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A piece of Bard history By Bill Varble For The Tidings It's been called the greatest book in the English language. To lovers of literature, and especially of William Shakespeare, it is the holy of holies, or something near it, and it will be in Ashland this weekend. It is a First Folio, the first collection of the plays attributed to Shakespeare. Some 750 - some sources say as many as 1,200 - were printed in 1623 in London. They sold then for a pound, the equivalent of about $50 today. About 230 or 240 complete copies are believed to exist, of which about 80 are believed to be in good condition. Experts say each is worth upwards of $1 million. From 11 a.m. to noon Sunday, you can see one at the OSF's New Theatre. Call the box office at 482-4331 for tickets ($7). "It's quite thrilling," says Shakespeare expert Barry Kraft of the OSF. The festival got the book Tuesday from the collection of Paul Allen, of Microsoft and Portland Trail Blazer fame. It was once owned by Mary Dryden, a descendant of poet John Dryden. Kraft says it will be nestled away in its own room when it isn't being shown to groups, perhaps until October. An expert showed Kraft how to handle it with a clean pair of cotton gloves with a rubber surface. "It seemed a little smaller than I thought it would be," says Kraft, who owns a facsimile folio. To make a folio - Latin for "leaf" - paper was folded once, resulting in a book about 15 inches tall, or twice the size of a quarto. Many plays were first published as quartos. A quarto is a piece of paper folded twice, becoming four leaves of eight pages. About 22 Shakespeare plays appeared first in quarto. Some, believed to have come from Shakespeare's "foul papers" - unpolished manuscripts used by printers, warts and all are known as "good quartos." With their little quirks intact, they are believed to most closely represent what the Bard wrote. Quartos pieced together from actors' memories are less reliable and more heavily edited. They are known as "bad quartos." Near the end of the Folio, Kraft found a small worm hole. "A worm ate its way through 'Cymbeline' and into 'Antony and Cleopatra,' " he says. Fortunately, the hole is at the inner edges of the pages, near the binding, not through the text. The First Folio was edited by John Heminge and Henry Condell, actors who worked with the actor Shakespeare in the Chamberlain's Men and later the King's Men theater troupes. They classified the plays as comedies, histories and tragedies. The writers of Elizabethan plays had no copyright protection. So when the plays were new, instead of complete scripts that could be copied to yield play texts, actors were given "cue scripts" that contained their cues and lines, but not those of other characters. Of the 36 plays in the folio, 18 had not been published elsewhere as far as we know. Some would presumably have been lost to us forever without the Folio. These include "Cymbeline," "The Winter's Tale" and others. On the book's title page is the engraving by Martin Droeshout that is a major source of our image of the Bard as a balding, long-haired man with an inscrutable expression (leading artist Gainborough to remark, "I never saw a stupider face"). Facing the portrait is a tribute by Ben Jonson praising the author of the plays in 40 couplets. Since the pages are rag, not paper, they contain no acids. They are brown with age but in remarkably good shape after nearly four centuries. Bill Varble is a reporter for the Mail Tribune in Medford LINKS: DAILY TIDINGS: Main | News | Sports | Obituaries | Opinion | Columnists | AP News | Subscribe | Archives | Weather | Classifieds | Contact Us | Privacy REVELS: Main | Calendar | Dining | Movies | T.V. OTHER: Road Cams Copyright 2003 Ashland Daily Tidings 541.482.3456. 1661 Siskiyou Blvd., Ashland, OR 97520. Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. - Advertisers -