9. “So Worthy a Friend and Fellow”
The First Folio Dedication, 1623
The First Folio dedication by Heminges and Condell is the capstone of a chain of evidence running from the title pages of quartos published during Shakespeare’s lifetime through two decades of documented business association to the wills of men who trusted each other with property and named each other as fellows. The Folio’s careful curation — the exclusion of the apocrypha, the inclusion of plays never previously printed — reflects the editorial judgment of men who knew the difference between what Shakespeare wrote and what he did not. A front organisation, maintaining a fiction for a dead patron, does not do that. Friends and colleagues do.
Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623. The dedicatory epistle “To the great Variety of Readers” is signed by John Heminges and Henry Condell. The Folio contains thirty-six plays, eighteen of which had never previously been printed. Without it, roughly half the Shakespeare canon would have been lost. Folger Shakespeare Library.