Shakespeare At The BPL (Part III) : Quick Book List

For the really curious, here’s a list of books they’re showing at the exhibit:

• A First Folio

• Q1 A Midsummer Night’s Dream

• Q1 Merchant of Venice
• Q1 Richard II
• “False Folio” Henry V  (I was unclear from the description exactly what this one’s story was)
• Q2 Hamlet
• 
• ??  Lear (no specific mention, the writeup speaks only of the conflated quarto/folio editions)
• Q1 Much Ado About Nothing, showcasing where the actor Kemp’s name appears in the script instead of Dogberry.
• “Bad Quarto” Pericles, not quite sure what that means
• Benson’s collection of Shakespeare’s Poems (1640), which included some of the sonnets where he apparently changed the pronouns to something more appropriate so that the man would be addressing a woman
• A Third Folio (1664), which includes a number of apocryphal plays including Sir John Oldcastle, and Thomas Lord Cromwell.

• Pope’s 1725 Complete Works (in Six Volumes)

• A handwritten David Garrick (1756) where he has created his own prologue to Winter’s Tale, in which he claims that to remove the first three acts of the play is “to lose no drop of that immortal man.”
• Zachariah Jackson’s 1818 publication on correcting some “700 errors in Shakespeare’s plays.”
• An illustrated Oxford edition from 1770, opened to showcase Lear, III.6
• Illustrated Songs of Shakespeare from 1843, showing As You Like It IV.2
• Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 1513
• Geneva Bible, 1560
• Holinshed’s Chronicles, 1587
• Don Quixote, 1620 (English translation)
  
• As in my previous post, two Samuel Johnsons, and an illustrated edition from America in the 1800s

I think I was most in awe of the Quartos, which contained tiny little details I’d never thought, like how each had a specific printing such as “1598,Valentine Simmes for Andrew Wise, and to be sold at his shop in Paules Churchyard at the sign of the angel.”  Or the “foul” version of Ado that shows Kemp’s name.  I don’t understand why it’s not taken more seriously, I kept hoping somebody would come over and want to talk to me about the different pieces.  Maybe that’s more for museums than libraries, I suppose.