06/01/2026
Thurs., June 4 at 4 p.m. - Don't miss Shakespeare for Kids: Much Ado About Nothing at Pequot Library! This kid-friendly (grades k-5), interactive version of Much Ado About Nothing, performed by Shakespeare on the Sound’s Apprentice Company. RSVP: https://buff.ly/QjBbC1j
William Shakespeare
"Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies (First Folio)"
Printed by Isaac Iaggard, and Ed. Blount, 1623
Pequot Library Special Collections
"Much Ado About Nothing" follows two couples, including Benedick and Beatrice, who engage in a "merry war" or a battle of wits before ultimately confessing their love for each other. The play first appeared in print in 1600 as a quarto, a book made by folding a large standard sheet of paper twice, thereby creating four leaves. This format was less expensive and smaller than a folio. As a post from the Folger Shakespeare Library notes, "This quarto is remarkable among early printed texts of Shakespeare’s plays for the contrast it presents between the superb correctness of its dialogue and the many obvious errors and ambiguities in its stage directions and speech prefixes. Editors have found very little to require correction in the dialogue but are hard pressed to impose order on the stage directions and speech prefixes."
The play was reprinted in 1623 as part of the First Folio, the landmark publication that preserved about half of Shakespeare’s plays or eighteen in total, including As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, The Tempest, and many more. The plays hadn't been printed in full previously in part because of the exorbitant costs of doing so. Too, as an article in Reader's Digest explains, "Previously, dramatic works had been considered less literary, more ephemeral, and unworthy of committing to paper." Sometimes actors only received pages for scenes in which they had lines, called "cue scripts", and they might venture on stage not knowing if the play was a tragedy or a comedy until it was underway.
The First Folio was the first published collection of Shakespeare’s plays, produced seven years after his death. It grouped his plays into categories—comedies, histories, and tragedies—for the first time. The title page shown here features an original portrait of Shakespeare, engraved by the artist Martin Droeshout. This engraving is considered authentic; it was approved by those who worked on the First Folio and had known the Bard, including Shakespeare's friends and former colleagues John Heminge and Henry Condell, who were also partners in the King’s Men acting company. They played an essential role in bringing together these plays. Shakespeare left money to both men in his will to buy memorial rings, a sign that he considered them good friends.
We displayed this text in our 2023-2024 Special Collections exhibition, "How William Became Shakespeare: Four Hundred Years of the First Folio."
