so fragmented and
disintegrated because it in some way reflected Shakespeare's inner life,
that he must have been undergoing some kind of nervous breakdown.
More recent scholarship has established -
pretty well comprehensively -
that it's a collaboration between Shakespeare and Middleton,
but it doesn't feel like it's a collaboration that they ever took
to the final stage.
It feels as if somebody, maybe the two writers themselves,
maybe the rest of the company,
said, "This isn't working. We're going to shelve it."
You feel Shakespeare get into gear in the second half,
when Timon has been exiled to a kind of literal and spiritual wasteland.
But even when Shakespeare gets into gear, it feels experimental,
it feels as if he hasn't pulled it into the kind of shape
he would expect it to be in to get onto the stage.
"The gods confound, hear me, you good gods all,
"The Athenians both within and out that wall
"And grant as Timon grows his hate may grow
"To the whole race of mankind, high and low.
"Amen!"
As Nick says, current academic opinion is that the incoherence
of Timon is caused by the failure of the collaboration
between Middleton and Shakespeare,
the mismatch between their very different gifts.
But it's in the play's second half
the vast majority of which was Shakespeare's work
that Timon loses its way.
And I've never been able to convince myself
that its unrelieved darkness is caused by anything as innocent
as a lack of inspiration.
So why didn't Shakespeare finish it?
Why did he just leave it for dead?
To my inexpert eye, it looks potentially like rather a good play,
but it must've been very depressing to write.
It's as if Shakespeare can't stop this flow of invective and bile.
It's like a nervous tic.
So, perhaps, I'm suggesting, he himself was depressed,
he'd temporarily lost faith in human nature.
Which brings me to King Lear,
a play written around the same dark period.
King Lear is very much on my mind at the moment
he's who I'm playing at the National Theatre.
Lear tells the story of an ageing King of Britain,
who decides to divide his kingdom between his three daughters,
according to how much love they profess for him.
And when the youngest refuses to play,
refuses to overstate her affections as her older sisters have,
he disinherits her.
He leaves her without a dowry,
he says to her face, "We have no such daughter."
But Lear has trusted the wrong children.
The two older daughters treat Lear abominably,
depriving him of his knights and all his possessions.
Shakespeare seems to have pursued a fairly consistent method of writing.
He rarely wrote a play from scratch.
He used to use material from the books that he'd read -
old fables, old histories, earlier plays
what's called his source material.
And the source material that he would have used for Lear,
tells the story of a king who returns to the court of his
youngest daughter, her husband wages war against her two sisters,
Lear is restored to his throne and everyone lives happily ever after.
But, of course, Lear was written at the same time as Timon of Athens,
so what does Shakespeare bring to this happily-ever-after tradition?
Well, first of all he introduces the figure of a Fool
a comedian whose stock in trade is not cheap and easy laughs,
but the unrelenting telling of the bitter truth,
above all to his master.
Lear loses his mind.
The play is a wonderfully detailed study of madness.
And, crucially, at the end of the play, Cordelia,
the much-loved and blameless daughter is killed
and the king himself dies shortly afterwards.
Shakespeare obliterates the happy ending entirely.
I think the thing that is shocking to me still
is the violence in the play.
The cruelty of it.
It is a truly dark play
and I think we've shared that vision of the play from the beginning.
And, you know, I'd always wanted the violence of the play
to ring true to a contemporary audience.
I mean, he deliberately changed the end so he kills Cordelia,
from the source material.
That seems to me the most...
..savage rewriting of a source material that I can think of.
But I just think I wonder whether he was going through...
..a bad patch!
I mean, I know it's a dangerous game to play,
but I cannot believe that you do something so violent
to your source material, as that,
without a personal investment of some kind.
Do you think he was going through a bad...patch?
It would be foolish to assume that there is no connection
between biography and art.
It's not wise to think of Shakespeare
as someone who would write in a kind of almost
disembodied sort of fashion,
as if he didn't belong to a place and a time, and to a family group,
and to a group of friends and fellow actors,
and would be unaffected by what happened around him.
I mean, I'm not a writer, but I...
- I can't imagine that would be possible. - Exactly, exactly.
As soon as you begin to compare the final scenes
in the Quarto published in 1608,
and the Folio, the differences are striking.
Shakespeare - or someone - has rewritten, moved lines around,
changed them completely.
This is the last moment of the play
when Lear famously carries on his dead daughter.
This is the Quarto version, of course, and is much bleaker.
In the Quarto version, Lear's final words are, to my eyes,
somewhat cliched -
"Break heart, I prithee break."
The Folio gives that line to Kent,
which works better and expands Lear's last words.
"No, no life?
"Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
"And, thou, no breath, at all?
"Thou'lt come no more.
"Never.
"Never, never, never...
"..never."
These are the Folio-only lines that make the ending so different,
"Thank you, sir. Do you see this?
"Look on her. Look on her lips.
"Look there, look there."
And in the Folio a lot more attention is given
to the sense of hope that there might be a world elsewhere
for this father and his daughter,
- because he sees something that maybe we're not able to see. - Yes.
It depends how you...how you read the "Look there, look there."
As you say, it could be... It could be seeing something.
His last lines in the Folio in the version that we do
is actually about Lear going,
"Just look at that. That is what life means a dead child."
"Look on her.
"Look.
"Her lips.
"Look there.
"Look there!"
But what has this re-writing achieved?
Sonia thinks the later Folio text is less bleak,
but I think it could be bleaker still,
and that's the greatest irony of all.
For all our yearning for those lost first drafts, what we have
even if we stick to only one version -
can be endlessly re-interpreted.
Lear, as a text, remains an absolutely unsurpassed
extraordinary piece of poetic - heightened poetic - writing,
probably the greatest I've ever read and have ever worked on.
This is a piece of work that was -
it's like a giant lump of clay, to a degree -
written, given to you, by a man of the theatre.
Not by a poet, necessarily,
but by someone who is used to going in and rehearsing plays
and making alterations depending on the situation,
depending on the environment,
in a sense, depending on the production.
There is no such thing as THE King Lear and THE Tempest.
It's A Tempest, A King Lear.
You have to start with the view that it's an interpretative act.
So much of what we learn from the First Folio
explodes our romantic preconceptions about the author -
the idea of a solitary genius, for example.
But I still think we can glimpse a little of the man
behind the words - shadowy, of course -
but always absolutely and profoundly dynamic.
We don't know exactly what he saw in the world around him
in 1605, for example, but we know HOW he saw it,
what he FELT about it,
and that's quite enough to ask of any book.
To dig deeper into Shakespeare's First Folio
and the other books in this series,
a free app from the Open University is available to download.
Go to...
..and follow the links to the Open University.