Shakespeare’s First Folio: the biography of a book

From the first known buyer of Shakespeare’s collected works, the aspirant cavalier Edward Dering, to the international press coverage of a new copy found in a Jesuit library in France, this talk asks how we might write the biography of a book. Professor Emma Smith traces some of the changing values - economic, personal, ideological, aesthetic, literary - the First Folio has attracted at different times, and tries to situate the Senate House Library copies into the story of Shakespeare's work.

Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford, and the author of The Making of the First Folio (2015) and Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (2016).