ABSTRACT
When the Folio of Shakespeare’s plays was first published in 1623, that text presented both the collected and the divided works of the playwright. The divisions along the lines of dramatic genre in that collection are typographically marked both by subtitle and by renewed pagination; the comedies, histories and tragedies create alliances between plays which we now sometimes separate – romances, problem plays, tetralogies. The shift from one mode of production to another, from performance to print, served both to ally Shakespeare’s plays and to distinguish between them. The apparent unity of the Folio thus both reveals and disguises the very different materials drawn together in these plays, most noticeably the chronicle histories which Shakespeare has transmuted into dramatic properties.
