Why have Shakespeare?s First Folios become such expensive and magical objects? Sotheby?s is selling one ? as ?the most important book in English literature? ? at 3.5 million pounds. When two of Shakespeare?s fellow-actors decided to print the first collected edition of his plays seven years after his death, they sought to present his plays ?as he conceived them? to the ?Great Variety of Readers?, for being read ?again, and again?. This was as much a measure of Shakespeare?s fame during his own lifetime and immediately after his death, as of his own rather bafflingly uncaring attitude to preserving the texts of his plays. He was primarily a man of the theatre (in spite of the sonnets and the poems), and while his writing was ironically aware of the ephemerality of the stage-play world, he did not seem to bother too much about fixing these passing shows in carefully edited texts. Hence variously corrupted, pirated and memorially reconstructed editions of single plays abounded while he was alive, apart from authorial manuscripts and prompt-books that belonged to his company. So when John Heminges and Henry Condell ? for whom Shakespeare left money for mourning rings ? put together the First Folio, they thought of the plays as orphaned children, abused, maimed and deformed, who were being cured and made perfect for public view. They included all the plays previously published, together with 16 other works for the first time, among them plays like The Tempest, Measure for Measure, As You Like It, Macbeth and The Winter?s Tale. And with this edition was born, in the words of its actor-editors, the alluring myth of ?True Original Copies? ? uncorrupted versions of the plays as they were first written by Shakespeare or performed by his company. This remains the Holy Grail in relation to which every serious modern editor of Shakespeare would have to work out his approach ? conservative or adventurous ? to the play-text.

Yet the phrase, ?True Original Copies?, is mischievously paradoxical. Can copies be original, or even true? (Plato must have been turning in his grave at such a phrase.) Shakespeare?s first editors must have been fully aware of the highly variable nature of the documents from which their ?authoritative? collected edition was prepared. Their modern descendants are perhaps more at home with the idea of indeterminacy. Yet, out of a labyrinth of possibilities and choices, a single text will have to be decided on which readers can read or actors perform.

?His mind and hand went together,? wrote Heminges and Condell about their revered colleague, struggling to describe the ?easiness? with which thought became utterance in Shakespeare. And this ?went? sounds today like a black pun. When this living hand went, taking with it the mind it seemed to be so effortlessly connected to, what was left behind was a peerless welter of words, and something else for which one can only use Shakespeare?s favourite word. Nothing.