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This book argues for a new relationship between music, myth, lyric, and drama in Shakespeare's last plays. In the last plays, Shakespeare dramatizes these tensions between the social and the aesthetic in response to the changing roles of myth and lyricism in early seventeenth-century English culture. Looking closely at the complex roles of an Orpheus at court and on the stage, the book turns to the life and work of John Dowland, known in his time as the “English Orpheus.” The great lutenist of the Elizabethan period and one of the most widely published and performed musician of the Jacobean age, Dowland developed a powerful self-consciousness about performance, authorship, and craft. He pressed old myths into the service of new social critique, and disseminated a new set of ideas about the place of the performing self in a changed society. Here Shakespeare and Dowland emerge as parallel performing artists, both exploring lyric poetry and music as performed and as commanded. This book also explores the place of these late plays in the First Folio printing of Shakespeare’s works of 1623. It makes a case for the meaningful place of its late plays in their respective generic sections. Drawing on recent reassessments of the printing and reception history of the First Folio, and engaging with newly discovered evidence for early readerships, the book recovers the historical moments of Shakespeare’s immediate reception.

This is a biography of a book: the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays printed in 1623 and known as the First Folio. It begins with the story of its first purchaser in London in December 1623, and goes on to explore the ways people have interacted with this iconic book over the four hundred years of its history. Throughout the stress is on what we can learn from individual copies now spread around the world about their eventful lives. From ink blots to pet paws, from annotations to wineglass rings, First Folios teem with evidence of its place in different contexts with different priorities. This study offers new ways to understand Shakespeare’s reception and the history of the book. Unlike previous scholarly investigations of the First Folio, it is not concerned with the discussions of how the book came into being, the provenance of its texts, or the technicalities of its production. Instead, it reanimates, in narrative style, the histories of this book, paying close attention to the details of individual copies now located around the world – their bindings, marginalia, general condition, sales history, and location – to discuss five major themes: owning, reading, decoding, performing, and perfecting. This is a history of the book that consolidated Shakespeare’s posthumous reputation: a reception history and a study of interactions between owners, readers, forgers, collectors, actors, scholars, booksellers, and the book through which we understand and recognise Shakespeare.