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BOOK REVIEW: ‘SHAKESPEARE’S BOOK’ BY CHRIS LAOUTARIS

Posted by StageTalk | 19 Dec 2023

‘Shakespeare’s Book: The Intertwined Lives Behind the First Folio’ by Chris Laoutaris

William Collins 2023

Reviewed by Andrew Hilton

In this 1 st Folio Quatercentenary year, it is appropriate that we should be offered an account of that great book’s provenance and publication, and here Chris Laoutaris provides an exhaustive and meticulously researched one. Though lucidly, even elegantly written, it is not a page-turner, or a candidate for a very large Christmas stocking, but a seriously academic work for the serious student market.

Shakespeare and Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre obsessives – of which I am one – long for human insights into the leading figures of the time; into Shakespeare himself, his leading actor, Richard Burbage, his collaborators and editors, Henry Condell and Richard Heminges, and a host of others – their fellow actors, their playwrights and their audiences; we long for their letters, their conversations, their affairs, their working practices, their tastes, their jealousies and secrets, their gossip; but such material is rare indeed. What we do have is records of financial and legal events – property transactions, loans and debts, disputes in court (and sometimes criminal prosecutions), licences for play publication, playhouse accounts, birth, marriage and death records and – of course – wills.

All these, together with contemporary political events (not least the long protracted, and controversial proposal that crown prince Charles’ should marry the King of Spain’s daughter), Laoutaris has mined to provide a complex picture of the years leading up to the Folio publication in 1623, an event that so easily could not have happened. That would have been at a cost to posterity of eighteen of the plays, including Antony & Cleopatra, As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, The Tempest, Twelfth Night and The Winter’s Tale , none of which had appeared – or have survived – in single, Quarto editions.

We are disabused of any notion that all Heminges and Condell had to do was to reach into the stage management cupboard at the Globe for the pile of prompt copies and hand them over to their chosen printers, Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount. The Globe had retained some of the plays, but the ownership of others was divided between up to a dozen booksellers, stationers and other rights holders. Here we are reminded that authors’ copyright did not exist as we know it today; plays were owned initially by the theatre companies for which they were written, who could hold on to them, or sell them for publication, or as assets. When the Folio project was underway it is believed that a number of these valuable properties were discovered to have been stolen.

So lengthy searches had to be undertaken (which may have taken Heminges and Condell to Stratford to consult the elderly Anne Shakespeare – she was to die months before publication) and deals to be negotiated. A syndicate was formed and sponsors acquired. The costs of the whole print run, supposed to be of 750, were huge. The paper alone, Loutaris estimates, would have cost in today’s money £11,000, and the total cost in the region of £33,000.

How far back the plan reached is uncertain; we shall never know if Shakespeare himself had hoped for it, or given the germ of the idea his blessing before his death in 1616. It seems likely, however, that it was lent impetus by the death of the King’s Men’s leading actor, Richard Burbage, in March 1619. He had towered over the London theatre scene and his death was met with an extraordinary outpouring of grief across the city, occasioning a reminder of the great roles Shakespeare’s had written for him – among others Romeo, Lear, Hamlet, Richard of Gloucester, Macbeth and Othello, as well as Marlowe’s Edward II and Jonson’s Volpone.

The task was formidable; apart from the acquisition of rights and the funding challenge, the editors had to choose between versions of the texts, always remembering that stage practice over several decades, various quarto printings, interventions by the censor, and sometimes the work of other hands than Shakespeare’s own, may have impacted for good or ill on his original intentions. They also had to decide on the sequence – the categories, ‘Comedies, Histories and Tragedies’ are their own – and here Laoutaris speculates interestingly on the choice of The Tempest to begin the volume: was Prospero Shakespeare’s own last performance for the King’s Men, and so celebrated in this way?

All these matters are reviewed in detail, as is the physical process of bringing the Folio into being. There is an evocative and detailed picture of the scene within the Jaggards’ printing shop – the racket and the smell, the compositors’ practices, challenges and errors – when the Folio finally went to press. It was to take two years to complete, all the while Heminges and Condell producing new plays, and the Jaggards taking other commissions. The first recorded sale of the volume was on the 5 th of December 1623, to an Edward Dering, who bought two copies for £2.

Shakespeare’s Book is both detailed and wide-ranging; also beautifully illustrated. Subtitled The Intertwined Lives Behind the First Folio the web of connections it reveals within and beyond the group of syndicalists, editors, and printers cannot be divorced from the urgent events of the day or the principal players in them; and so Laoutaris’ research will be of interest to historians of the period as well as to bibliophiles and Shakespeare enthusiasts. If that sounds a little dry, then I must add that he gets closer to the street in Jacobean London than I have found elsewhere, particularly to the booksellers’ and stationers’ streets in the shadow of St Paul’s, where he acts as the most authoritative and expressive guide.

And what of Richard Heminges and Henry Condell? Our debt to them is incalculable, and yet they are rarely celebrated. Their editorship – rather than just management – of the Folio plays has been questioned, with the Oxford-educated John Florio, now known chiefly for his Elizabethan translations of Montaigne and Boccacio , proposed in their place. Happily, Laoutaris makes no mention of this very questionable hypothesis.

