# Is "Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (First Folio)" by William Shakespeare a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (First Folio) by William Shakespeare (Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, London, 1623) is identified by: William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. London 1623 only — there is no rival, foreign or original-language first, and the census note is correct that precedence is not in question.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies
- Published according to the True Originall Copies
- London: printed by Isaac Iaggard and Ed
- Blount, 1623; entered in the Stationers' Register 8 November 1623
- The colophon reads 'Printed at the Charges of W. Iaggard, Ed
- Blount, I. Smithweeke, and W. Aspley, 1623.' Folio
- Publisher imprint reads Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, London

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | William Shakespeare |
| Publisher | Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, London |
| Year | 1623 |
| True first | — |
| Format | Hardcover (trade) |
| Key point | William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies |
| Book-club edition exists? | — |

## Points of issue
Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. Published according to the True Originall Copies. London: printed by Isaac Iaggard and Ed. Blount, 1623; entered in the Stationers' Register 8 November 1623. The colophon reads 'Printed at the Charges of W. Iaggard, Ed. Blount, I. Smithweeke, and W. Aspley, 1623.' Folio; 36 plays, 18 of them printed here for the first time. The title-page Droeshout engraving exists in four states, three of which occur in First Folios: state 1 has no shadow behind the head, which appears disconcertingly to float above the collar, and survives in only four recorded impressions (two at the Folger, one at the British Library, one at the Bodleian); state 2 adds the corrective shadow; state 3 adds a line to the pupils and a single strand of hair and is the state found in most copies; state 4 is a re-worked plate cut for the Fourth Folio of 1685. Troilus and Cressida was inserted late after a rights dispute and does not appear in the table of contents; three states are recognised — copies sold without the play; copies with the play but lacking its Prologue and retaining a redundant final page of Romeo and Juliet struck through in pen and ink to mark the leaf for cancellation; and copies with the cancel leaf carrying the Prologue on the recto and a reset first page of the play on the verso. Because proofreading continued during printing, 134 of roughly 900 pages exist in corrected and uncorrected states, so no two copies collate alike and pagination errors are endemic and expected. Roughly 750 copies were printed; 235 are recorded as surviving, including two identified in 2016.

## Is this the true first?
London 1623 only — there is no rival, foreign or original-language first, and the census note is correct that precedence is not in question. What is in question for any copy presented as a First Folio is whether it is a First Folio at all. The later folios are separate editions, not printings: Second Folio, 1632; Third Folio, 1663, with a second issue of 1664 adding seven plays — Pericles (the only one now accepted as Shakespeare's), The London Prodigal, Thomas Lord Cromwell, Sir John Oldcastle, The Puritan, A Yorkshire Tragedy and Locrine; Fourth Folio, 1685 (R. Bentley, E. Brewster, R. Chiswell and H. Herringman). The Third Folio is the scarcest of the four, unsold stock having reportedly burned in the Great Fire of 1666. Genuine First Folios are census-tracked individually copy by copy; a previously unrecorded copy is a significant scholarly event, not a routine find.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
CORRECTION to the census note: there is no Methuen 1902 facsimile. The 1902 facsimile is Sidney Lee's collotype reproduction of the Chatsworth copy in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire, published Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902; Senate House Library's facsimile bibliography records no Methuen facsimile at all. The documented facsimile sequence a donor realistically holds: Francis Douce (London, 1807); Lionel Booth's type reprint (London, 1864); Howard Staunton's photolithographic facsimile (London, 1866); J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps's reduced facsimile (London, 1876, reprinted 1906 — the census note's date is correct); Lee (Clarendon Press, 1902); the Norton Facsimile edited by Charlton Hinman (1968 — the census note's date is correct), which reproduces no single copy but is a composite assembled from about thirty Folger copies, selecting the cleanest and most corrected state of each page; and the Hinman/Blayney Norton second edition (New York, 1996). Also expect disbound single leaves, Second/Third/Fourth Folio fragments, and 20th-century reduced photographic reprints. Any 1623-dated folio should be referred to an ABAA/ILAB specialist or the Folger Shakespeare Library before being described as a First Folio.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (First Folio)* by William Shakespeare a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/mr-william-shakespeares-comedies-histories-tragedies-first-f
CC BY 4.0. Part of the Canonical First-Edition Points of Issue dataset (https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/api/first-edition-titles.json). Last reviewed 2026-07-04.