The hero,the villain,the princess,and the book

Abstract

This article establishes a prehistory of the excitement about the discovery of the Saint-Omer Shakespeare First Folio in a longer narrative of investments in the book’s secrets. Tracing the neglected importance of Baconianism to the establishment of the First Folio’s cultural prominence in the early twentieth century, parallels between the kinds of narratives told by authorship sceptics and by bibliographers are drawn. I argue that the sense that the book encodes mysteries about its own genesis unites popular and academic approaches to the First Folio and is one way to account for the discrepancy between its value and its non-rarity.