THE BARD AND THE BOOK

An introduction to the most important book in the history of theater.

Bausum focuses on the miracle that so many of Shakespeare’s brilliant plays were preserved and explores how that came to happen. An airy rush of narrative is enlivened with quoted lines, plus photos of contemporary printed pages as well as spot art renditions of actors (one pursued by a bear), a printing press, and theatrical images of various small animals. The author reconstructs the progress of Elizabethan-era play scripts from draft “foul papers” to transcriptions into “rolls” of individual parts (the origin, she writes, of “roles”) and prompt books, and then on to published versions of “bad” quartos, better ones, and finally the authoritative “folio” of 1623 (the first and best of four folio editions in the 17th century). Along with filling readers in on “catchwords” and other hand-printing terminology, she also notes how typos, a child’s doodles, and other mischances down through the years have individually marked every one of the first folio’s 235 (and counting) surviving copies and earned many of them intriguing names like the “Farting Folio” and the “Purple Copy.” And Bausum’s closing account of personal experiences at the Folger Shakespeare Library is rapturous enough to tempt like visits.

A timely and engaging celebration of a literary landmark.