What is the First Folio and how is it useful? The First Folio is an 'acting text' of William Shakespeare's plays, published in 1623 by Hemmings and Condell, two members of Shakespeare's acting company, The Lord Chamberlain's Men. It provides the closest version we have of the plays as Shakespeare wrote them and how they were acted.

Shakespeare, himself an actor, coded the text in the First Folio (in a similar way in which a composer codes a music score). His unique use of punctuation, spellings, verse, poetic conceits (especially repetition) and other language choices, plus a combination of familiar story-lines and history, enabled the actors to know their given circumstances in a quick and concise manner so that they might make choices appropriate to the world of the play.

Unfortunately, over the years, editors and scholars have altered what Shakespeare wrote in order to conform to more literary and modern grammatical rules and standards. In doing so, they have often changed these very important clues. And, as a result, many people today find Shakespeare inaccessible. But it is little wonder: just imagine if one tried to read the score of a Beethoven Symphony without any of the codes that let you know whether a note was an eighth note or a half note, or when to rest and for how long (etc.)!

Regardless of what text you might ultimately use in a production, artists are always encouraged to look at the First Folio in order to glean all of the givens of the play from the acting clues, especially in terms of status and relationship.