shakespeare first folio roorkee mr. m.s. rana

Loads of people, even people who love Shakespeare, might not care so much about Timon, or they might think, ‘if we had to sacrifice one, alright, let’s do Timon of Athens.’ We know that Timon of Athens comes into the book really as an afterthought, because the editors think they can’t get the rights to Troilus and Cressida. We’re always saying, ‘oh without this book we wouldn’t have Macbeth, we wouldn’t have Julius Caesar’, but the play I’ve become really fascinated by is Timon of Athens. It’s much less a confident, monumentalising canonising of Shakespeare, and more a speculative and contingent of gathering of what’s available.

One thing that’s really interesting to think about is the way the First Folio was brought together in 1622-23. How do you see the process of First Folio veneration – if that’s the right word – evolving in the years to come? On the one hand they’re very proud of it, but on the other hand, the sense that someone might come and turn the pages is quite frightening! I think we’re a bit out of kilter about whether this is a book, a museum object, a relic, or, as you say, a fetish. It becomes more and more unlikely – vanishingly unlikely – that anybody will consult it as a book and in lots of rare book collections, it’s become an item that people are nervous about. Once it became super-expensive, it became an object that said something about the abilities and success of the person who owned it, as much as anything to do with the contents. So, there was a confluence of two streams – one which I think is economic and one which I think is more scholarly and theatrical – at the end of the 18th century which combined to make this book highly covetable and super-expensive. In the second half of the eighteenth-century new wealth stimulated luxury goods markets in Wedgwood china, book collection, and wonderful country houses. The 1623 edition came to acquire an authoritative reputation which later editions didn’t have, and as an artefact it benefitted from the expansion of luxury consumerism fuelled by money from the slave trade. And it became it in part through a kind of scholarly and theatrical rediscovery. Like Simone de Beauvoir’s brilliant formulation about becoming, not being born, a woman, this was not born the First Folio, it became it.

William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies. This book was not published as the First Folio, it was called Mr. Can you tell us a bit more about that process of fetishisation? I know elsewhere you’ve described the First Folio, as it exists today, as a fetish as much as a book, and I can hear in your first answer answer the beginnings of how that might have happened.

Shakespeare first folio roorkee mr. m.s. rana