Скачать или смотреть PAVIER QUARTO | SPENCER W STUART, Collections Advisor

My conversation with Sheryl MacKay of CBC Radio’s NXNW (taped Feb. 2019) to mark the 400th Anniversary of the Pavier Quarto, aka 'The False Folio'

In the holdings of two Special Collections (the Folger in DC and the Texas Christian University in Forth Worth) lie a curious quarto. Made up of nine plays, eight of which bear William Shakespeare's name on their title page, the book appears to be an assemblage of individual plays printed at different times, however bound together by the publisher Thomas Pavier. However close analysis of the watermarks on the paper in the early 1900s revealed they were all printed in 1619 by William Jaggard's printing house. The very same printer who would produce the First Folio in 1623. The Folio that created the icon we know today as 'The Bard'.

So why the false dates? The same bibliographers that matched the the paper stock went on to cast Pavier as a pirate publisher trying to make a buck off Shakespeare's death in 1616. However more recent research into the quality of the quarto's text and the general publishing environment at the time reveals the conscious ramp up to the monolithic First Folio published only a few later. The Pavier Quarto signals a shift from creating a working script for actors toward a literary text for the reading public. The Shakespeare we know now.