Shakespeare First Folios: A Checklist
Books Let's formalise things. Since it looks like my latest mad project is going to be looking at all the extant First Folios either in person or on a screen, find after the fold a complete list of all the First Folios in existence as per Eric Rasmussen and Anthony James West's The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue. Their version offers a bit more geographical detail but this list has been simplified for ease of use. After each location you'll see that they're marked depending on whether the linked blog post talks about a Folio I've seen in the real world [RW], on screen [S]. I've also linked to a complete digital version [complete] where available and partial [partial] when it's just a page or two or the binding. It's unlikely I'll be able to tick all of them off (especially if they're in a vault somewhere), but it's a finite goal.
Shakespeare's First Folio on Screen:
A Bodleian Library Folio (32).
Books Twelve Books That Changed The World (2006) is a book and four part ITV documentary series in which Melvyn Bragg highlights a series of British volumes which he thinks, have had the most profound effect on humanity. There are the obvious choices: On The Origin of Species, The King James Bible, Principia Mathematica and the Magna Carta. The more specific choices: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Married Love, On the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Experimental Researches in Electricity and The Wealth of Nations. The probably aimed at the channel's core audience: Book of Rules of Association Football.
Over the years I've been hoarding documentaries about Shakespeare and found this on a DVD-R which I must have recorded off-air at the time. This would have been in the period when I was recording from a separate Freeview box direct to disc so everything is in the wrong aspect ratio (which is also why all the screenshots on here look a bit weird). It opens with a trailer for GMTV followed by an advert for digital switchover to offer some historic context and includes weather forecast which probably also captures perfectly what life was like in the UK in 2006:
The grand finale is the First Folio. There's not much you can do with ten minutes of screen time, so Melvyn offers a brief outline of how the book was published, a mix of scenes from the plays (mainly sourced from the BBC Shakespeare although there's a bit of Branagh and Kurosawa sprinkled in) and contributions from Yale University's Professor Harold Bloom and the then Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library Dr. Gail Paster who aid Melvyn in collectively offering a general sense of the historical importance of the Folio in the development of the English language. There's also a nice moment when some international acting students translate the text into their own language.
There are actually three different Folios in the programme (four if you count a facsimile used when Melvyn's quoting from the preface). Dr Paster has one of the Folger copies on the desk beside her, but its in profile and there's not enough visual information to work out which one. There's a single shot of the contents page of a folio which isn't the one seen elsewhere (we'll get to that). Despite having an unfolded crease down the middle I've not been able to identify from Rasmussen and West's catalogue The Shakespeare First Folios which copy this is from. The third is the one which is the reason why we're here.
The Bodleian Library has two Folios of which this is probably the more photogenic. The other, Bodleian Library Arch. G c.7 is the original deposit copy sent by the Folio's printmaker William Jaggard to the library. There's much to be said about how it was sold off as worthless to a local bookseller when the Third Folio was published in 1664 and only returned to Oxford in the early 1900s after they outbid the Folger library. That copy doesn't appear on screen because as you can see from the digital scan it was not taken care of to say the least with whole chunks of the pages torn out. The section listing its condition in Rasmussen and West's catalogue stretches to three and a half pages.
The digital scan of the copy which does appear, Bodleian Library Arch. G c.8 also has had a difficult life but at least the relevant pages are intact and for the most part looks very impressive on the table in front of Melvyn. I was ultimately able to confirm which copy it was because a shot of title page include a partial glimpse of the opposite side where the "To the Reader" usually appears has been pasted in from another source, a Fourth Folio edition if the pencil note underneath is to be believed. The title pages from Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet which are shown also match this copy, the latter notably because of a burn mark at the top of the page.
The history of this folio is pretty straightforward. The provenance begins with eighteenth-century literary scholar Edmond Malone (there's a Reynolds portrait of him on his Wikipedia page), a man after my own heart who devoted part of his life to trying to deducing the order in which Shakespeare wrote his plays. This was published in the complete works edited by Samuel Johnson and George Steenvens in 1778, an order which is still largely followed. Malone later fell out with Steevens, notably when he published his own complete works which he said would be "more scientifically and methodically edited than the Johnson–Steevens edition was ever likely to become."
