♪♪ Next on "Great Performances"... ♪♪ ♪♪ -What an amazing approach this is.

It's got a real theater, I guess, hasn't it?

-Professor Emma Smith is on her way to an Elizabethan house.

Longleat.

England.

Inside, she will see a priceless object.

-You never quite know what it's going to be actually like to see something you've been waiting to see for a long time.

I feel kind of nervous.

-Emma has come to see a book of stories with hundreds of different characters speaking words we often repeat, offering thoughts we often share... steeped in history and encapsulating the life stories of generations.

It's a first edition of Shakespeare's complete plays.

-Hello.

[ Chuckles ] -Shakespeare's "First Folio."

-Wow!

♪♪ -♪ Y nosotros ya... ♪ -Now, often tucked away, the Folio began in the wide embrace of theater.

It was Shakespeare's fellow actors who made the Folio and who passed his plays on to our actors today.

Without the Folio, we would have lost half of the plays.

-We would never have known about "Antony and Cleopatra," "As You Like It."

-"Julius Caesar" and "Macbeth" and "Twelfth Night."

-And "The Tempest."

-"Henry VII."

"Henry IV, Part 1."

You know, on and on.

-I mean, it's hard to imagine a world without half of those plays.

-Without the Folio, Shakespeare would simply not be as we know him today.

-I think Shakespeare would have been seen as one writer from that period who wrote some pretty good plays.

-His fellow actors could not have predicted the success of their friend, yet four centuries later, Shakespeare's flourishing across the globe.

Perhaps no more so than in the work of the New York City's Public Theater.

-He sees the worth of every human being.

He sees the worth of every different perspective.

-For over 60 years, they've put Shakespeare at the center of all they do.

-Shakespeare can absorb everything we give it and then give it back to us in a way that enlightens us and says, "Oh, wow.

I hadn't thought of that, but there it is."

-You remove those plays from our culture, oh, my, our culture is poorer.

-It just gets to -- It gets to the heart of what it means to be human.

-In whatever ways the plays speak to us today, it all started with the Folio.

-The Shakespeare First Folio is the most important secular book in the history of the Western world.

♪♪ ♪♪ Major funding for "Great Performances" is provided by... ...and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

♪♪ -On the banks of the River Thames in London is a replica of Shakespeare's theater -- Shakespeare's Globe.

♪♪ This is where the Folio story begins.

It begins with his actors.

Today, Niamh Cusack and Finbar Lynch, Shakespearean actor partners, are walking in their footsteps.

-So, here we are, standing on the Globe stage, which is very exciting for us.

I can just imagine what it was like as an actor looking out, looking up, wanting to reach out to the huge auditorium.

And then you've got the sky above.

-So, what would it have been like to be a member of the audience at a play here?

-I think it would have been incredible.

The atmosphere would have been really electric.

There are shows happening most afternoons of the year.

Um, some people suggest that there might have been 3,000 people in this space.

-So Shakespeare -- he was the most popular playwright of the time or one of the most popular playwrights of the time, but there were other playwrights, weren't there?

-Oh, absolutely.

I think, when he dies, it's actually a really fragile moment because only half the plays have actually been published anywhere.

They've been printed in these sort of little paperback editions.

We call them "quartos."

They're sort of very disposable.

And the rest of the plays probably exist in maybe just a handful of copies, you know, so chances of a play surviving are really quite limited.

-Are you saying that half of the collected works of Shakespeare as we know them would not have been handed down?

-Exactly.

We've lost hundreds of plays from this period.

Only half of Shakespeare's plays had appeared in print in his lifetime.

Most things weren't published in this period.

And at the point after his death, I guess the question is, what happens to the other half?

And I think this is where it gets really interesting because we have two of his friends, John Heminges and Henry Condell, both actors in his company, both old colleagues from decades ago, seem to have taken it upon themselves to say, "Okay, well, we need to secure this legacy.

And what we will do is we will get together as many versions of the plays as we possibly can.