And why weren’t Heminges and Condell up to the job? Because they were actors! Some prejudices never die.

Please drink a toast to Richard and Henry over Christmas!

Andrew Hilton, formerly the Founder & Artistic Director of Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory, is the author of ‘Shakespeare on the Factory Floor’ (Nick Hern Books 2022)

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• Early Theatre: A Journal associated with the Records of Early English Drama

Shakespeare’s Book: The Intertwined Lives Behind the First Folio by Chris Laoutaris (review)

• Early Theatre
• Volume 27, Number 1, 2024
• pp. 135-138
• View Citation

Additional Information

• Shakespeare’s Book: The Intertwined Lives Behind the First Folio by Chris Laoutaris

The year 2023 offered one of the more intriguing Shakespeare anniversaries, intriguing because it celebrated not an individual but a book: the 1623 folio edition of Master William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies , widely known as the first folio. In place of the biographical impulse that propelled much of the commemorative work of 2014 (the 450 th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth) and 2016 (the 400 th anniversary of his death), 2023 centred instead on a bibliographical impulse, encouraging us to think about the role of print publication in the survival and dissemination of Shakespeare’s plays, and about the place of the folio itself within global cultures. This is not to say, however, that the biographical impulse has been absent from 2023’s responses to the events of 1623. This impulse has instead shifted from Shakespeare himself to the people who produced the folio, as Chris Laoutaris’s significant new monograph, Shakespeare’s Book , demonstrates. 1

Mimicking the structure of one of the folio’s plays, with five sections or ‘Acts’, plus a ‘Prologue’ and ‘Epilogue’, Shakespeare’s Book tracks the process of the folio’s genesis, preparation, and publication between 1619 and 1623, also offering a brief discussion of this book’s afterlives. The ‘Prologue’ ponders the circumstances in which Shakespeare’s colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell took on ‘an act of reclamation, conservation and collation that they were expecting the author himself to have undertaken’ (11). The first four ‘Acts’ then each focus on a single year. ‘Act One — 1619’ begins by looking at the circumstances surrounding the death of Richard Burbage in March 1619, which Laoutaris interprets as a ‘catalyst’ for the publication of the first folio. He then looks in detail at two key events of the same year. The first is the production by Thomas Pavier and William Jaggard [End Page 135] of a set of quarto playbooks, mostly with Shakespearean connections, that appear to have been sold as a set and bound together by owners as a collection, the project being variously known as the ‘Pavier Quartos’, the ‘Jaggard Quartos’, and the ‘False Folio’. The second is an edict of May 1619 by the masters and wardens of the Company of Stationers that ‘“no plays that his Majesty’s Players do play shall be printed without consent of some of them”’ (77), which was prompted by a letter from the lord chamberlain, William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, later one of the first folio’s dedicatees. ‘Act Two — 1621’ examines the processes through which the syndicate that published the folio came together, and it begins to examine Anglo-Spanish politics — especially the plan for Prince Charles to marry Infanta Maria Anna of Spain, which eventually collapsed in 1623 — and the late Jacobean court’s performance cultures as contexts for the book’s publication, a line of discussion that continues in the following ‘Acts’.

‘Act Three — 1622’ and ‘Act Four — 1623’ juxtapose the printing of the folio with key events and performances linked with the ‘Spanish Match’, such as Prince Charles and the duke of Buckingham’s voyage to Madrid and the presentation of plays on Spanish themes at the English court. ‘Act Four’ concludes with a detailed account of the marketing and selling of the folio in autumn 1623. ‘Act Five’, subtitled ‘William Shakespeare’s Will in his Book’, pushes into new territory by exploring fresh contexts for the folio in Shakespeare’s biography. In this section’s three chapters, Laoutaris suggests that the choice of writers selected to compose dedicatory verses in the folio may reflect Shakespeare’s own networks in Oxford, London, and Stratford-upon-Avon; speculates that a sonnet ascribed to ‘Cygnus’ in the 1605 edition of Jonson’s Sejanus may have been written by Shakespeare; and plays with the idea that before his death Shakespeare may have been cultivating a stationer named John Robinson as a potential collaborator in printing his plays. The ‘Epilogue’ looks at the publication...

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Shakespeare’s Book: The Story Behind the First Folio and the Making of Shakespeare

• By Chris Laoutaris
• Pegasus Books
• Reviewed by Bob Duffy
• June 7, 2023

A superb account of how the Bard’s compendium came to be.

When he died in 1616, William Shakespeare left behind a circle of prominent admirers: actors, playwrights, poets, and patrons among the nobility and even on the throne. Critically, the circle also included printers and booksellers.

Notable members of this select company, including fellow poet/playwright Ben Jonson, hit upon a singular means of honoring Shakespeare’s memory: publishing a collection of all his plays, an unprecedented tribute. This volume, issued some seven years after his death, has become known as the First Folio, and it’s the subject of Chris Laoutaris’ Shakespeare’s Book , a masterful and engaging study of the circumstances surrounding the volume’s creation, as well as its historical setting and physical production. It’s also impressively readable, written with pace and assurance.