As part of his research Malone collected many books including the Folio, although it's not known where he procured it in 1780. He treated it as a working copy and/or scrap book and there are notes about the nature of the play strewn throughout, various engravings of luminaries like the Earl of Pembroke pasted in and a facsimile of Shakespeare's signature. How much of this was Malone or the previous owner isn't clear although its pretty startling to see a Folio treated in this way. On one page Malone has even included in what's supposed to be an engraving of Shakespeare taken from the Steevens' complete works with a note underneath explaining that it's not actually the playwright, but James I.
On his death, he left a lengthy instruction to his brother Richard, Lord Sunderlin, that the lot be given to Trinity College Dublin. But Richard was an Oxford man, so decided to ignore all that. He initially loaned the collection to James Boswell The Younger, son of Samuel Johnson's biographer who was working on the second edition of the Johnson/Steeven complete works. After Boswell died, Richard finally deposited the Elizabethan books including the First Folio to the Bodleian in 1821 and auctioned off the rest. It's been there ever since, appearing in two Shakespeare exhibitions in 1916 and 1964.
But what about the contents page? Although the Bodleian edition is in pretty good order, the box at the bottom of the page contains a note from Malone in which he noticed how Troilus and Cressida seems have have been a late addition, which is a bit too much detail for a fifteen minute segment about the book late night on an ITV Sunday. Two Oxford Colleges, Queens and Wadham both have their own copies but the entries in The Shakespeare First Folio don't mention the crease you can see above and best will in the world I'm not going through the rest of the book trying to match it. Perhaps it was filmed as a pick-up when the crew visited the Folger library?
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"Tonight, the 1990s sitcom whose title spelled out exactly what the audience saw: Men Behaving Badly, featuring contributions from producer Beryl Vertue, writer Simon Nye and stars Martin Clunes and Leslie Ash."[BBC Sounds]
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"Just before Christmas 2005, I find myself on the phone to Robert Bathurst. He’s doing the usual promotional rounds, having been press-ganged into talking up his imminent role in The Comic Strip revival “Sex Actually“."[Off The Telly]
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"Radio 1 entered the 1990s maintaining its position as Britain’s most popular radio network, held over the previous two decades, but in a short period of time, the station had become a national object of ridicule, excellently epitomised by Harry Enfield’s astutely created characters Smashey and Nicey."[Transdiffusion]
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The Downside of Disney+
Doctor Who is set to make an explosive return on 11 May.The TARDIS will make its global premiere around the Whoniverse and for those in the UK, for the first time ever, the Doctor will land with two episodes premiering on BBC iPlayer at 00:00 on Saturday, before arriving on BBC One later that day right before the Eurovision Song Contest Grand Final.At the same time, those outside of the UK can watch the Doctor and Ruby on their epic adventures as the TARDIS is set to land on Disney+ where available.Viewers in the UK will now be able to watch whenever and wherever they choose, with the option to watch from midnight on BBC iPlayer or tune in at primetime on Saturday nights on BBC One.
A History of the BBC in 100 Blog Posts: 1991
Places
"Midlands Today prepares for a move to a new studio, and the introduction of a separate news programme for the East Midlands."[BBC Rewind]
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"Noel’s House Party: A Decade Of Crinkley Bottom - some highlights from the archives, produced by Richard Latto."NHP began this year and this (perhaps little seen) clip show was created specially for the History of the BBC website.[BBC Clips]
"Nickelodeon asked me for ideas. I thought, All I do right now is watch my four and 15-month year old kids go to the bathroom."[The Guardian]
"In the early summer of 1991 I was coming to the end of my degree course at the then Nottingham Polytechnic and found myself killing a few hours in its library whilst nervously awaiting my results. As I leafed through the day’s broadsheets, trying desperately to distract myself from my anxiety, I came across an article which caught my eye and excited me."[Off The Telly]
"Revisiting Stephen Gallagher’s Chimera, an early 90s TV mini-series exploring the perilous consequences when scientific advancement meets government corruption…"[Horrified Magazine]
"One thing I’ve become vaguely obsessed with over the past year is how often the things that “everyone” knows about a TV show turn out to be incorrect. Of course, by “everyone”, I don’t actually mean everyone. The person on the street doesn’t mutter Brittas Empire TX dates as they go about their shopping. At least not in my local Tesco."[Dirty Feed]
"Although Thunderbirds had premiered on British television back in 1965 and would be repeated several times over the next two decades, the fragmented regional makeup of the British television landscape of the time meant that different regions would see different episodes airing at different times – with some regions receiving more broadcasts than others."[The Official Gerry Anderson Website]
"Some people probably think I compile lists of recording dates for sitcoms in lieu of having anything interesting to say about them. These people are entirely correct. Nonetheless, as I’ve just had a delightful time watching the whole run on iPlayer, let’s take a look at Series 1 of Andrew Marshall’s brilliant 2point4 children."[Dirty Feed]
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From Blondie to Lulu: The songs the BBC banned during the Gulf War
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[Far Out Magazine]
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"When the Gulf War broke out in 1991, the BBC acted with responsibility."
