Marking the 400th Anniversary of Shakespeare’s First Folio

By Dr. SIRI GALHENAGE
Psychiatrist [Ret]
“Reader , Looke/ Not on his picture, but his booke”

[Ben Jonson, prefacing The First Folio of the collected works of Shakespeare]

Inspired by Prof. Kumar David’s article, ‘Shakespeare: Man for All Seasons’ [Sunday Island: March 12, 2023], in which he addresses the poetic rhythm of the Bard’s dramatic prose and the relevance of his work to the present, prompted me to remind the readers that this year marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio – the compilation of 36 of his plays in one volume. Published in 1623, seven years after the Bard’s death, the Folio, titled, ‘Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies’, was the initiative of two of Shakespeare’s colleagues – John Heminges and Henry Condell. Their work, an act of ‘posthumous devotion’, has found a permanent home for the bard’s work, enabling a ‘great variety of readers’ to visit and to marvel at his creative imagination, his way with the words, the profundity of his understanding of human nature and the universal appeal and timelessness of his thought.

In their preface to the First Folio, Heminges and Condell invite the readers to ’Reade him, therefore; and againe, and againe’ with an accompanying elegy by Ben Jonson, ‘To the memory of my beloved, The author Mr. William Shakespeare: And what he hath left for us’. ‘Soul of the age!/ The applause! Delight! The wonder of our stage!’, adding his prophetic words: ‘He was not of an age, but for all time!’

About half of Shakespeare’s plays were printed during his lifetime in quarto. [A quarto is a book in which each printed sheet is folded twice in half and then half again to produce four double sided leaves or eight pages]. The First Folio was the product of an extraordinary act of retrieval and restoration, some from quartos, and others from theatre scripts by different hands with varying degrees of legibility – an arduous task undertaken by two devoted theatre men [not literary scholars] during an era when printing was expensive, and scripts used on stage were not often printed on page. Shakespeare was the sole or main author in the 36 plays selected for printing in the Folio, except for Pericles, and Troilus and Cressida which could not be included due to delays in getting permission to print. 18 of the plays were printed for the first time and so saved from possible loss. It is not known whether any scripts were lost when the Globe Theatre was destroyed during the fire in 1613. The whole exercise was undertaken with no pecuniary motive, and generations of Shakespeare lovers could never be grateful enough to Heminges and Condell for helping to preserve the extraordinary literary talent of the greatest playwright of all time, in any language.

400 years have passed since the publication of The First Folio, yet there is very little known about the source of Shakespeare’s literary prowess. His literary endowment remains obscure, and hence subject to conjecture. He received his early education at the local free grammar school with no further formal learning as depicted by the famous lines of Ben Jonson: ‘Small Latin and Less Greek’ to describe his friend Shakespeare’s limited education. However, according to John Aubrey, antiquary, philosopher and writer, ‘he [Shakespeare] understood Latine pretty well’….’for he had been in his younger years a school-master in the countrey’. It is thought that with no university education, young William would hardly have been a grammar school teacher, but an unregistered private tutor.

Yet, as reflected in his work, Shakespeare seems to have had exposure to ancient Greek and Roman history and mythological tales, and the Chronicles of Raphael Holinshed, which recounted the history of England, Scotland and Ireland – themes from which he borrowed heavily in his writing. In addition, it is said that he listened to the folklore and chatter of people around him, and even projected some of his autobiographical material on to the characters he created.

Shakespeare was a country boy from Stratford-upon-Avon, and he went to London as a young man, leaving behind his family, with the intension of making a living by becoming an actor. He joined Lord Chamberlain’s Men [later, named The King’s Men], a large body of actors at the Globe Theatre. As the demand for plays grew, he emerged primarily as a playwright. He wrote poems during the plague when the theatres were closed.

By 1592 Shakespeare had built up a reputation as a writer. His extraordinary literary prowess with his way with the words and his power of creative imagination attracted the envy of his peers. Some even accused him of plagiarism. It was the Cambridge educated Robert Green who wrote: ‘Yes trust them not, for there is an upstart crow, beautiful with our feathers….that with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide supposes he is as well able to bombast a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only shake-scene in a country. He was not deterred by such offense.

Shakespeare never intended to print and publish his work. He wrote scripts to be used by actors for performance on stage. He never expected his work to gain global appeal. Along with the wave of British colonial rule in the early 1600s, his work was disseminated around the globe, and it took root in many parts of the world, including the culturally fertile soil of the Indian subcontinent, producing generations of Shakespeare lovers and scholars who adapted his work to suit their times and climes. It gave rise to the idea that ‘Shakespeare belongs to the world’.

I am no Shakespeare scholar, but a doctor of medicine specialised in mental health. In my retirement – in an attempt at keeping my ageing brain cells alive! – I developed a deep interest in Shakespeare’s work. I am marvelled by his profound understanding of the human condition, an ability he had developed long before theoretical frameworks were developed in understanding the human mind by psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud and others. Not only that he understood human nature better than most and expressed it better than any other, he had the remarkable gift for revealing us to ourselves. He presented us as we are and left us to make our own interpretations.

I cannot claim to have read all of Shakespeare. I have been lured by those plays that invite me to examine the characters and situations in the light of my own theoretical orientation, aided of course by extended reading. The following is a cursory account of some of my observations:

In Hamlet, the greatest of Shakespeare’s plays, I have explored the troubled mind of Prince Hamlet, a young man experiencing a profound sense of loss with conflicting emotions, following the mysterious death of his father, the king, and the marriage, in haste, of his mother to the usurper, resulting in the shift of his state of mind from mourning to melancholy. In the same play, the young and beautiful Ophelia, in her defence of her deep sense of sadness and betrayal, drifts into a state of mania [‘manic defence’] leading to her ultimate destruction through loss of touch with reality. Ophelia is one of the great character creations by Shakespeare, certainly my favourite. In my view, she stands above Rosalind, Desdemona, Cordelia, and Beatrice amongst Shakespeare’s female characters.

I have traced the pathogenesis of ‘marital jealousy’ and its destructive outcome in the play Othello. Inspired by the play, psychiatrists coined the diagnosis of ‘Othello Syndrome’ to depict the condition of ‘morbid jealousy’, but not without debate regarding its clinical application.

King Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, is driven by a delusion of infidelity with his persistent questioning of his wife, Hermione, regarding her fidelity, and the suspicion of her unborn child of her paternity, although the rapid resolution of the monarch’s abnormal thought processes in the finale is clinically questionable.

“Thou shouldst not have been old before you hadst been wise”, the Fool recognises the existential dilemma of his master, an ageing King Lear [in the play by the same name], who fears losing his power and possessions, and is driven out to ‘a desolate field’ in a ‘raging storm’!

Macbeth portrays the destruction of self and others in the pursuit of power, and in The Tempest – a play with a metaphysical theme – Shakespeare reaches his pinnacle as a playwright in the display of compassion and forgiveness through the character of Prospero.

Shakespeare drew heavily from the archetypal legends, folklore and history – the storehouse of ‘our universally shared experience’ which the legendary Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung called our ‘Collective Unconscious’ – and used his creative genius and his linguistic dexterity to give dramatic expression to such material. By doing so, he addressed the concerns of his contemporary audiences of the Elizabethan era. And, with the publication of the body of his work in the Fist Folio, thanks to John Heminges and Henry Condell, he continues to speak to us in the modern world.

[sirigalhenage@gmail.com]