Among the printers and booksellers of the time, a large-format “folio” edition like this was a big deal: only Jonson, among English playwrights, could claim an omnibus folio of his works, but Ben’s volume featured poetry along with plays. Though the literati tended to consider plays as creations of secondary worth, Shakespeare’s folio was to include dramatic works only, a remarkable assertion of their perceived value.

As Laoutaris retells the saga, it’s no surprise that it took the syndicate of Shakespeare’s friends so long to get the First Folio into readers’ hands. Preparing and producing the book required many steps. In the first place, there was Jacobean London’s bureaucracy for registering secure copyright amid the city’s helter-skelter theater culture. What’s more, establishing a text faithful to the Bard’s intent for a given play could itself be challenging, if not befuddling, as widely variant copies were often in circulation. These might include earlier printed versions of single plays, theatrical prompt-books, multiple performance transcriptions, disparate actors’ texts, and even Shakespeare’s own manuscripts or drafts.

As distinct from more compact “quarto” or “octavo” versions — which, due to their unique pre-press requirements, permitted greater economies of scale in the printing process — a folio edition meant a substantially larger finished size and a much heftier price tag. Laoutaris identifies a contemporary buyer, presumably typical, who paid £120 for Shakespeare’s book. In today’s money, this equates to “roughly a year’s wages for the average labourer.” The customer in question, one Thomas Longe, was likely no laborer, at least by trade.

Laoutaris reconstructs each stage in the physical production cycle — editing, pre-press composition, and printing — in clear and fascinating detail. Citing previous analyses, he summarizes how certain identifiable compositors, anonymous but betraying themselves through the traces of their individual technique and vagaries in spelling, personally typeset which of the plays — and even which sections of the plays.

Shakespeare’s Book marshals a wealth of related historical detail, too, illuminating, for instance, how the aspiring publishers of the First Folio — or at least a ruling plurality of them — fine-tuned their endeavor to buttress King James’ foreign policy. Many in the syndicate apparently calculated that the support of the king and his circle, potential dedicatees of the planned folio, was essential to its commercial success. The king was determined to marry his son Charles to the Duenna, the flower of the Spanish royal line.

Known as the “Spanish Match,” this dynastic strategy had become a matter of some controversy among the English public, with many concerned about — and possibly experiencing déjà vu over — the threat of Catholicism creeping back into British life. (The pope, his pontifical gaze on the match, was reportedly polishing up the usual dispensations, should the king ease up on the sanctions against Catholic worship.)

The hoped-for betrothal ultimately fell through (largely in the face of the Duenna’s underwhelming enthusiasm for a Scottish bedmate), but not before the First Folio’s publishers nailed down an order of presentation that hinted at the wisdom of King James’ “treasured Spanish project.” The folio begins with a late play, The Tempest , which “may have been placed as the headline work because, as one scholar put it, the play exemplified ‘conflict resolution through dynastic marriage.’”

Significantly, the compendium concludes with Cymbeline , which, Laoutaris writes, “created a potent narrative arc across the whole volume, resolving on a play which staged an accord between two ancient powers, Britain and Rome, in a manner that must have recalled James I’s vision for a grand Anglo-Spanish union.” While the king’s proposed match went awry, the order of presentation of the plays stayed, with the folio dedicated to two royal advisors who happened to be vocal opponents of the marriage.

Shakespeare’s Book is sure to take its place among this century’s most valuable contributions to Shakespearean studies. By showcasing this unprecedented compilation, Laoutaris draws attention to the First Folio’s importance to our awareness and appreciation of the English language’s premier poet.

Bob Duffy, a reconstituted scholar of the Renaissance who can’t seem to shake the bug, reviews frequently for the Independent.

Support the Independent by purchasing this title via our affliate links: Amazon.com Or through Bookshop.org

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Shakespeare’s Book: The Intertwined Lives Behind the First Folio by Chris Laoutaris Book Review

Shakespeare’s Book is a misleading title, and I’m glad for it. This is not just the story of one great man and his textual legacy. Laoutaris succeeds finding the entwined lives behind the First Folio. In short: there’s more to this book than just a book! From the busy backrooms of London printing shops to the elaborate masques of court, Laoutaris guides his reader through the many echelons of Jacobean London, introducing us to a network of printers, stationers, actors, courtiers, and entrepreneurs. The First Folio is the reader’s reference point as they are introduced to the complex social fabric of Early Modern England. He flexes an extraordinary eye for detail (think the various costs of paper and complexities of Jacobean copyright) whilst always gesturing to the bigger picture: war in Europe, court rivalries, and sectarian unrest. Yet for me, Shakespeare’s Book is at it’s most compelling when Laoutaris traces the human connections behind the Folio. He emphasises the collaborative spirit that produced this text, successfully managing to navigate a complex web of relationships that crisscross a rapidly changing urban environment. There are equal doses of social and material histories, with just enough off-stage drama to balance out the more technical moments of cases and presswork. I would happily recommend this book to anyone with an interest in Early Modern history, literary studies, and Jacobean theatre. Whilst not highly academic, a moderate grounding in some of the period’s major historical developments would make this a swifter read. But Laoutaris’ style is always accessible, and his passion for this moment in literary history is certainly infectious!

Reviewed by George (Assistant to the Education Directors) 

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Shakespeare’s Book: The Story Behind the First Folio and the Making of Shakespeare

Chris laoutaris. pegasus, $29.95 (432p) isbn 978-1-63936-326-1.

Reviewed on: 04/14/2023

Genre: Nonfiction

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Excerpt: "shakespeare's book" by chris laoutaris.

Shakespeare & Beyond

The First Folio is the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, published seven years after his death; without it, 18 of his plays might have been lost to history. But there was another book claiming to be a collection of Shakespeare’s plays that appeared a few years beforehand, as Chris Laoutaris explains in Shakespeare’s Book: The Story Behind the First Folio and the Making of Shakespeare .

This so-called “False Folio” is the focus of the excerpt below, which comes from Chapter 3, “The ‘Pavier-Jaggard Quartos’: A Shakespearean Printing Mystery.”

Chris Laoutaris is a biographer, historian, poet, Shakespeare scholar, and Associate Professor at The Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-Upon-Avon, England. He is the Co-Founder and Co-Chair of the Shakespeare Beyond Borders Alliance and the Co-Founder of the EQUALityShakespeare (EQUALS) initiative. He is also the author of Shakespeare and the Countess: The Battle that Gave Birth to the Globe . Shakespeare’s Book: The Story Behind the First Folio and the Making of Shakespeare is out now from Pegasus Books.

Imagine you are a book browser in 1619. An avid theatregoer, reader and collector of plays, you are drawn to a particularly intriguing volume of eleven bound dramas in the shop identified by the sign of the Half-Eagle and Key in London’s Barbican. At first you think this is much like any other sammelband or ‘nonce’ collection, a gathering of individually printed miscellaneous plays bound together in one volume. But you have a discerning eye and notice something strange.

All but one of these plays appear to be by William Shakespeare, with one by his contemporary Thomas Heywood, but you are sure that at least a couple of the plays identified as being by Shakespeare were in fact written by other playwrights. You notice too that despite the fact that most of these playbooks bear different dates, all bar one of their title pages look alike, boasting the same printer’s device: an emblematic rose and gillyflower within an elaborate flower-and-scroll bestrewn ornamental border, engraved with the Welsh motto ‘HEB DDIEV HEB DDIM’, ‘Without God, Without Anything’. You are sure you have seen the device before, because it belongs to other books printed by the owner-managers of the shop in which you are standing: the outlet attached to the printing house of father and son entrepreneurial team William and Isaac Jaggard. Isaac watches you with suspicion as you leaf through the collection. There is something unsettling about his stare. His father, fifty-two-year-old William, who has been losing his sight for the last seven years and relies ever more on his son’s support with managing the printing business, listens intently as you ask Isaac about the collection. They both seem relieved when, after a brief exchange of pleasantries, you simply pay for the volume and leave the shop without further comment. But you cannot quite shake off the feeling that something is amiss.

What you have purchased would come to be known collectively as the ‘Pavier Quartos’, or more sensationally as the ‘False Folio’; both rather misleading labels, and so they will be referred to here as the ‘Pavier-Jaggard Quartos’ in acknowledgement of the involvement of the two businesses that collaborated in their creation. When this group of plays was initially rediscovered it was thought that it consisted of nine individual editions published in quarto, a quarto being a small single volume containing one or only a few works (so not, in fact, a Folio of any kind), with one of these containing two plays. These were The Whole Contention between the Two Famous Houses, Lancaster and York , with no date on its title page; Pericles , dated 1619; A Yorkshire Tragedy , dated 1619; The Merchant of Venice , dated 1600; The Merry Wives of Windsor , dated 1619; King Lear , dated 1608; Henry V , dated 1608; The Life of Sir John Oldcastle , dated 1600; and A Midsummer Night’s Dream , dated 1600. The Whole Contention is in fact two plays printed together continuously, what came to be called Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3 in the First Folio. A Yorkshire Tragedy and The Life of Sir John Oldcastle are attributed to Shakespeare in this collection but are now believed not to have been written by him. As more recent scholarship has shown, Thomas Heywood’s play, A Woman Killed with Kindness , was also included in some bindings of this collection when it originally went on sale. Five of the playbooks attributed to Shakespeare indicated on their title pages that they were ‘printed for T.P.’, the initials of the stationer Thomas Pavier who would become known among Shakespeare scholars as a ‘notorious piratical publisher’.