[Far Out Magazine]
David Bordwell RIP.
Obituaries There are only a few figures in life that have been as important to be as film theorist and historian David Bordwell, who left us on the 1st March. I really began taking film serious in the mid-90s, but it wasn't until the mid-00s when I was exposed to his work through my MA course that I really understood how films were structured, how they worked as an art form. Unlike other writers, he and his wife Kristen Thompson had the ability to make even the most esoteric concepts accessible and if you're at all interested in film, I'd point you towards any edition of Film Art (earlier editions are much cheaper and just as valid) and their blog.
On that blog, Kristen writes movingly about his final days. The last thing he watched was a couple of episodes of The West Wing:
"He wanted to die at home rather than spending his last days at a hospice facility, and he did. I was with him. It was brief, and I don’t think he suffered. It happened within a few months of the fiftieth anniversary of when we moved in together in the summer of 1974. He was as wonderful a spouse as he was a scholar and a friend."
The post includes an obituary from the university he worked with quotes from Damien Chazelle and David Koepp. If there's any justice, he'll be included in the Oscar obituary reel.
The Eighth Doctor (Whotopia: The Ultimate Guide To The Whoniverse)
Books The cornerstone of BBC Books's 60th anniversary efforts, Whotopia is part of the legacy of Doctor Who reference books taking the effort right up to The Power of the Doctor, on this occasion resolutely sticking to the fiction rather than production. Perhaps sensing that having a printed book containing this information is a bit old fashioned when WOTAN's successor is out there (not to mention every episode on the iPlayer), the authors, Jonathan Morris, Simon Guerrier and Una McCormack's twist is to have many of the mentioned individuals provide first person testimony for themselves in character, "incoming messages" mixing new material and dialogue straight from the show.
As with so many of these projects its obviously an act of love and joy for this silly old series and that's reflected in the quarter page entry for Eighth, half a page if you include the publicity shot for Night of the Doctor. This being an official publication, it's only allowed to reference the top and tail of his story so we find him wistfully reflecting on his regeneration and how alive he feels, not that there isn't an Easter egg for us long terms fans, "I think that's what's different about me. The joy of life" (unless it's entirely co-incidental). The business ends rather sharply but sweetly and feels entirely in character, which is why I'm "reviewing" it here and trying to think of a ...
Placement: Let's sneak it in after The Eight Doctors. Perhaps he's chatting with Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam.
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A three part history of the show until 2005 when this was originally posted.[Off The Telly]
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"They were looking for someone who could speak Penguinese. I needed the money."[The Guardian]
"In one particularly arch episode of Yes, Prime Minister, Jim Hacker is seen lecturing his Private Secretary Bernard Woolley on the options open to an MP seeking to avoid answering a question."[Off The Telly]
"When I first read the script, I was only 55 and I thought, God, I’m not ready to play old people yet."[The Guardian]
"This fourth edition features Richard Herring and Sarah Smith looking at radio comedy in the early 1990s, when they were both starting out in - Sarah was the producer who gave Richard his first commission."[BBC Sounds]
"The 1990s was a time of youthful self-confidence in British culture."[The Poetry Archive]
"The BBC had a new series to schedule. Star Trek: The Next Generation finally appeared on BBC2 on 26 September 1990; almost exactly three years after Encounter At Farpoint premièred on 28 September 1987."[Space Doubt]
"Charles Runcie, an editor on Radio 5 Live when it launched 25 years ago, remembers the build-up to what was a brand-new BBC radio concept."[BBC Archive]
Politics
Romola On Walking.
