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voice-over: this is bbc news. we will have the headlines for you at the top of the hour, which is straight after this programme. this is a present for you from the british library. that s amazing. i ve just handed david tennant a new copy of a very old book. well, it is fascinating to see it all as it was. first published in 1623, shakespeare s first folio was 400 years old this year. to celebrate, the king and queen played host to an original copy and theatre s royalty, many of whom can thank the folio for their most memorable roles. chatter will these hands ne er be clean? the collection of plays was put together by two of shakespeare s fellow actors seven years after his death. it includes 18 plays that had never been printed before.
shakespeare is the cornerstone of our cultural life in the way that he is. he simply wouldn t exist as part of the kind of national conversation in the way that he does without the first folio. those we would have lost so many of those plays. you know, i m sitting here at the end of my first day of rehearsals for macbeth, a play that s been in performance now for over 400 years, but it wouldn t exist. we wouldn t have a copy of it. and even those that we did have, that we do have other sources for, the folio was the kind of.the prestige edition. and the reason that those plays are still performed around the world, the reason that shakespeare is the cultural colossus that he is, is because that book was published. great glamis. ..worthy cawdor. greater than both by the all hail hereafter.
thank goodness they were written down and thank goodness the first folio exists and that we can re experience them. but that was an unusual thing for. play texts at the time weren t something that you would necessarily expect to have on your bookshelf. before that, they existed and they were called quartos. they were these little sort of big bits of paper folded into quarters and they were like pamphlets and they weren t always necessarily the most faithfully reproduced texts. famously, there s, you know hamlet did exist as a quarto but, famously, it was, to be, or not to be? ay, there s the point. not the line that we expect. again, that s what the first folio gave us. it gave us a sort of an editor s version of what these plays should be because otherwise, they were just passed hand to hand. you know, actors at the time didn t get given full scripts. you got given your own lines, because it was somebody had to write it out by hand! so, these plays kind of existed slightly ephe