In 1908 the bibliographer and early First Folio scholar W.W. Greg made a startling announcement. Having examined the watermarks and the provenance of the paper stocks used in the printing of this peculiar series of playbooks, originally discovered by fellow bibliographer Alfred W. Pollard in two sammelbands , he concluded that they had all been issued in the same year, 1619, and by the same press: that of William and Isaac Jaggard. Furthermore, some of these plays had false imprints, with The Merchant of Venice , A Midsummer Night’s Dream , King Lear, Henry V and The Life of Sir John Oldcastle all deceptively dated. He also drew attention to the fact that The Whole Contention and Pericles had continuous signatures – the letters and numbers that appeared at the bottom of the pages in many early printed books, primarily as guides to pressworkers, but which functioned much as page numbers. This indicated that this set of dramatic works had originally been intended to form one large volume of consecutively paginated plays, but that the publisher or printer had, for some unknown reason, changed his mind during the printing process and instead devised a devilish scheme that would make them look as if they were individual playbooks that had been printed at different times. Since Pavier’s initials were emblazoned on most of these works, Greg blamed the stationer for instigating this ‘rather shady bit of business’, for ‘falsifying the dates’ on the plays with the intention of hoodwinking the King’s Men who, he imagined, must have ‘conceived their rights to have been invaded’. Because these plays had been hiding their collective printing by a single press – since William Jaggard’s name was not actually included on any of the works’ imprints – the ‘Pavier-Jaggard Quartos’ became an infamous part of Shakespeare’s legacy. Subsequently they were related directly to the printing history of the First Folio because they looked like the very first, but aborted, attempt to create a ‘Shakespeare collection’ in one volume. Early scholars were quick to associate Heminges and Condell’s complaint, in their epistle to the reader that they printed with the Folio in 1623, with the ‘Pavier-Jaggard Quartos’:

[W]e pray you, do not envy his [Shakespeare’s] Friends, the office of their care, and pain, to have collected and published them; and so to have published them, as where (before) you were abused with diverse stolen, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious imposters, that exposed them: even those, are now offered to your view cured, and perfect of their limbs, and all the rest, absolute in their numbers as he [Shakespeare] conceived them.

Heminges and Condell claim that the world had been ‘abused’ with fraudulent copies of the plays that had been issued in unauthorised piratical editions. This turns the First Folio into a rescue operation, restoring Shakespeare’s works to some kind of original, pure state. As will become clear, their insistence that the Folio offers perfected works ‘absolute’ as Shakespeare ‘conceived them’ is straining the truth. But what is significant here is the suggestion that the First Folio was, somehow, righting an earlier wrong that had ‘abused’ both Shakespeare’s works and reputation through the illicit printing of ‘stolen’ plays in inadequate, ‘maimed, and deformed’ versions.

But if this was the case, then why and how did William and Isaac Jaggard become two of the primary syndicate members of the First Folio shortly after the printing of the ‘Pavier-Jaggard Quartos’? Were the plays issued collaboratively by Pavier and the Jaggards really illegal in the first place and was Pavier the mastermind behind the ‘False Folio’ and the unscrupulous, piratical publisher that early bibliographers and historians of the First Folio made him out to be?

Excerpted from Shakespeare’s Book: The Story Behind the First Folio and the Making of Shakespeare by Dr. Chris Laoutaris. Published by Pegasus Books, April 2023.

Don’t miss our interview with the author on the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast.

Publishing Shakespeare's First Folio, with Chris Laoutaris

Chris Laoutaris talks with our podcast about Shakespeare’s Book: The Story Behind the First Folio and the Making of Shakespeare, which re-examines everything we thought we knew about the publication of the First Folio.

More about the First Folio

Learn more about the history of this 1623 book, and what it contains, and why it’s so important.

Shakespeare First Folio

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Table of Contents

• Rave and Reviews

About The Book

About the author.

Dr. Chris Laoutaris is a biographer, historian, poet, Shakespeare scholar, and Associate Professor at The Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-Upon-Avon, England. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Countess: The Battle that Gave Birth to the Globe, which was shortlisted for the Tony Lothian Prize for Biography, was an London Observer Book of the Year, a Daily Telegraph Book of the Year, one of the New York Post ’s "Must-Read Books.” Laoutaris is the recipient of the Morley Medal in English, the Ker Memorial Prize in English, and his first poetry collection, Bleed and See was shortlisted for the Eric Gregory Poetry Awards. He is the Co-Chair of the Shakespeare Beyond Borders Alliance and Co-Founder of the EQUALityShakespeare (EQUALS) initiative.

Product Details

• Publisher: Pegasus Books (April 25, 2023)
• Length: 560 pages
• ISBN13: 9781639363261

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Raves and Reviews

"A fabulous book about the making of Shakespeare’s first folio, Chris Laoutaris’s Shakespeare’s Book . It’s about the community around Shakespeare, his patrons, and his publisher. He’s seen as a solitary genius but this book makes clear how much went into the making of Shakespeare the author."

– Deborah Harkness, author of A Discovery of Witches , for  The  Boston Globe

" Shakespeare's Book is an exquisitely crafted volume, the result of such painstaking and extensive research that it could be compared with the creation of the First Folio itself. The famous playwright is just one of a dazzling cast of characters from the theatrical, social and political world of Jacobean England who are brought vividly to life in the narrative. Beautifully written and utterly compelling, it echoes the drama and intrigue of a Shakespeare play."

– Tracy Borman, author of Anne Boleyn & Elizabeth I: The Mother & Daughter Who Changed History

"This is Shakespearean scholarship at its best, brilliantly researched yet compulsively readable. It's a book for our times, enduringly fascinating and appealing to both enthusiasts and the general reader. Highly recommended!"

– Alison Weir,  New York Times  bestselling author 

"A richly detailed labour of love."

