Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies

This page of William Shakespeare’s First Folio features “The Names of the Principal Actors in all these Plays.” The list includes all 26 actors who performed in the theatre company, known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later the King’s Men), from the 1590s through the 1620s. Shakespeare’s name appears first, followed by Richard Burbage, the exceptionally gifted tragedian who originated the roles of Richard III, Hamlet, Lear, Brutus, Othello, and Prospero. Shakespeare’s fellow actors shaped his development as a dramatist because he wrote for their individual talents. His friends John Heminge and Henry Condell were also actors and, as shareholders in the Globe Theatre, eventually owned 50 percent of its shares between them. This status would most likely have given them access to playscripts and cue scripts (texts of dialogue distributed to individual actors that contained only their lines) and the authority to negotiate their publication, making possible their collaborative work on the First Folio.



To establish the most accurate text of the plays, Heminge and Condell collated original playscripts, cue scripts, and prompt books (the annotated production scripts used in theatre productions) as well as early editions of the plays printed in quarto format (akin to inexpensively printed pamphlets). They may also have had access to any of Shakespeare's working drafts and his fair copies (those which incorporated all of the playwright's corrections) if these were still extant when they prepared the text of the First Folio.