Great Performances — Making Shakespeare: The First Folio does a documentary hat trick in being informative, entertaining, and inspirational. It’s a must-watch.
When I did a tour of Shakespeare’s Globe in London a while back, the tour guide/actor told me something I hadn’t heard before (or remembered): that Shakespeare’s works, in addition to being read, are meant to be heard, and seeing them performed both deepens our understanding and enhances our experience of what Shakespeare meant with his words.
It’s been ages since I’ve sat down and read a Shakespeare play, but I’ve watched many on film, on telly, and on stage, as well as documentaries about The Bard. Which brings me to Great Performances — Making Shakespeare: The First Folio, a outstanding piece of documentary filmmaking by writer-director Nicola Stockley and producer Richard Denton, debuting to stateside audiences during the 400th anniversary year of the printing of the First Folio. I enjoyed it so much, I was inspired to write this piece.
“The First Folio is the most important secular book in the history of the Western World.” — Prof. Jonathan Bate, Arizona State University
The First Folio is the first published collection of William Shakespeare’s full plays. It contains 36 of his comedies, histories, and tragedies, of which only half had been published, not necessarily accurately or in their entirety, before Shakespeare’s death in 1616. So, without the First Folio, “Antony and Cleopatra,” “As You Like It,” “Julius Caesar,” “Macbeth,” “The Tempest,” “Twelfth Night,” and others would have been lost to time. Without these plays, we would have never known the immortal “If music be the food of love, play on” and “Et tu, Brute?” or had the pleasure of seeing Kenneth Branagh, Michael Fassbender, Ian McKellen, Peter O’Toole, Patrick Stewart, Denzel Washington, Orson Welles, and many others play the tragic Scottish general-turned-king, Macbeth. But thanks to the enormous effort put forth by two of Shakespeare’s fellow actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, we have.
One part of Great Performances — Making Shakespeare: The First Folio tells the story of how Heminges and Condell, in their “act of love” for Shakespeare, took on numerous challenges to bring the First Folio to life — from securing the financing and tracking down the scripts, to choosing between different versions of the plays and getting the the 900-page volume printed (without the benefit of today’s printing technologies in the early 17th century).
Helping to provide context and insight and bring the story to life are husband-and-wife Shakespearean acting partners Niamh Cusack and Finbar Lynch; Andrew Dickson, author of Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare’s Globe; Dr. Ben Higgins, author of The Shakespeare Syndicate; calligrapher Brody Neuenschwander; Prof. Farah Karim Cooper, Director of Education, Shakespeare’s Globe; Prof. Tiffany Stern, The Shakespeare Institute; Michelle Terry, Actor and Creative Director, Shakespeare’s Globe; Prof. Cathy Shrank, The University of Sheffield; Dr. Alison Smith, Chief Curator, National Portrait Gallery; and Prof. Eric Rasmussen, Nevada University.
Approximately 750 copies of the First Folio were ever printed, of which only 235 are known to exist today. In the 400 years since they were published, notable individuals have owned a copy, amongst them King Charles I, and now King Charles III.
Another story featured in Great Performances – Making Shakespeare: The First Folio is about the decade’s worth of investigative work done by Dr. Claire Mary Louise Bourne of Penn State University, which ultimately uncovered that celebrated English poet John Milton was the owner of a notated copy. There’s also the one about a First Folio found by accident at a library in France in 2014, and another about the copy stolen from Durham University in 1998, recovered in a rather interesting fashion a decade later at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC.
It is at the Folger that Emmy® Award-winning actor Brian Cox (Succession) and his wife and fellow actor Nicole Ansari (Deadwood) delight in examining a very special copy of of the First Folio, one of the 82 at the renowned library. From the Folger’s Director, Dr. Michael Witmore, they also learn about Henry Folger, the great American Shakespeare lover and folio collector who amassed a third of all known First Folios, and dive deeper into his obsession to possess that one particular copy.
In Great Performances – Making Shakespeare: The First Folio, Prof. Ayanna Thompson of Arizona State University says:
“There are lots of people who don’t feel like Shakespeare is for them, which is, of course, ridiculous because the plays have things in them that they could relate to on a fundamental level… I think in the next 400 years we have to work, get back to the place where Shakespeare’s plays are for the groundlings and the royalty, right? Where everyone feels that they have access and can see themselves in the plays.”
That work is already happening in the here and now. Examples highlighted in Great Performances – Making Shakespeare: The First Folio include the work of The Public Theater in New York City, whose mobile unit recently toured diverse, multilingual neighborhoods in the Big Apple with their bilingual (Spanish-English) musical version of The Comedy of Errors. And the organization’s 2023 season of Free Shakespeare in the Park featured director Kenny Leon’s Atlanta, Georgia-set production of Hamlet, which delivers a Shakespearean tale that challenges racism and violence. We also see Julie Congress, The Public Theater’s Voice and Text Coach, work with 11-year-old students at a school in the Hunts Point neighborhood in the Bronx to make their own sense of Romeo and Juliet while rehearsing for their production of the tragedy.
All that and more is in Great Performances – Making Shakespeare: The First Folio, which premieres tonight, Friday, November 17, at 9 PM ET, on PBS (check your local listings), with streaming available on PBS.org and the PBS App.
Narrated by Emmy®, Tony®, and Grammy® Award winner Audra McDonald, the program is from the directors and producers of The WNET Group’s Shakespeare Uncovered. Stephen Segaller is executive producer. For Great Performances, Stephanie Dawson is producer, Bill O’Donnell is series producer, and David Horn is executive producer.
(To help you find where you can stream filmed adaptations of Shakespeare’s works, as well as programs and films about or inspired by The Bard, in the US, visit our “Shakespeare Is for Everyone: Where to Stream Filmed Adaptations of The Bard’s Works in the US” page.)
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