– Financial Times  "Best Summer Books 2023"

" Shakespeare’s Book , a new history of the men who created the First Folio... Those seeking to learn more about the history of the First Folio could do no better than to read Laoutaris’s book: it is lively and impeccably researched."

– Prospect Magazine

" Shakespeare’s Book shines a brilliant light. Meticulously researched and compellingly conveyed, Shakespeare’s Book sits comfortably alongside the likes of Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World and James Shapiro’s 1599 as a Shakespeare study that manages to be edifying and entertaining in equal measure. Mr. Laoutaris brings vividly alive the many individuals involved in the Folio by way of illuminating potted biographies. His book as a whole is a richly informative account of what he calls ‘one of the most significant conservation projects in history.’”

– The Wall Street Journal

" Shakespeare’s Book by Chris Laoutaris is a must read for anyone with even a slight passing fancy for Shakespeare. These characters come to life as the result of Laoutaris’ in-depth research into the backgrounds and politics of each. To say this is a book to be read and reread, and have a place on the library shelf, would be a major understatement."

– New York Journal of Books

"Like Shakespeare’s plays, Laoutaris’s book revolves around detailed interpersonal relationships. From his pages, you will learn about the lives of Heminges and Condell, the Folio’s main patrons, and many others, including Shakespeare’s friend and rival Ben Jonson and the various minor poets who offered praise of the book and its author."

– Michael Dirda,  The Washington Post

“Mr. Laoutaris traces the tangled negotiations that led to [the] acquisition of printing rights for the 22 plays the King’s Men did not control. His resourceful sleuthing ties the Folio’s birth to the politics of its time.”

– The Economist

"[A] masterful and engaging study.... impressively readable, written with pace and assurance... Shakespeare's Book is sure to take its place among this century's most valuable contributions to Shakespearean studies. By showcasing this unprecedented compilation, Laoutaris draws attention to the First Folio's importance to our awareness and appreciation of the English language's premier poet."

– Washington Independent Review of Books

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SHAKESPEARE AND THE COUNTESS

The battle that gave birth to the globe.

by Chris Laoutaris ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 2015

Intrepid research translates into a sometimes-intriguing narrative stuffed with mystifying detail.

The dense story of the 1596 endeavor by a powerful, litigious countess to block the opening of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Theatre in London.

A piece of choice London real estate sent Countess Elizabeth Russell (1528-1609), one of the most learned and fiercely Puritan women in late-16th-century Europe, to petition Queen Elizabeth I’s Privy Council to prevent the opening of the Blackfriars, commanded by the playwright, his troupe, the Chamberlain’s Men, and their patron, George Carey. British Shakespeare scholar and lecturer Laoutaris ( Shakespearean Maternities: Crises of Conception in Early Modern England , 2008) gets swept up in the overwhelming detail concerning these characters and their connections—e.g., Elizabeth’s two deceased husbands, one the ambassador to France, Thomas Hoby, the author of the influential  Book of the Courtier , which Shakespeare would draw on; the other, John Russell, also a radical nonconformist more than a decade her junior. It was Hoby’s family property in the Blackfriars (formerly a monastery campus) that Elizabeth inhabited from 1570 onward, next to the Office of the Queen’s Revels, the hub of London’s theatrical district and an area that drew immigrant refugees from the ongoing wars of religion. These residents would support Elizabeth’s cause, and there was also the matter that Shakespeare frequently waded into explosive political material in many of his plays—e.g., in his flattery of the queen’s former favorite – turned-traitor, the Earl of Essex, in  Richard II . When Elizabeth presented her document to the Privy Council, warning of “all manner of vagrant and lewd persons” consorting with the playhouse, she managed to secure the signatures of Shakespeare’s patron and his publisher, Richard Field. Plodding painstakingly through the research, Laoutaris reveals how Elizabeth's petition exploited the uneasy social conditions created by recent inflation and civil unrest. However, when one door closed, another opened—namely, Shakespeare’s legendary run at the new playhouse, the Globe.

Pub Date: June 15, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-60598-792-7

Page Count: 528

Publisher: Pegasus

Review Posted Online: March 4, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015

HISTORY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

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by David Grann

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BOOK TO SCREEN

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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From the publisher

'A lively picture of multiple operators scrambling to steal a march on the competition . . . Lavishly detailed' FINANCIAL TIMES 'This is Shakespearean scholarship at its best, brilliantly researched yet compulsively readable. It's a book for our times, enduringly fascinating and appealing to both enthusiasts and the general reader. Highly recommended!' ALISON WEIR FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE SUMMER A BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 A BBC RADIO 4 FRONT ROW NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 AN AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 The year 2023 marks the 400th anniversary of Mr William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, known today simply as the First Folio. It is difficult to imagine a world without The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale and Macbeth, but these are just some of the plays that were only preserved thanks to the astounding labour of love that went into creating the first collection. Shakespeare's Book: The Intertwined Lives Behind the First Folio charts, for the first time, the manufacture of the First Folio against a turbulent backdrop of seismic political events and international tensions that intersected with the lives of its creators. Shakespeare scholar Dr Chris Laoutaris uncovers the friendships, bonds, social ties and professional networks that facilitated the production of Shakespeare ' s book, as well as the personal challenges, tragedies and dangers that threatened its completion. And he considers how Shakespeare himself, before his death, may have influenced the ways in which his own public identity would come to be enshrined in the First Folio, shaping the transmission of his legacy to future generations and determining how the world would remember him 'not of an age, but for all time'. 'Beautifully written and utterly compelling... comprises all the drama, intrigue and surprises of a Shakespeare play' Tracy Borman

