Customer Reviews

First Folio of Shakespeare (The Norton Facsimile)

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Compiled from the best extant leaves of Shakespeare's First Folio, this edition is a labor of love. The binding and slipcover are more impressive in the Norton's first edition, but the pages within contain Shakespeare in a way that's rare today: unedited, giving a real sense of Elizabethan and Jacobean times.

Of course, the absence of footnotes or explanatory text places the burden on the reader, and it's likely you'll want to have some supplementary materials handy in case a particularly obscure turn of phrase arises. On the other hand, the remarkable introduction by the late Charleton Hinman provides a remarkable glimpse into the history of the First Folio, and is essential reading in itself.

It does not, of course, contain all of Shakespeare's plays, as scholarship has enlarged his ouevre over time; but just about everything is here.

A huge volume (14 inches high by 9 inches deep and over 3 inches thick), this is the ultimate coffee table book - in itself, an suggestion of period bookcraft. If you have the space, and can do a healthy bench press, this is the kind of educational experience that you could spend a lifetime poring over.

This is a superb book in every way: fine scholarship, painstaking reproduction, beautiful presentation. Nothing else is in the class of the Norton First Folio facsimile. To those who may look askance at the price, I can only say the book is worth every penny. What Heminge and Condell said in "To the great Variety of Readers" about the original Folio is equally applicable to this reproduction: "Iudge your sixe-pen'orth, your shillings worth, your fiue shillings worth at a time, or higher, so you rise to the iust rates, and welcome. But, what euer you do, Buy."

The best resource of it's kind for anyone interested in getting back to the "roots" of Shakespeare. If Amazon allowed half stars, I'd take off half a star for it's price. It's too expensive to be accessible to students, the people who could get the most usage and benefit out of this fantastic book.