(birds tweeting)
(off camera) Action!
This is how most people nowadays probably receive Shakespeare
in a book, on a page.
But it was very different
from how Shakespeare was received
four hundred years ago
The first full copy of
Shakespeare's works was called the First Folio
It was printed in 1623, seven years
after Shakespeare died,
aaaaand the opening title pages has the catalogue of all the plays,
listed by Comedy, History, and Tragedy,
36 of them, although now we
know there's a few more
that Shakespeare had a hand in
and here's a list of all the
actors that he worked with,
or  many of the actors that he worked with 
over the 20 years he was writing
aaaand here,
is what the plays all  look like...
But what does the word 'Folio' mean?
Take a piece of paper,
which of course has two sides to print on
and you fold it in half
then you have four sides to print on
for the same cost
and this would have been Folio in Shakespeare's time
think of it like a modern hardback.
Now if you take that same piece of paper
and you fold it again,
you have twice the number of sides to print on.
This would have been a Quarto publishing in Shakespeare's time.
Think of it like a modern paperback.
And if you go into antique book shops
you might still find
a book where the page leaves h aven't
been cut
an unread book. That's why.
Now the First Folio published for the very
first time 18 of Shakespeare's plays
that had never been published before
and it's one of the most expensive
books in the world too,
now this isn't one of the most expensive ones sadly,
but it is quite an old one,  it was
printed in 1910.
Nowadays if you're to encounter
Shakespeare on the page
rather than on the stage,
it'll probably be in a modern edition
a full copy of the play
but Shakespeare's actors wouldn't have had access to a full copy,
they limited the number of times that it was copied out
to stop people from stealing the play
and they didn't have very much rehearsal
time
so the idea was they would listen to the author read the play
and then taking it in turns
from lead actor to smallest actor
they would write out their own part
and create their actor's 'part'
or their 'cue-script'
and here's a facsimile - a very nice photocopy -
of an actor's part, this is the part of Orlando
and you can see this is everything that Orlando has to say until his next cue
and everything he has to say then, until his next cue, which is "my lord'
in beautifu l beautiful writing.
So they would have written out in their own hands their parts
and writing out what you have to say in your own hand
is a brilliant way of starting to learn the part very quickly.
When they decided to publish the First Folio
if they didn't have a full copy of the play
they would gather all the cue-scripts from the actors
and reassemble some of the plays
like a jigsaw puzzle.
Now without a full copy of the play, how did they know what was gonna happen?
Well, they also would make a 'Platt', the word is a little like 'plot'
This would have been hung backstage and you can see
this is the mark where the hole would have been
in the piece of paper and they would
have hung this on a wooden peg backstage.
"The platt of the Second Part of the Seven
Deadly Sins"
and it goes through scene by scene
every piece of action; who's
involved, what's gonna happen,
...here's 'alarum' and 'excursions'...
until the very end.
It's a list of everything about the show
they didn't want to keep in their heads.
It wasn't called the 'First Folio' 400 years ago
it was simply called  Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories & Tragedies
Then they printed it three
more times in folio, but  this is the first.
I love working with the First
Folio. It was edited by two of his actors
and while we don't have any rehearsal
notes or copies of the scripts from his time
this is the closest we can get to
the version that they thought
he would have wanted to be published.
And we have to tune ourselves towards a different way of thinking about them
They used to spell a lot more like they used to speak
You can see here the lovely, odd spelling of 'scream'
S C H R E A M E
Now that will give us a guide to the pronunciation
but it also makes the language sound so much more visceral, chewy and muscular
all the spellings are modernized in a modern edition,
and the other thing that's removed -
you can see here - are the capitalized words
in the middle of speeches like
Coward and Villain and Beard
in 'O what a Rogue and Peasant Slave am I?', in Hamlet
and you can see the same words, Conscience, and Coward,  capitalized
in 'To be, or not to be...'
and these are also removed from modern editions but there's a theory
that actors practice that those capitalized words are the ones that are
important to the character, that they give
a by-line, through the speech - very useful  for actors that don't have much rehearsal time.
Now the folio is by no
means perfect,
the people that were  compositing the text - putting it together -
one of them wasn't literate and they were all hydrating with beer
so were very probably drunk whilst they were pu tting the type onto the page, upside down and back to front,
pressing every page
And much like the modern Globe
certainly not the case four hundred years ago
the other thing they would have had to deal with is helicopters flying overhead.
This is the closest we can get to the
text that that first group of Shakespeare actors used
I think of this as the actors' edition and we'll see in the next film how useful it can be.
Now as I said the First Folio is by no means perfect
and there are different versions
of the plays
half of them were published for the
first time in the First Folio
but there were 18 that were published during his lifetime in paperback,
Hamlet was one of them,
and here is the Quarto of Hamlet.
And it looks very, very similar to the Folio
Here is the 'special Providence in the fall of a sparrow' speech of Hamlet
towards the end,
"If it be, tis not to come; if it be not to come twill be now,"
"if it be not now, yet it will come, the readiness is all,"
"since no man of aught he leaves, knows what it is to leave betimes"
- all relatively similar to the Folio version until that point -
but the bit that is not found in any other edition
are the last two words, 'let be'.
Now there's nothing wrong with these modern editions,
they're someone's interpretation.
They've tried to make the play clearer, adding in punctuation to help interpret the meanings
standardizing the spelling's,
adjusting the layout and choosing
particular bits when there are different
versions of the same scene.
Few modern editions are really aimed at actors but the point is the edition you have
is not sacred, and has been refined and
worked on.
I said earlier that we don't have any working copies from Shakespeare's time
but look at this this:
this  is a copy of Hamlet from 1676
it's the Smock Alley Theatre's prompt copy
and you can see the practice of actors from 400 years ago
very, very carefully cutting the text, making it their own
and sometimes, not so carefully cutting the text and making it their own
marking bits they knew were particularly
important and would need time,
this is the 'dumbshow' in the 'Play-within --the-Play' sequence.
Shakespeare left us an incredible collection of plays
and whichever modern edition you might have
it's worth looking online to see the
different earlier versions that there are
each is a window shining a light
onto a different aspect of Shakespeare.
Now I grew up thinking that Shakespeare
shouldn't be cut
that it should be protected,
that we should be careful with it,
and looking back at the cue-script, at the Platts,
at the working copy from 1676
it reminds me that these are dynamic
things:
they're inviting you to work on them,
them they're inviting you to cut them,
rhey're inviting you to own them.
(birds tweeting)