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Shakespeare’s Book: The Intertwined Lives Behind the First Folio Hardcover – 30 Mar. 2023

‘A lively picture of multiple operators scrambling to steal a march on the competition . . . Lavishly detailed’ FINANCIAL TIMES

‘This is Shakespearean scholarship at its best, brilliantly researched yet compulsively readable. It's a book for our times, enduringly fascinating and appealing to both enthusiasts and the general reader. Highly recommended!’ ALISON WEIR

FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE SUMMER

A BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

A BBC RADIO 4 FRONT ROW NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

AN AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

The year 2023 marks the 400th anniversary of Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies , known today simply as the First Folio. It is difficult to imagine a world without The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale and Macbeth , but these are just some of the plays that were only preserved thanks to the astounding labour of love that went into creating the first collection.

Shakespeare’s Book: The Intertwined Lives Behind the First Folio charts, for the first time, the manufacture of the First Folio against a turbulent backdrop of seismic political events and international tensions that intersected with the lives of its creators. Shakespeare scholar Dr Chris Laoutaris uncovers the friendships, bonds, social ties and professional networks that facilitated the production of Shakespeare ’ s book, as well as the personal challenges, tragedies and dangers that threatened its completion. And he considers how Shakespeare himself, before his death, may have influenced the ways in which his own public identity would come to be enshrined in the First Folio, shaping the transmission of his legacy to future generations and determining how the world would remember him ‘not of an age, but for all time’.

‘Beautifully written and utterly compelling… comprises all the drama, intrigue and surprises of a Shakespeare play' Tracy Borman

• Print length 560 pages
• Language English
• Publisher William Collins
• Publication date 30 Mar. 2023
• Dimensions 15.9 x 4.9 x 24 cm
• ISBN-10 0008238383
• ISBN-13 978-0008238384
• See all details

From the Publisher

Product description

PRAISE FOR SHAKESPEARE’S BOOK

‘A superb evocation of the places, personalities and networks that helped turn the words of William Shakespeare into secular scripture. A brilliant, sinewy, deeply immersive read from a fine scholar and storyteller’ Jessie Childs, bestselling author of The Siege of Loyalty House

'[A] significant offering… his mission is admirable: to trace every major step in the collective enterprise, starting from the death of the leading Shakespearean actor Richard Burbage in 1619, which served as a melancholy spur… to collate the Bard's works for posterity… [T]he necessary drama is there' Daily Telegraph

‘Laoutaris’s history of the interlinked careers behind the Folio scheme, brings that network to life . . . His resourceful sleuthing ties the Folio’s birth to the politics of its time’ Economist

'Like Shakespeare's plays, Laoutaris's book revolves around detailed interpersonal relationships. From his pages you will learn about the lives of Heminges and Condell… and many others… trestfy[ing] to the thoroughness of the author's research’ Washington Post

'A must read for anyone with even a slight passing fancy for Shakespeare . . . To say this is a book to be read and reread, and have a place on the library shelf, would be a major understatement’ Judith Reveal, New York Journal of Books

‘[A] brilliant new study of the Folio’s genesis … genuinely thrilling. Shakespeare’s Book offers both wonderful vignettes of Shakespeare’s world and tantalising solutions to long-standing mysteries. Laoutaris compellingly recreates the vital collaborations – and rivalries – behind the printing of ‘Shakespeare’s Book’’ The Tablet

‘Intricately woven, vividly depicted and groundbreaking’ Dr Paul Edmondson of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust

About the Author

Laoutaris is the recipient of the Morley Medal in English and the Ker Memorial Prize in English. He has reviewed for many academic publishers and journals; has written for the Financial Times, Sunday Express, Times Higher Education Supplement, and BBC History Magazine, among others; and has provided historical and Shakespearean consultancy to the Royal Shakespeare Company and numerous film and documentary production companies.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ William Collins (30 Mar. 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 560 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0008238383
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0008238384
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.9 x 4.9 x 24 cm
• 446 in Stage Actor Biographies
• 762 in Drama & Dramatists
• 890 in Criticism on Poetry & Poets

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Chris laoutaris.

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9780008238384

Chris Laoutaris

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Shakespeare's Book Hardcover – January 1, 2023

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• Print length 368 pages
• Language English
• Publisher William Collins
• Publication date January 1, 2023
• Dimensions 6.26 x 1.93 x 9.45 inches
• ISBN-10 0008238383
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Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ William Collins (January 1, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0008238383
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0008238384
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.85 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.26 x 1.93 x 9.45 inches
• Best Sellers Rank: #9,095,303 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books )

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Opinion: Why Americans love scary stories — none of them scarier than our own

• Copy Link URL Copied!

