The scholar Charlton Hinman, meanwhile, found through close attention to the variants held in the

Folger Shakespeare Library (which was due to reopen after renovations this November, making its
trove of 82 First Folios a focal point; the reopening has been delayed) that the irregularities in fact
resulted from the working methods used in Jaggard’s printshop. He argued that the variations in
spelling, pagination, and so on were the results of different working methods and experience levels
in the team of five to 10 compositors who put the book together. They are known now as
Compositors A, B, C, and so on, and, in the case of Compositor E, by name: John Leason, the
teenaged, cack-handed typesetter whose technique improved as his apprenticeship to the older
Compositor B progressed, but who still left a trail of antique typos in his wake. The others merely
have consistent differences of presentation. Compositor A, for instance, favors “doe, goe and here,”
while Compositor B prefers “do, go and heere.” (Their preferences can be found in other Jaggard
books as well.)

During the 19th century, the market value of First Folios—emblems of imperial British culture and
high status—escalated. Owners responded to the strangeness of the text by trying to improve it.
Some tried to Frankenstein a “perfect” Folio into existence, subjecting Folios to “Grangerizing”
(adding newly illustrated matter), “vampment” (filling gaps with facsimile leaves, or leaves
cannibalized from other copies), and similar debased, debasing practices; many surviving Folios are a
hodgepodge of materials. But among Hinman’s other discoveries was that there is no such thing as a
singular “correct” Folio text. Because each Folio was proofread as the compositors went along, and
each will have since weathered further alterations, no two copies will be textually identical, and no
amount of grifting and grafting will change that.

Those alterations often take in what we might today deem charming evidence of 17th- or 18th-
century direct engagement. In the words of critic Percy Fitzgerald, the books are “usually found
frayed, maimed, soiled, smeared, imperfect, leaves and sheets torn out.” They are often corrugated,
slimed with gravy, ringed by drink, footprinted by cats, underlined, illustrated (sometimes horribly, as
with a clutch of manicules around the scene in Titus Andronicus where Lavinia has just lost her
hands), and used as scrap paper for practicing signatures or tallying sums. Readers sometimes spot,
or think they have spotted, spelling, semantic, or metrical errors.

In rare cases, annotations have caused genuine excitement. Claire M. L. Bourne and Jason Scott-
Warren identified John Milton as the annotator of a copy owned by the Free Library of Philadelphia.
In a 2022 article in Milton Quarterly, the two scholars write that “besides the Milton family Bible …
[this is] the first English vernacular book to be identified as having belonged to Milton.” It shows
Milton to be “a reader alive to the minutiae of poetry as a craft.” His frequent use of “vext” to
describe weather in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained began, it now seems, with his underlining
of “still-vext” in the Folio Tempest, which the Oxford English Dictionary records as the earliest such
usage. References to Shakespeare are an undersong in Milton’s work, but it is wondrous to see some
clearly noted.

The many markings Milton made on his First Folio also reveal some of the differences between the
Folio and quarto texts of plays including Romeo and Juliet. As Higgins observes, “There is nothing
obviously wrong with Juliet’s line ‘Proud can I never be of what I have’ when she rejects the idea that
she should feel delighted about her betrothal to Paris, but Milton still altered the line to Q5’s ‘Proud
can I never be of what I hate.’” There is a difference between the “forceful and impassioned” fifth-
quarto Juliet and the “rueful” First Folio version. This character difference is stranger still considering
that the Folio lacks the play’s now-famous starting sonnet, an early modern trigger warning that
winds the clock of tragedy, making the quarto technically more fated and fatal, sadder, and that
Milton supplies by hand in his Folio text. Milton clearly backed inclusive and zigzagging reading
methods. So does Higgins.

The grief that collectors sometimes feel on learning that Folios have been scrawled or drooled on is
perhaps akin to literary stalwarts’ anger when Shakespeare is adapted in surprising ways. Yet it was
always thus. To look on four-plus centuries of Shakespeare adaptations is to look on something like
theater’s version of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style (1947)—a collision of genres and
sensibilities within a set of preexisting narrative constraints. Greg Doran’s enjoyable memoir My
Shakespeare: A Director’s Journey Through the First Folio (Bloomsbury, 2023) recounts renditions of
As You Like It with a knitted set and The Tempest with impressive live special effects devised by the
English actor Andy Serkis. Nahum Tate’s 1681 revision of King Lear had Edgar and Cordelia fall in love
and Lear retire happy (the original ending was deemed too gloomy); Bertolt Brecht’s unfinished
adaptation of Coriolanus, which he worked on in the early 1950s, is inflected by the politics of Mao
Zedong. Even more curiously, Forests, a 2012 production conceived by the Catalan director Calixto
Bieto, collages Shakespeare’s mentions of trees into a play-length sylvan scene.

