The First folio 1623
John Heminge (an actor and thought to be the first Falstaff) and Henry Condell (a comedy actor) had been actors with Shakespeare in the King's Men, the theatrical company for which Shakespeare wrote plays. They became concerned about the number of corrupt copies of Shakespeare’s plays in circulation and so put together the First folio in 1623. They were able to work from some original manuscripts and prompters books. Around 750 copies were printed and 233 are known to survive of which only 40 are complete. One third of the surviving copies are in the Folger Shakespeare library in Washington DC. Folger was the president of Standard oil. Only three have come up at auction in the last decade and reaching millions of dollars. It is one of the most valuable books with estimated prices paid up to £5million.
Only 18 of Shakespeare’s plays had been published prior to their work but the first folio contained 36 plays and was treated as the only authoritative version of the plays.
The new plays were Macbeth
The Tempest Julius Caesar
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Measure for Measure
The Comedy of Errors As You Like It
The Taming of the Shrew King John
All’s Well That Ends Well
Twelfth Night
The Winter’s Tale
Henry the Vth Part 1
Henry VIII
Coriolanus Cymbeline
Timon of Athens Antony and Cleopatra


Printing it as a folio gave it status raising it above the quartos. It was bound with a copperplate engraving by Martin Droeshout ( an engraver whose Flemish family had settled in England to avoid the Protestant persecutions.) This is one of only three likenesses where we can be reasonably certain it is of Shakespeare. (The other two are the so-called Chandos portrait and the bust in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford).
However I have read a long article about the bust in Holy Trinity Church which considered that the present bust in not the original which showed a man leaning on a sack of wool with no writing implements whatsoever. From early sketches he did not look at all like the current images of Shakespeare.

I love Bill Bryson’s books and in his book on Shakespeare, with regard to the Droeshout image he says
The portrait is an arrestingly – we might almost say magnificently – mediocre piece of work. Nearly everything about it is flawed. One eye is bigger than the other. The mouth is curiously mis-positioned. The hair is longer on one side of the subject’s head than the other, and the head itself is out of proportion to the body and seems to float off the shoulders, like a balloon. Worst of all, the subject looks diffident, apologetic, almost frightened – nothing like the gallant and confident figure that speaks to us from the plays.
He goes on: Droeshout is nearly always described as being from a family of Flemish artists, though in fact the Droeshouts had been in England for sixty years and three generations by the time Martin came along. Peter W. M. Blayney, the leading authority on the First folio, has suggested that Droeshout, who was in his early twenties and not very experienced when he executed the work, may have won the commission, not because he was an accomplished artist but because he owned the right piece of equipment: a rolling press of the type needed for copperplate engravings . Few artists had such equipment in the 1620s.

What is certain is that the Droeshout portrait was not done from life: Shakespeare had been dead for seven years by the time of the first folio. It is assumed he was working from an existing image. To confuse things even further there were two Martin Droeshouts and later research now points to this being the work of the elder not the inexperienced younger.
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