Book Review

American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond

By Jeremy Dauber Algonquin Books: 480 pages, $32 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

American history is kind of terrifying: Native American genocide, slavery and witch trials; the Civil War, the Great Depression and Vietnam; AIDS, 9/11 and COVID. As Jeremy Dauber writes at the start of his casually magisterial, endlessly erudite “American Scary,” “You can write America’s history by tracking the stories it tells itself to unsettle its dreams, rouse its anxieties, galvanize its actions.” He then does just that, analyzing nearly 400 years of scary literature, film, comic books, television, video games, urban legends and just about anything else that might haunt you on a sleepless night.

One sign of Dauber’s sense of purpose is that cinema doesn’t even enter the picture until page 135. By then, the author has taken us on a lively tour of Salem-inspired literature, slave narratives (”Slavery was part of the American story from the beginning, and of course, it is a horror story”) and the likes of Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ann Radcliffe (a massive influence on Gothic fiction in America even though she was British) and many of their lesser-known peers. And he’s just getting warmed up.

Marching through the centuries, Dauber nimbly matches real-life calamities with fictional horrors. But he never loses sight of the imagination, that essential ingredient of stories about frightful phenomena both classical (vampires, werewolves) and modern (nuclear annihilation, the internet).

Opinion: The world is scarier than Halloween. I found refuge in Black horror stories

Black horror warns us of what humanity is capable of — what racism is capable of inflicting onto Black and brown bodies.

Oct. 28, 2023

This is a book that could launch a thousand reading lists and syllabi. But Dauber, who has also written histories of comic books and Jewish humor, never strangles the fun out of fear.

He’s the best kind of cultural historian, one who does an epic amount of research to make the big picture accessible. We see this in both the byways he chooses to travel and the wit and language he uses to describe them.

Take, for example, his account of the 1952 EC Comics story “ ’Taint the Meat … It’s the Humanity!” about a butcher who rakes in profits by selling rotten meat that ends up killing his own kid along with his customers. His wife finds out and takes matters into her own hands. “Actually,” Dauber writes, “she takes the butcher’s cleaver into those hands, chops her husband up into little tiny pieces, and stocks those pieces in the meat display case for our distress-slash-delectation.”

A queen of horror delivers more delightfully twisted stories

In her latest short story collection, Argentine writer Mariana Enríquez offers haunting imagery and a sharp focus on mental, physical and economic ruin.

Sept. 9, 2024

Dauber sees American horror as falling into two categories that sometimes overlap. One is “the fear of something grand, something cosmic” — an enraged God or maybe a creature conjured by the macabre master H.P. Lovecraft. The other — or Other — is the perceived “monster located right next door. … Indigenous tribes. Black people. Immigrants. And always, always women: witches and sirens, painted as emasculators in so many different stripes. All reminding the audience of the ugly monster that lies within themselves, from the monstrous double of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘William Wilson’ to Penn Badgley’s Netflix serial killer series, titled, simply, ‘You.’ Not to be confused with Jordan Peele’s 2019 meditation on the horror double, called ‘Us.’ ”

Dauber, a professor of Yiddish language, literature and culture at Columbia University, isn’t just whipping out handy references when they serve him. He connects the dots and drills into themes that run through not merely American horror but also American culture writ large.

Horror, more than most genres, captures societal anxieties and converts them into entertainment. As Nazism made inroads both abroad and at home in the 1930s and ’40s, the werewolf served as a symbol of “seemingly innocuous people, civilized, friendly, turning into homicidal beasts.” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” about a housewife going mad as her physician husband looks on condescendingly, speaks across the 20th century to “The Stepford Wives,” Ira Levin’s 1972 novel (and the basis of movies in 1975 and 2004) in which a Connecticut suburb’s independent-minded women are turned into compliant drones.

“American Scary” is laden with such “Aha!” moments, and though it seems to define its subject broadly, it’s possible that we have come to define it too narrowly. American horror truly is everywhere. It was on our cellphone screens as we stared at the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and on our TV screens as we witnessed the carnage of Vietnam in the 1960s and ’70s. All that bad karma has to go somewhere.

Such ideas have been explored by other capable writers, including Robin Wood and Carol J. Glover (both of whom are cited in “American Scary”). But I’m not sure whether anyone has approached the task with Dauber’s combination of thoroughness, lucidity and wit.

Many pop culture books amount to deathly dull fan service. Some are enlightening but narrow. And a few are expansive and revelatory. “American Scary” lands, resoundingly, in that last category.

My advance copy, well-traveled and tenaciously thumbed through and underlined, looks as if a knife-wielding psycho or razor-fanged beast had its way with it. It’s even partially dismembered: The front cover came off due to excessive use and is now being used as a bookmark. I could be accused of this violence, but I would face my accusers with a wicked grin.

Speaking of “Wicked,” the hit musical that is the fourth-longest-running Broadway show of all time (and a potential big-screen blockbuster come November), gets its due here. So do “The Blair Witch Project,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “The Last of Us” and, of course, the ever-looming colossus of American horror, Stephen King — whose own book about the history of his genre, “Danse Macabre,” was published in 1981.

A lot of horrible things have happened since then, in fiction and in reality. As Dauber so deftly explains, the line between the two realms can be frighteningly fine.

Chris Vognar is a freelance culture writer.

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