Unboxing Shakespeare’s First Folio | V&A

Discover the secrets of a precious 400-year-old copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio – the first ever collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Without this extraordinary book, several of Shakespeare’s best-loved and most-performed plays would have been completely lost to us, including Twelfth Night, Macbeth and The Tempest. It’s partly thanks to the First Folio’s survival that we have today’s iconic adaptations such as West Side Story, The Lion King, 10 Things I Hate About You and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo Juliet. Follow Elizabeth James, Senior Librarian at the National Art Library, as she turns the pages to reveal evidence of how the book was originally created, and examines signs of use by an early owner. We then join Harriet Reed, Curator of Contemporary Performance as she explores the book’s huge influence on film, music and culture today. You can see a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio on display in ’Re:Imagining Musicals’ from August 2023: More in our Books collection: