First Folio - Performing Shakespeare Using The First Folio

Performing Shakespeare Using The First Folio

Some Shakespeare directors and theatre companies producing Shakespeare believe that while modern editions of Shakespeare's plays, which are heavily edited and changed, are more readable, they remove possible actor cues found in the Folio, such as capitalization, different punctuation and even the changing or removal of whole words. Among the theater companies that have based their production approach upon use of the First Folio was the Riverside Shakespeare Company, which, in the early 1980s, began a studied approach to their stage productions relying upon the First Folio as their textual guide. In the 1990s, the First Folio was reissued in a paperback format more accessible to the general public.

Today, many theatre companies and festivals producing the works of Shakespeare use the First Folio as the basis for their theatrical productions and training programs, including London's Original Shakespeare Company, a theatre company which works exclusively from cue scripts drawn from the First Folio.

However, what are now the widely accepted versions of these plays include lines taken from the Quartos, which are not in the First Folio. For instance, small passages of Hamlet are omitted – among them Horatio's line "A mote it is to trouble the mind's eye", and his subsequent speech beginning with "In the most high and palmy state of Rome, / A little ere the mightiest Julius fell..." Also missing is Hamlet's encounter with the Norwegian captain from Fortinbras's army in Act IV, Scene IV, along with perhaps the most important cut, the soliloquy "How all occasions do inform against me". Romeo and Juliet omits the prologue, with its famous line about "star-crossed lovers".