Gabriel Ready - The First Folio: A Short History of Fixing

A look at the various attempts to fix the First Folio over the 400 years since its publication, touching on: the evolving perceptions of the players John Heminges and Henry Condell, the First Folio as an irrelevant old book, the First Folio as a conceptual construct and the First Folio as a
reconstructed material object. Ready demonstrates how the book’s history intersects with Stratfordian mythology and authorship doubt.
Gabriel Ready is an independent researcher whose work focuses on Shakespeare’s First Folio. He solved a centuries-old problem in “Model of Disorder,” explaining why the preliminaries section of the First Folio was designed to be an optional gathering and how the first 18 pages are found today in several distinct sequential orders. In 2021, Ready published “The Production of the First Folio Reconsidered” in the journal The Oxfordian 23 and “A Prologue Arm’d: The Printing of Troilus and Cressida in the First Folio” in The Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter (Summer 2021). He has an M.A. in English Literature.
Learn more at ShakespeareOxfordFellowship.org.