Collection: The Fifth Folio Play Lists

Welcome to the site. Glad to have you here.

This is a new folio conceived as a unified editorial and artistic work. It has 46 plays, an unusually comprehensive collection that extends beyond the traditional Shakespeare canon. It includes The Two Noble Kinsmen and King Edward III. It includes the six Apocryphal plays from folios three and four: even if we no longer see any of Shakespeare's hand in them, we keep them as legacy and as contrast. It reconstitutes Double Falshood as En Sierra Morena, retooling what might be fragments of the lost play Cardenio with Don Quixote.

We begin by restoring sentences from the original texts. In Shakespeare's case, a sentence spanning pages isn't gratuitous.

We introduce enumeration of stage directions and of spoken parts per character: a new scheme for finding one's place. Stage directions are decorated and numbered. We also use stage directions as just-in-time information. For example, they can introduce historical characters by untangling familial lines, listing cognomens, and recalling antecedent events.

Enumerating characters' spoken parts replaces conventional line numbers, binding to the play rather than to specific media. Main characters are sometimes given sympathetic visual embellishments in color, font, and symbol; a glance will reveal Ophelia's lines from Polonius's and Gertrude's, Lear's from the foole's, Iago's from Othello's, Macbeth from his lady.

We create special features for displaying Songs and Letters, which are quite charming. We think you'll enjoy them. They play with Chance, a theme throughout this site.

We keep act divisions, for the most part. Hamlet's folio presentations stop at Actus Secundus, Scena Secunda. Antony and Cleopatra survives only as a continuous gestalt with neither acts nor scenes; Richard Wagner would love it. We have lovely act decorations, but if they are not called for we do not use them. We subsume scene divisions into our enumerated stage directions.

We write IVLIVS as JULIUS. If there is an explicit Latin quote, we put it in sans serif. We restore italicisations of proper nouns; they serve as useful markers for the reading experience and make a beautiful contrast. 

We remove the 'long' lowercase s, ſ, which in some fonts can appear indistinguishable from an f.

When older spellings are re-introduced, some words get longer, which has an undesirable consequence for a variety of reasons including pacing. In addressing this, we've turned to glyphs for help. The result sacrifices fidelity to our sources and produces something new.

Shakespearian English included some unfamiliar glyphs. Usage could be complex and unstable. Shakes-peare's own grave marker has several such glyphs.

We have deployed only a handful of these glyphs, ones that do real work. They were culled from original Shakespearian sources, seldom though they may have been found there. We standardize on them with a simple set of rules.

A boy no older than 15, with no prior experience reading Shakespeare, critically reviewed several plays line-by-line and is comfortable with the approach. Let's review:

The case of thorn, which collapses 'Th' into 'Þ': we follow the Vikings by deploying a single glyph to represent this sound. The Greeks did similarly with their Θ. The, That, There: That's how we know Them in English today. Þe, Þat, Þere: Þat's how we know Þem at Fifth Folio. Compression is palpable.

Spellings in Shakespeare's era were often phonetic. Trust your ears; believe what you hear, not what you sea. Notice what we did theyre?

Now for other glyphs: let's resume with ß, for ss. That's easy enough. Business, businesse, busineße. Kiss, kisse, kiße. So we expand and contract back, and now you have one foot in the sixteenth century.

ē is used at ends of words for 'en'. For example, Then is Þē. Den is Dē, but Denmark remains Denmarke.

ō is used at ends of words for om. From is Frō.

Lastly, Y with a little u on top is You.

Another thing we do, and here we reach the end of our list: which is wc, an editorial shorthand of the day. And there you have it.

There is an audio technology called dithering: by introducing a little noise, quiet details become audible. It's something like the principle at work here. We introduce a little friction, noise if you will, and recover clarity and variety in a new kind of fidelity.

Source material was scrutinized and when necessary modified. We were surprised by how many faults lay hidden in even the most conspicuous places. There are various kinds and shades of error. Of course, we've made mistakes too. We have an Errata section and would appreciate your help. Virtually every play presented a unique set of problems, sometimes technical, sometimes philosophical. Quartos and folios could deviate not only in language but in temperament, leaving us with things to ponder and new arrangements to find.

It is not the obligation of a folio to continue simplifying language until it reads like a newspaper. However, we value newsprint and the speed with which it flows. Our lines wrap in columns with colored decorations marking the passing lines.

Words in Shakespeare's day were often spelled phonetically, so they might assume different spellings even within the same sentence. And where modern Shakespeare writes 'Aye', here you might find merely 'I'.

from All's Well That Ends Well .. Parolles: I, so I say.

from Antony and Cleopatra .. Antony: I, and my Sword, will earne our Chronicle

Cleopatra .. I, I, farewell.