What seems to still vex people most about this sort of thing is the assumed adjustment of the
author’s words. But Shakespeare is known to have produced some of the plays, even those in the
Folio, in collaboration with other playwrights, such as John Fletcher, on Henry VIII, and Thomas
Middleton, on Timon of Athens. (The language in these plays is apparently bygone in comparison
with that of Shakespeare’s younger contemporaries—favoring “hath” and “them” over Fletcher’s
“has” and “’em,” “thou” and “I did go home” over Middleton’s “you” and “I went home”—and this is
worth noting, Smith points out in The Making of, “given how we praise Shakespeare’s linguistic
inventiveness.” It is possible too, however, that Shakespeare’s variants are merely regional—that is,
more rustic.)

Then there is the fact that, based on what we know of Shakespeare’s work and its environment, the
plays were shaped not only by the poet’s hand but by the company for which he wrote them. The
King’s Men’s star actors were Richard Burbage and William Kemp: Burbage’s acting was protorealistic
and reflective, and roles written for him almost certainly included Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Coriolanus,
and Prospero; the clown Kemp, meanwhile, is “so intrinsic to the roles Shakespeare wrote for him
[almost certainly including Bottom, Falstaff, and Dogberry],” writes Smith in Shakespeare’s First Folio,
“that on occasion his name replaces that of his character” in the text. When Kemp left in 1599, the
position of head clown was taken by the more sardonic, musically talented Robert Armin (both are
listed in the Folio), and the “fool” in Shakespeare changed—this was the time of Twelfth Night’s
subtle and ironic Feste, and of the wise fool, who shares one of Feste’s lines, in King Lear.
Lastly, what we know of Shakespeare’s character—archives imply that he was at least at times a
grain-hoarding, tax-dodging, coat-of-arms-coveting entertainer—indicates that, could he see the
quantity of fresh collaborations with his work, he would be not just lenient but pleased, especially in
view of his declining print presence in later life (“the number of editions published in the first 10-year
period is almost equal to that of the next twenty years,” as Smith observes). And he would want to
know, of course, where he might find his cut of the royalties.

Cue the Play on Shakespeare series, published by ACMRS Press, the publications division of the
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University. The series, which
grew out of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s plan to “translate” Shakespeare for the current
century, bills itself “a new First Folio for a new era.” The 39 newly-commissioned versions of
Shakespeare’s plays were written primarily by contemporary dramatists, who were asked to follow
the reasonable principle laid out by series editor Lue Douthit: tamper in the name of clarification but
submit to “do no harm.” The project was inspired by something the linguist John McWhorter wrote
in 1998: “[the] irony today is that the Russians, the French, and other people in foreign countries
possess Shakespeare to a much greater extent than we do … [because] they get to enjoy
Shakespeare in the language they speak.”

The various “translators” reach varying planes of success. Amy Freed’s Taming of the Shrew is
proficient in expounding mystifying phrases, and makes only sound amendments to, for instance,
Petruchio’s central speech—apart, perhaps, from her changing “full-gorged” to the much less jugular
“full-fed” and “haggard” to “lady hawk,” which clumsily reverses the original’s ancillary associations
(e.g., in “a haggard woman”). Elsewhere, for every change that clarifies, another obfuscates
Shakespeare’s intentions. In Lisa Peterson’s Hamlet, “chief good and market of his time” becomes
“chief good and reason for his life,” destroying the complicating, mercenary hendiadys of “good [i.e.,
both moral benefit and vended object] and market” (she might have tried “good and profit”). There
is also an issue around meter: many have high schoolers’ strict fixation on iambic pentameter (except
for Migdalia Cruz’s Macbeth, which seems at least to recognize that other meters and metrical
substitutions are in play), also neglecting line endings’ importance.

These instances expose the project’s fatal flaw: Shakespeare wasn’t just a great playwright, but a
great poet who wrote plays. Poet-translators might have imitated him more passably. A well-read
poet knows that the devices of the trivium, the rhetoric and Latin composition studied in the
playwright’s youth, were anything but trivial to his creation. What’s more, a grasp of historical diction
will show that modern borrowings such as “kowtow” (Chinese, early 19th century) and
“bamboozled” (unknown, early 18th century) have no place in the verbal universe of Coriolanus. The
worst offender is David Ivers’s As You Like It, which he unwisely admits he’d “sometimes … write
while drinking a glass of Maker’s Mark.” The characters come out with such garbage—“Now I’ll be
firm to say the pancakes sucked and the mustard rocked”; “My boss of sort is Marxist in state”; “Here
comes the Dad”—that the overwhelming impression is of, yes, inebriation.