The short answer
The First Folio was not Shakespeare’s first appearance in print, a manuscript in his handwriting or a complete collection of everything he wrote. It was a major posthumous publishing project. This guide explains what the 1623 book contains, how it was assembled and why a surviving physical copy can tell a different story from a modern collected edition.
Chronology
A timeline of the turning points
Individual plays in print
Early surviving editions included small-format publications; the Folio did not introduce every play to print.
Shakespeare’s death
The later collection was assembled without his personal supervision of its final printed form.
The First Folio
Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies gathered thirty-six plays.
The Vincent copy
An inscription records a copy given by printer William Jaggard to Augustine Vincent, illustrating how individual books acquire provenance.
A documented collecting history
Henry and Emily Folger acquired the Vincent copy, which includes replacement leaves as well as original printed material.
What folio means and what was actually new
Folio describes the making of a book from sheets folded once, producing two leaves and four pages. Quarto sheets are folded twice, producing four leaves and eight pages. These are formats, not the names of two rival authors. The 1623 collection used a large, substantial form for plays that audiences had previously encountered on stage or, in some cases, as separate inexpensive publications.
The book gathered thirty-six plays. Eighteen had not previously appeared in print, including Macbeth, The Tempest, Julius Caesar and Twelfth Night. This is why its survival matters so much. The familiar claim that it saved half the plays concerns the absence of other surviving early printed witnesses; it is not proof that every individual play would certainly have vanished in every imaginable alternative history. Nor was the Folio Shakespeare’s first published book.
Colleagues, booksellers and printers had different jobs
Shakespeare’s fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell helped gather the plays and addressed the collection to readers. Their participation connected the book with the company for which Shakespeare had worked. London publication also required a commercial partnership: the syndicate was headed by Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard, and the Jaggard printing house produced it. William Jaggard died before completion, with Isaac taking over the shop.
This division of labour makes the phrase Shakespeare published his complete plays misleading. He had died in 1616. The volume’s presentation belongs to a later memorial and commercial enterprise. Its preliminary addresses praise the author and encourage purchases; they are evidence of how the book was offered to readers, not neutral guarantees that every page was copied directly from a perfect manuscript left ready for publication.
The contents page is an arrangement, not a career timeline
The three categories in the title organise the plays as comedies, histories and tragedies. They do not put them in the order Shakespeare wrote them. The Tempest, a later play, opens the comedies, while the histories follow the order of the English kings represented. Reading the volume from the beginning therefore gives you a publishing arrangement rather than a chronological development of the dramatist’s career.
There is also a useful warning for anyone counting titles from a contents photograph. The printed contents list names thirty-five plays, while the volume contains thirty-six: Troilus and Cressida entered the production process late and is present despite its omission from that list. Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen are not in the book. Neither are the Sonnets or the narrative poems. A modern complete Shakespeare can consequently include material beyond the First Folio without being an inaccurate reprint of it; it is simply a different editorial project.
An early printed text is not the same as an unquestionable final text
The Folio’s importance does not make every reading in it automatically superior to an earlier quarto. Its plays were set from different kinds of copy, including earlier printed editions and scribal material. The title-page claim about original copies is part of the book’s historical presentation, not a conclusion that modern editors can accept without examining each text. This is a reason to study the Folio carefully, not to dismiss it.
King Lear shows why that distinction matters. Its 1608 quarto and 1623 Folio differ substantially: each contains passages absent from the other, as well as different words and arrangements. A modern edition may choose one as its base or mark material taken from both. Before assuming a line is missing from your copy, read the editorial introduction. It may represent a deliberate treatment of the surviving witnesses rather than a careless abridgement. The present guide explains that problem; it does not collate every variant or settle every question of authorial revision.
Survival is a history of particular copies
There is no surviving production register establishing an exact print run. A frequently cited estimate is about 750 copies. The Folger’s consulted overview reports 235 known surviving copies; that is a stated catalogue count, not a claim that no further copy or fragment could be identified. Complete and incomplete books also need to be distinguished before numbers are compared.
