A book can become a rescue boat without looking like one. Shakespeare’s First Folio appeared in 1623, seven years after his death, gathering plays that had lived on stage and in scattered print.
Actors and colleagues John Heminge and Henry Condell assembled the collection, arranging its thirty-six plays as comedies, histories, and tragedies. Eighteen had not appeared in print before, among them Macbeth, The Tempest, and Twelfth Night. Without this edition, those works might have vanished from the record.
The Folio was a substantial, costly format, more likely to endure than the smaller single-play quartos. It was not a transparent window onto Shakespeare: printers and editors shaped the texts, and some passages differ from earlier versions. The book preserves a history of performance as well as words on a page.