ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the First Folio groups the plays for the first time into comedies, histories, and tragedies, and it includes the Droeshout portrait of Shakespeare. Some of Shakespeare's plays were published during his lifetime, but half of them were published for the first time in the First Folio seven years after his death. The Director Says: The First Folio is not always grammatical or logical, but it is fundamentally theatrical. The text was written to be acted, not to be read, and First Folio text is packed full of instructions to actors who had to present plays at such a rate that there was no time for rehearsals in the way it is understood today. Unlike literature that is carefully punctuated so as to be grammatically correct, Shakespeare punctuated the way people actually spoke, so the original punctuation is crucial, for it defines where the individual thoughts end.
