Every play collection represents an interpretative act that offers an evaluation of the materials it contains. In this quatercentenary year since the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio, this article positions the 1623 Folio alongside other play collections from the period to show how they construct – through their strategies of selection and presentation – influential narratives that affect how we engage with the texts they contain and to highlight the distinctiveness of Shakespeare’s collection. It identifies four practices that help to clarify a collection’s strategies – categorizing, fixing, authorizing, and fetishizing – and takes each of these practices in turn, casting a spotlight on the First Folio’s interest in ‘Histories’, its professed fixity, its valuation of Shakespeare as sole author and authorizer, and its imperative to fetishize the material book. Other collections, including William Alexander’s Monarchic Tragedies (1604, 1607), Samuel Daniels’s Whole Works (1623), John Lyly’s Six Court Comedies (1632), and James Shirley’s Six New Plays (1653), to name just a few of the collections considered in this article, advertise different strategies: some prioritize cross-genre readings; some construct networks of authorizers (including stationers, dedicatees, and censors) who inform reading practices and the status of a collection; some embrace a lack of fixity and suggest that texts can be shuffled, reordered, and extracted; and some do not prompt readers to venerate the book, but rather other features, such as the politic potential of the plays or the primacy of the author as a perpetual rewriter, denying final authority to the material book. This article demonstrates that Shakespeare’s Folio cannot be taken as a touchstone for plays in collection, but offers, instead, an individual and localized collection narrative that has had an outsized influence on how we approach the dramatist and his plays, as well as the work of other early modern writers. We need to understand a collection’s own strategies in order to understand the works it presents to us.
