To be, or to not be… essentially the most well-known author of all time. When it involves William Shakespeare, that isn’t the query. The love that endures for England’s nationwide poet, the son of a humble glove maker from the West Midlands, actually does, in his personal phrases, “put a girdle round the Earth”.

You want solely witness the coach a great deal of followers from all around the UK, Europe, America and Asia descending upon Stratford-upon-Avon – The Bard’s birthplace and residential of the Royal Shakespeare Company – to grasp that individuals from each a part of the world, even those that don’t communicate English, are nonetheless enthralled by Shakespeare and his performs.

And but, have been it not for the actions of a few associates 400 years in the past, lots of his biggest works, together with Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, The Taming of The Shrew and The Tempest, might need been misplaced endlessly.

During Shakespeare’s life, his particular person performs have been printed solely as quartos – flimsy items of printed paper folded into quarter-sized pamphlets and offered for sixpence.

Considered throwaway objects on the time, they weren’t designed to final and, when Shakespeare died in 1616, there was an actual probability the quartos, in addition to the performs printed on them, would disappear endlessly.

Luckily, in 1623, seven years after his dying, two of his colleagues and fellow actors, John Heminge and Henry Condell, determined to protect their buddy’s legacy by publishing a compendium of his works in a single single and substantial 900-page quantity. Eighteen of the performs are believed by no means to have been printed beforehand.

Entitled Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies, 750 copies have been printed which offered for between 15 and 20 shillings. Now often called The First Folio, solely 235 copies survive, every value tens of millions.

The highest quantity ever paid for one at public sale was in October 2020, when an American collector, Stephan Loewentheil, spent $9.97m (£7.84m) at Christie’s public sale home in New York.

The lion’s share of the 235 Folios are in libraries, faculties or personal collections within the United States. More than a 3rd – 82 to be exact – are sorted by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC.

The relaxation are unfold throughout the globe – a number of in Japan, and the odd copy in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India and Chile.

Luckily for us, round 50, although, nonetheless stay right here within the UK. In celebration of the First Folio’s four-hundredth anniversary this yr, many of those are on public view across the nation, in Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and the British Library in London, for instance, in addition to Stratford-upon-Avon the place the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust maintains three copies, together with one belonging to the RSC.

Greg Doran is creative director emeritus on the RSC and has been described as “one of the great Shakespeareans of his generation”. He has directed the likes of Judi Dench, Helen Mirren and David Tennant in Shakespeare roles – even King Charles III himself, who, in 2016, because the then Prince of Wales (not Denmark!), performed Hamlet in Doran’s Shakespeare Live! manufacturing for the BBC.

On his international travels, Doran has had the chance to examine a number of of the remaining First Folios, which he has written about in his new e-book My Shakespeare: A Director’s Journey via the First Folio. He advised the Express about a number of the volumes and their house owners he’d met, and specifically one lifelong Shakespeare fan, King Charles III, whose predecessors have been the topic of a few of The Bard’s work: “I saw a copy at Windsor Castle which the King showed me,” he says.

“It’s a Folio owned by Charles I which he was reading at Carisbrooke Castle, where he was held captive, on the Isle of Wight, just before his execution. And I wondered: which play was he taking consolation from?

“Was he perhaps reading something pertinent like Richard II? He also ended up in prison before being killed, and famously says: ‘I wasted time and now doth time waste me’. But no, it seems that, actually, he was reading the comedies…which I suppose you would do, if you were in that position, to try and cheer yourself up!”

Doran explains how our present King was a loyal president of the RSC for over 30 years. “I’ve known of his passion for Shakespeare from the way he regularly comes to performances,” he says. “There’s always something that strikes him about the play that is unique to him and his position.

“For example, he noted that his predecessor Charles I had annotated his copy of the First Folio with his motto Dum spiro spero, which means: ‘While I breathe, I hope’.”

The King confessed to Doran that he’s additionally fond of creating notes within the margins. “Whenever he comes to Stratford and wants to record a particular line from a play, he scribbles it down in his own Complete Works of Shakespeare which he was given for his 21st birthday.”

But not, Doran hastens so as to add, on the First Folio itself, fortunately.

The RSC director additionally inspected Folios in Germany, USA, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. “There’s also a copy in a university in Tokyo that belonged to a man called Paul Francis Webster, who was the only African American to own a copy,” he provides. “It turns out, he was the lyricist for the theme song for Spiderman. He also won an Oscar, in 1954, for a song in Calamity Jane.

“And that same copy which he owned had belonged, before, to the man who wrote the words to Handel’s Messiah, in 1741. It’s extraordinary that two lyricists, two centuries apart, should own that same copy.”

As nicely because the tales they comprise, the remaining Folios give an perception into the lives of the house owners who learn all of them these centuries in the past. Professor Emma Smith teaches Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford, and is creator of The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio.

She advised the Express about a number of the annotations she found in unique volumes throughout her analysis: “There are many differences in the lives these 400-year-old books have had,” she says. “Some of them have doodles and marginalia in the sides; some of them have cat paw prints on them.”

In Oxford there’s one Folio that after belonged to a severe Shakespeare scholar within the 18th century referred to as Edmond Malone, with a wine glass stain on it.

Smith provides: “It’s actually on Henry IV, Part 1, which is very appropriate because that’s a play all about taverns and indulgent living.”

Smith notes how the provenance and former possession of the Folios will be intriguing for contemporary students. “A hundred years ago, we would only have been interested in the most absolute perfect copies which look as though nobody has touched them,” she says. “Now we’re much more interested in the ways that people have left their mark upon this book: the names of the owners that people have written in them and the notes they have made.”

The cleanliness-obsessed Victorians even went as far as to bleach the pages of their Folios with a view to eradicate the marginalia and doodles they thought-about untidy and undesirable; in full distinction to the way in which historians method their analysis in the present day.

Shakespeare’s works proceed to have relevance over 4 centuries after they have been written, not simply to students, actors and administrators, however to on a regular basis audio system of the English language. The performs are nonetheless broadly carried out globally. He is by far essentially the most quoted author within the historical past the English-speaking world, and is believed to have launched or popularised over 1,700 phrases and phrases nonetheless in use in the present day: ‘World is my oyster’, ‘Blinking idiot’, ‘Cruel to be kind’, ‘Wild goose chase’, ‘Clothes make the man’, ‘It’s Greek to me’, ‘All that glitters is not gold’.

An indication of his international reputation is that, over the centuries, his works have been translated into 80 or so totally different languages, together with – moderately bizarrely – the fictional Klingon language from sci-fi sequence Star Trek.

If Shakespeare have been alive in the present day, he would little question be flattered… if slightly baffled.

• The exhibition 400 Years of the First Folio is at Stratford-upon-Avon till November 5. Shakespeare.org.uk. The RSC’s manufacturing of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, London’s Garrick Theatre, from September 30. rsc.org.uk