People From The Guardian this week on the occasion of her appearing in Nachtland at the Young Vic. It's about a decision to sell or burn a Hitler painting or as the interviewer points out, what Channel 4 did a couple of years ago. On a lighter note:
"I go on very long walks, sometimes a whole day on my own. I walk around London, I walk around the Downs, I’ll sometimes just walk for miles in the countryside. Last year, I went to Paris and did a two-day walk. I just find it very soothing. Also, particularly as I get older, I’m feeling more communist!"
What's happened to the Doctor Who Annual?
Books In the past week I've finally managed to get my hands on a copy of this year's Doctor Who Annual thanks to Blackwells. It's fair to say I was whelmed. Again. Now I'm obviously not the target audience for these volumes, anyone over the age of ten probably isn't, but compared to the editions of even yesterday it feels threadbare, particularly in the area of original fiction.
Amid the factual pieces and games there's a charming single story which allows veteran writer Steve Cole to tick the fourteenth Doctor off his list, one of the rare few. A version of the Doctor with David Tennant's face has a rematch with the Sycorax, so there are plenty of callbacks to The Christmas Invasion.
It's marked as "A Brand New Adventure" which it would have been on the day of publication, 7 September 2023. But some kids opening and reading it on Christmas Day might have been a bit disappointed they also received the anthology, Ten Days of Christmas, which also features the same story, topping and tailing a series of Tenth Doctor stories and listed on the cover as an "exclusive" which was published a month after this.
It's not quite the same. Whereas the whole story is as prose in the anthology, the annual offers a comic strip adaptation of the second half. It's drawn by Doctor Who Adventures vet John Ross with his bold, brash, colourful style. Nevertheless it is a pre-print of material which was due to be published again month later and could potentially have led to some parents paying twice for the same thing. How did we get to this point?
Some history. As probably everyone reading this will know, Doctor Who Annuals have been in publication since the mid-60s and this isn't the first occasion material has been reprinted. Elements of annuals reappeared in omnibus form. The first spin-off fiction I came across was at Speke Library, who had a copy of the Adventures in Time and Space anthology which collected material representing most of the previous annuals. But it was a separate publication to the annual publications.
When the show returned, the 2006 annual included material written by the new showrunner and stories by all of the writers from the first series, all of whom had previous contributed to spin-off ventures so knew what was required. Steven Moffat would later adapt his story What I Did on My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow into the best Doctor Who story ever made that isn't Caves of Androzani, Blink.
The annual was a massive success for Panini, also publishers of Doctor Who Magazine and so the license was obviously handed over to someone else, namely the BBC Children's Books imprint of Penguin who've been producing it to this day. The 2007 annual was a more simplistic affair with the flavour of the Doctor Who Adventures magazine in publication at the time, to the point of including a reprint of a strip from issue 2.
Russell T Davies was quite cross about this and rightly so. Unfortunately I've been unable to trace the source for his annoyance, be it in a Doctor Who Magazine interview, Production Notes or The Writer's Tale. I'm sure I haven't hallucinated it. Either way he said that he'd make sure that it wouldn't happen again and it didn't.
Up until the 2020 edition, even after he'd left the show, every annual included some kind of original Doctor Who story, comics or prose or both varying in length and complexity. Paul Lang, the senior designer of Doctor Who Adventures, continued the tradition of publication even after it ended publication by essentially creating a new hardbacked edition of it each year which continued right through to the Thirteenth Doctor's first year.