We will put them into a folio volume, a large, printed, sort of substantial text that will survive, and we will produce the very first collected works."

-That must have been incredibly expensive, though.

-It was an absolutely huge job.

You wouldn't do it unless you really wanted to.

There's something in this book which is an act of love for this amazing writer who Heminges and Condell knew, their dear friend.

And they knew that he was a genius, but they wanted to make sure that people in the future knew that he was a genius, as well.

-So, what are the plays that we might have lost?

-Some really, really big ones.

"Antony and Cleopatra" only exists in the Folio.

"Twelfth Night."

"As You Like it."

"Julius Caesar."

"Macbeth."

-Wow.

-Imagine a world without "Macbeth."

-"What's done cannot be undone."

-"When shall we three meet again?"

[ Laughter ] Appropriately enough.

♪♪ -When shall we three meet again?

In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

-When the hurly-burly's done, when the battle's lost and won.

-That will be ere the set of sun.

-Where the place?

-Upon the heath.

-There to meet with Macbeth.

♪♪ [ Birds crying ] -Determined to publish all of Shakespeare's plays, Heminges and Condell's work began.

♪♪ Tracing what they would need and who they would need is author Ben Higgins.

-It's a hugely significant project.

And this is a lot of money.

It's a tremendous amount of capital required to get something like this off the ground, to buy the manuscripts, to secure the rights to print them, to get hold of the paper.

This is an awful lot of money.

So how are we going to do this?

How are we going to get this project done?

Well, it's going to take more than one person, but the leader of this project is a particular bookseller who has the means and the know-how and, maybe most importantly, the capital to get this thing off the ground.

This figure's name is Edward Blount.

-This 1640s drawing is a representation of Shakespeare's London and one we can still recognize today.

-So, over here, we've got Southwarke and the start of the theater district.

And then over here, we've got the Globe Theatre, Shakespeare's stomping ground.

And over the river is St Paul's Churchyard.

This is the kind of beating heart, really, of the book trade in Shakespeare's time.

And this is where, if we want to try and get on the trail of Edward Blount, this is where we need to head to next.

♪♪ About where these railings are here, there would have been, 400 years ago, a row of bookshops.

And among these bookshops was the one that was owned by Edward Blount, the chief financier of Shakespeare's Folio.

This exciting thing about him is that it's from this spot in his shop that copies of the First Folio would first have been sold.

♪♪ -Blount's shop was a high-end business, rather like Maggs of Bloomsbury today, where the rules of supply and demand still apply.

-There is an essential choice as a bookseller still today to make between selling books that people actually want or selling books you think people should want.

-Hm.

-And so there is this element of fulfilling the demand and the temptation.

The way to make a quick buck is to sell the simple, popular, repeatable.

And in that time, in the 16th century, this was, you know, religious books, books of common prayer.

-So things like sermons or plague pamphlets.

-Yeah, yeah, exactly that.

-This is -- It's known as a folio.

This is a folio.

We've got some examples on the table here.

What do you make of the fact the First Folio was published in folio format?

-People were genuinely shocked.

"Gosh!

How dare you print non-religious material in such a lavish format!"

The book -- You have to realize that up to this point, the book has this long association with the church and it is profoundly a religious thing.

Most people would only own one book, and that would be the Bible.

-As for the price, the Folio would be the most expensive book of English plays ever published.

-Who is the target market for this book?

I think this is a question that Edward Blount was asking, as well.

There's the big danger that you have created what is a very big book of a very big price which potentially has a very small audience.

♪♪ -With Blount's support promised, Heminges and Condell could at least begin their task.

First, they must find copies of the scripts.

In Shakespeare's time, all documents began with a quill.

♪♪ -My favorite pen is a swan quill, and all I have to do is cycle to the canal a few minutes away and pick up a swan quill.

The most important part of making the quill is just that final little cut that gives you a nice, sharp edge.

-In the 17th century, Bruges was the book center of Europe.

Today it is the home of a modern-day scribe, Brody Neuenschwander.

-Let's say you were a scribe writing down long texts.