The Vincent copy demonstrates how complicated survival can be. Its inscription records a gift from William Jaggard to Augustine Vincent in 1623. It later passed through other owners before Henry and Emily Folger bought it in 1903. Fourteen missing leaves were replaced with handwritten facsimiles, and other leaves came from different original Folios. The book is therefore both a witness to 1623 printing and an object with a later history of collecting and repair. Age alone does not make every leaf in a binding an untouched original.
How to use a digitised Folio without confusing its evidence
Begin with the title page, identify the holding institution and copy, then inspect the preliminary addresses and contents before a chosen play. Keep the book’s own printed page numbers separate from image numbers in a viewer. If you move between institutional facsimiles, record that change: annotations, damaged areas, replacement leaves and some printed readings may differ. The Bodleian’s Arch. G c.7 facsimile supplies one identified copy, not an abstract image of all Folios.
The title-page portrait reproduced here comes from the British Library’s G.11631 copy. Martin Droeshout’s engraving appeared after Shakespeare’s death; its presence within a project supported by his colleagues is historically important, but does not make it a photograph or establish how it was drawn. Use that page as evidence of publication and representation. For reading a play, a modern annotated edition and an identified early facsimile answer complementary questions rather than competing to be the only legitimate Shakespeare.
Biography context
Explore United Kingdom through connected lives
William Shakespeare
Distinguish the documented writing and theatre career from the collection published after his death.
Explore the biographiesCompare publishing formsA Christmas Carol in 1843
Compare a later author’s separately published illustrated book with the posthumous collection of plays.
Explore the biographiesConnected biographies
The author behind the collection
1564–1616
William Shakespeare
Playwright, poet, actor and theatre shareholderWilliam Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet and actor whose career linked Stratford-upon-Avon with London’s commercial theatres and royal patronage.Read biographyQuick answers
Common questions
- How many plays are in Shakespeare’s First Folio?
- Thirty-six. Its printed contents list names thirty-five because Troilus and Cressida was added too late to appear on that list, although its text is in the volume.
- Was the First Folio published during Shakespeare’s lifetime?
- No. It appeared in 1623, seven years after his death in 1616.
- Is the First Folio arranged in the order the plays were written?
- No. It groups them as comedies, histories and tragedies. Those categories and their sequence are not a composition chronology.
- Are all surviving First Folios identical?
- No. Printed variants, ownership marks, damage, trimmed pages and replacement leaves distinguish individual copies. A holding institution’s copy description matters.
Primary and institutional sources
How this history was checked
Institutional guides supply publication and copy histories; the King Lear textual introduction explains a specific editorial problem. The British Library title-page scan and the public-domain address to readers in a later facsimile transcription were inspected. The latter is identified as a transcription of the 1910 facsimile, not an original 1623 copy. No complete Folio collation, surviving-manuscript survey or new census of copies is claimed. This article was reviewed on 23 October 2026.
- Folger Shakespeare LibraryShakespeare First Folio: contents, contributors and consulted survival count
- Folger Shakespeare Library, Barbara Mowat and Paul WerstineThe Publication of Shakespeare’s Plays
- Folger Shakespeare LibraryAn Introduction to This Text: King Lear
- Folger Shakespeare LibraryFolger First Folio 1: the Vincent copy
- John Heminges and Henry Condell, 1623; Wikisource transcription of the 1910 facsimileTo the Great Variety of Readers: original address in transcription
- Methuen, 1910; Wikisource transcriptionFirst Folio facsimile: title page and contents
- Bodleian Libraries, University of OxfordDigital facsimile of the Bodleian First Folio, Arch. G c.7
- British LibraryFirst Folio G.11631: entire title-page scan
- Wikimedia Commons / British LibraryExact title-page file and CC0 dedication