Had he not been published before?
Shakespeare seems to have been more interested in success on the stage than in seeing his words in print. In his lifetime, he published three books of nondramatic poetry, but only about half of his plays could be bought, in cheap volumes called quartos, sometimes pirated – “diverse stolen and surreptitious copies” – roughly the size of a modern paperback. Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, now known as the First Folio, was published in 1623, seven years after his death. Its more expensive 900-page format implied that these play scripts were serious literature, as not everyone would have thought then. More importantly, without it, we wouldn’t have 18 plays, including Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Twelfth Night,…