But in the Doctor Who Annual 2020, something changed. Published in 2019 (so pre-pandemic), this had a rather perfunctory episode guide (mixed with some puzzles) bracketed by two lengthy prose stories, nicely illustrated by George Ermos and Lauren Wills. But the reader might be forgiven for finding them familiar - they were both reprints from books originally published in 2018, an excerpt from David Solomons' The Secret in Vault 13 and The Rhino of Twenty-Three Strand Street from David Rudden's anthology Twelve Angels Weeping.
At the time this seemed like a rip-off. Avid fans who read every new book as they're published will have seen these before and although the pictures are rather lovely, there'll be some kids or their parents who will have paid £7.99 for second hand material and what amounted to adverts for other books and even if they wouldn't have otherwise noticed, the adverts for those publications at the end of each story would have indicated such.
After years and years of brilliant or at least unusual Christmas treats going into 2020, buyers of the annuals were handed something which had been re-gifted, shameless reprints from earlier sources and that's continued. To be fair the Amazon and Good Reads pages for the book suggest that people were happy enough with their purchase with a fair few five-stars around. But actual reviews often note that these stories are reprints and isn't it a shame?
The 2021 annual was a slight improvement. The synopses within the episode guide are written as first person diary entries by the Doctor and the fam and at the end there's a section which ties in to the next year's Time Lord Victorious event, with River Song in her Melody Malone alter ego introducing the various characters and races who'd be appearing. This is all new material even if it isn't a story exactly, more like another advert for all the other product.
But then the only fiction in the 2022 is a four page retelling in photo comic format of the first episode of the Daleks! animated story which was the Doctor Who YouTube channel's contribution to Time Lord Victorious, ending on a cliffhanger and a suggesting that readers should go there to see the conclusion. Another reprint of existing material in a slightly different form. Screenshotting the thing and adding speech bubbles is a technical and design achievement, but what's it for?
Fair play to the Official 60th Anniversary Annual 2023, which includes a blisteringly fun (almost) complete history of the Doctor written from the thirteenth Doctor's POV, wittily recapping some of the show's madness over the years, suggesting that Sixy did indeed regenerate after falling off his exercise bike and under the subheading "the wilderness years" noting in the wake of Seventh:
"everything went a bit quiet for a while. There are no visual records of any of my adventures for a long time - although there are written archives."
There certainly are kids, a whole era of adventures, "Too Broad and Deep for the Small Screen" and in some case too pornographic, but I digress.
Except the centrepiece of the book, at a moment which should be celebrating Jodie Whittaker's final year in the role and looking ahead to the future of the series, is "Clara Oswald and the Enchanted Forest" by Jasbinder Bilan featuring a character which hadn't been in the show for over five years which at the end we discover is pre-print from the Origin Stories anthology.
Which means since the comic strips in the 2019 edition, the hasn't been any original fiction exclusive to the Doctor Who Annual and in some cases, it's entirely possible that someone could receive books containing the same stories on Christmas Day which I'm sorry to say is a rip-off by the publisher, Penguin Random House UK, that otherwise has a sparkling track record in new Doctor Who fiction, from their new TARGET novelisations to the aforementioned anthologies. Serious, they're otherwise brilliant.
What editorial decisions have led to this shift? If it's budgetary, it's hard to see why they can't justify commissioning a writer or two to create new stories on top of the sterling design work, for what is sure to be one of their biggest sellers of the year at £9.99 a pop even if the paper and printing does cost more these days. If it's because of a crush on deadlines, plan earlier. If it's creative, a way of offering a shop window for other publications which might not have the same cache, well, that's just cynical.
There's a possibility that someone reading this, assuming they've come this far will know the answer to this and there's a perfectly reasonable explanation and honestly, I wrote most of this as a way of finding that out. If, as ever, that I'm entirely off-base I'll be happy to edit this or even take it down. I've tried desperately not to criticise individuals but the whole annual as published entity and everything which leads to it being like this.
Why does this matter? Apart from diminishing the legacy of the annuals and making them something less than (especially now Panini's separate "Storybooks" or "Brilliant Books" don't exist any more), I'm just thinking about what it will be like for some parents and kids each Christmas. Annuals used to be special events and at a cost of £9.99 this year, it feels like Penguin, outside of the editorial matter, are taking advantage of readers by not giving them value for money and instead offering up something they might already own.