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This chapter provides an introduction to Pericles and the Shakespeare canon. Pericles, it is widely agreed, is the first of Shakespeare's ‘last plays’, that highly distinctive group of romances and tragicomedies. However, it was omitted from the First Folio collection of his plays assembled by his friends and fellow actors after his death and published in 1623. The very gateway to the final period of Shakespeare's playwrighting career is thus obstructed by thorny problems of text and authorship. Investigation of the authorship of Pericles can scarcely be disentangled from broader issues concerning the Shakespeare canon as a whole and the methods by which it is most convincingly to be defined. T.S. Eliot held that ‘the full meaning of any one’ of Shakespeare's plays ‘is not in itself alone, but in that play in the order in which it was written, in its relation to all of Shakespeare's other plays’.

This introduction reviews the production of the First Folio from the perspective of its publishers. It treats the book’s imprint and colophon as neglected sites of rhetorical significance and cultural conditioning and argues that we can use these brief texts––together with the personalities they name––as interpretive keys to learn more about the ways in which Shakespeare’s books were made. It introduces the four book-trade businesses that financed Shakespeare’s collected works and provides an overview of how the Folio was made. Methodologically, the introduction argues that we need new ways of working with early modern stationers. Rather than limiting ourselves to the riveting but isolated case study, books like the Folio urge us to think about communities of stationers in relation to one another. Bringing these stationers together allows their individual tactics and strategies to emerge in sharper relief, and encourages us to consider the interpretive life of a networked model of literary production.

This chapter considers the reaction to the publication, in March 2010, of the Arden edition of Double Falsehood. It takes into account discussion in the press and in the ‘blogosphere’, as well as academic reviews that have so far appeared, and considers what controversies have been generated, what new knowledge has been gained, and what are the principal unanswered questions in the wake of this publication. The chapter offers some speculative answers to some of those questions.

This introductory chapter discusses the first known purchaser of a First Folio, Sir Edward Dering, and how his account books allow us to contextualise this book as part of his household, his patterns of leisure and consumption, and his intellectual, political and social aspirations. It outlines what the First Folio is, and establishes some models for thinking about the biography of a book, drawn from anthropology and historical analyses of consumption and acquisition.

This book discusses the search for William Shakespeare's letters. However, Edmond Malone and Samuel Ireland were on a wild goosechase, this chapter states, on the trail of the kind of letters that would make sense to the 1790s reader. Not only were they looking for the wrong letters, they were looking in the wrong place. For Shakespeare's letters survive in abundance — in his plays, or, more precisely, on his stage. At a conservative estimate, 111 letters appear on stage in the course of Shakespeare's plays, and his characters allude to many more, running through all the genres and his entire career — early plays and late plays, comedies, tragedies, tragicomedies, and histories all contain letters. In fact, Shakespeare depicts letters in all but five of the First Folio plays, so that their very absence in itself becomes telling.

Shakespeare’s Folio continues to take centre stage in this chapter. The book has become a modern fetish, not only of the book as such (the most studied individual edition in history) but of authorship and of subjectivity. The theory of the fetish is traced from Marx’s Kapital to William Pietz. The chapter also considers the history of the word by way of European colonialism, and links this to the colonial presence of Shakespeare in Africa, China, and elsewhere. The argument then transfers to artistic representation of book fetishism in modern China, before suggesting that the ‘cult of the book’ has found a modern home in commodification and digitization. As books move from sacred to secular, they also move into a world of ambiguous economic value in which, like art works, they are modern relics.

Chronology has been the bedrock of Shakespeare Studies. Yet the succession in which Shakespeare wrote the plays was late to be devised and, even with today’s digitalized tests and statistics, remains conjectural. Genre was the First Folio’s organizing principle, as its title made clear: Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories & Tragedies. Subsequent editions—the seventeenth-century folios and the eighteenth-century multivolume octavos and quartos—retained the generic schema, sometimes with adjustments and refinements. Not until the late eighteenth century was a chronology for the plays attempted, and not until the middle of the twentieth did that order become standard in editions of his Collected Works, providing the basis for how we interrelate the plays and contextualize them. And yet this chronology has become increasingly untenable, and not only because the dates of the plays’ composition, unlike those of their performance or of their publication, remain conjectural. It is because chronology, the schema that attributes each play to one hand at one point in time, cannot accommodate the complexities (coauthorship, revision, and adaptation) that are now seen to constitute the canon.