Avant Bard

“‘It’s arguably the most important secular book in western culture,” Fernie told the Guardian from his University of Birmingham headquarters. Were it not for the First Folio, we wouldn’t have half of Shakespeare’s plays today.’ That includes Macbeth, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, the Taming of the Shrew and more than a dozen other works among the 37 tragedies, comedies and histories in the folio, less than half of which were published in the Bard’s own lifetime.” The Guardian on one of the first (and most important) examples of self-publishing. Shakespeare’s First Folio: State Library of NSW takes the Bard’s ‘radical’ 400-year-old book out of the vault.