The Fearelesse Folio...

...Being carefully-edited Electronic Files of the Plays in a Format that is Useful (they can be printed out on regular paper and used as working scripts), Clean (they are as close to the originals as possible without presenting stumbling-blocks to live Actors), and Beautiful (they try to simulate the visual ‘flavor’ of the old texts.)

Your gentle Editor intends to pursue completing his versions of the complete plays, as well as Texts of the plays that have been ‘rectified’ in full and then cut to arrive at a running time of between 2 and 2 1/2 hours, before he has shuffel’d off this mortal coile.

Editor's Note

These texts were prepared using the splendid electronic files transcibed precisely from the First Folio and Quarto versions of Shakespeare’s plays by Michael Best and made available through Internet Shakespeare. We are also indebted to the textual notes in the wonderful Applause First Folio editions by Neil Freeman.

These editions are meant to serve as working scripts which transmit the flavor and sense of the early texts; hence they are formatted for reading convenience in variance from the Folio as follows:

• A space has been inserted between Speakers’ Lines, and Lines and Stage Directions.
• The speech block is left-justified, not wrapped back to the margin.
• The Characters’ Names are not abbreviated.

Also, for the sake of clarity:

• The “u / v“ affectation has been rectified. ( i.e. “Love” and “Urge”, not “Loue” and “Vrge.” )
• The “i / j“ affectation has been rectified. ( i.e. “Justice,” not “Iustice.” )
• Any obvious typographical errors are corrected.
• The f -shaped “s” is rendered “s.”

Some inconsistencies in spelling have been eliminated; for example:

• Interjections such as “I” and “Mary” have been spelled “Ay” and "Marry."
• Variances in Character’s Names and certain other text elements have been regularized.

To some extent, the extremely conservative emendations decided upon by H.H. Furness in his New Variorum editions have been herein adopted. All editorial emendations have been printed in dark blue, so that anyone wishing to change the text may easily do so; the text in black (with a few exceptions such as Characters’ Names) is exactly as printed in the First Folio. Where any more useful text appears in other early Quartos or Folios, it is given, and so noted in the margins.

Also contributing substantially to these editions are my friend Lewis Shaw and my wife, Professor Kathleen Brown. They are dedicated to the memory of an extraordinary man of letters, Dr. Brooke Pierce.

Currently Available Plays (uncut):

• Macbeth
• The Tempest
• Much Ado About Nothing
• The Two Noble Kinsmen
• Measure for Measure
• The Merchant of Venice
• Love’s Labor’s Lost (Coming Soon!)

In order to spare these texts the ravages of the sometimes cruel and arbitrary rendering of HTML, they are preserved in the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF.) Click on the title of any play to view or download the text. You may also download a copy of the Editor's Notes for future reference.