One Book to Rule Them All: ‘The King James Version’ of Shakespeare’s Plays

Abstract

ABSTRACT Renaissance clothes were piecemeal assemblages of parts. This pervasive practice is connected to early English theater, which emphasized variety rather than the (neo)classical focus on unity of time, place, action, genre, audience, and affect. Like aging costumes, aging plays could be updated by changing their parts without needing to create or buy something entirely new. Like early modern clothes and costumes, and like the earliest portraits of Shakespeare, the Shakespeare First Folio of 1623 is a heterogeneous miscellany. But for marketing purposes the Folio constructs a series of bibliographical and rhetorical uniformity-effects. The Folio celebrates ‘the great Variety of Readers' but denigrates the great variety of play-texts. Its claims to unity of authorship and condemnation of alternative printings underlie the myth of a unified one-parent canon consisting of one-version and one-date works., which misrepresents early modern composite play-production and its most successful patchwork playwright. To illustrate the complexity of the relationship between early performances and posthumous print, the essay examines in detail the Folio text of The Life of Henry the Fift, re-examining certain Folio-only passages in light of the known performance of the play by the King’s Men at Whitehall for a court audience on 7 January 1605.