You'd want flow.

You'd want the letterforms to all be related to each other so that the pen could flow easily from one to the next.

♪♪ -It's really important to understand the way in which Shakespeare understood playwriting to work.

So you would have what would be the foul papers, which was Shakespeare's rough draft, and the foul papers might be given over to a playhouse scribe or someone in the company.

-These fair copies may have survived, but if not, Heminges and Condell would be relying on Shakespeare's own handwriting.

How easy would that have been?

-We don't know an awful lot about Shakespeare's handwriting or the state of the playscripts that he -- that he produced.

We've got only one partial example.

It's Shakespeare adding in some speeches to a collaborative play called "Sir Thomas More."

-Gosh.

-It is completely chaotic.

If you were trying to read a play from this, it would be really, incredibly difficult.

-"Their babes" or "babies"... "Imagine" is -- I don't believe I see that word quite clearly here.

Oh, my goodness.

-What's amazing about Shakespeare's manuscript is quite how weird and wacky it is.

And this includes, on one level, the spelling.

He doesn't spell the same word in the same way, even in a sentence.

So a scribe is going to have to come up with a spelling or even work out, is Shakespeare really saying the same word or not?

-"To leave these..." Some of it I do make out, but I think for most people in our times not a single word would come off the page.

-If Heminges and Condell had found fair copies, they likely came from the Globe's scribe, Ralph Crane.

None of his versions of Shakespeare's plays survive, but this is his fair copy of Thomas Middleton's play "A Game at Chess."

-So, I can see this quite nicely.

And he's clearly a professional scribe because he's using larger scripts for titles and headlines and then going to smaller scripts.

It's much clearer.

It is a very different world.

I can read most of this.

So, I would say if I were getting ready to spend money to print an expensive edition, I would have Crane prepare the fair copy first.

♪♪ -Besides foul papers and fair copies, there was an additional complication.

While half the plays had never been published, 18 had been printed in quartos, small, pocket-sized booklets, and sometimes in more than one version.

♪♪ -Um, here we go.

"When we awake and born..." No.

"Oh, this conscience makes cowards of us all."

-"Thus conscience doth misdoubt."

-I missed out a page.

-Inside the Globe's indoor theater, Niamh Cusack and Finbar Lynch are working through the different options facing Heminges and Condell, even with the most famous speech of all.

-Okay.

"To be or not to be.

Ay.

There's the point.

To die.

To sleep.

Is that all?"

-"To be or not to be.

That is the question."

-Ah.

-"Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune..." -To die.

To sleep.

Is that all?

Ay.

All."

-The two existing quartos of "Hamlet" were markedly different.

-In the case of "Hamlet," the first quarto seems to have been based on maybe somebody taking shorthand in the theater.

The actors weren't very pleased when that went into print, so they published a second quarto, which they said was fully corrected and twice as long as the first one.

-"Could bear the scorns and flattery of the world, scorned by the right rich..." -"For who would bear the whips and scorns of time."

-Hm.

-[ Chuckles ] "The oppressor's wrong.

The proud man's contumely.

The pangs of disprized love, the law's..." -"Who would this endure?"

-Then when it came to the Folio and they got the backstage theater script, that was different again.

So you've got three different versions of "Hamlet."

What are you going to do?

-If I was either John Heminges or Henry Condell and I was asked to pull together a version of "Hamlet," I would find that really challenging to decide what is the authoritative version.

Of course, the difference between them and me is that they knew him and they performed in the plays.

♪♪ -In the end, they used passages from both quartos but favored the theater scripts, the play as it was performed.

But did they make the right choice?

Today all three versions are options.

-You know, the idea that there are all these different editions of these plays is really liberatory.

We know that he rewrote things.

So there is license then not to kind of change them drastically, but these are things that are -- that are fluid and alive.

He knew most of the time these are living, breathing, changeable pieces of material that have to respond to the people, the time, the place that you're performing it.

So, for me, that's the best thing about them.

They're not preserved in aspic.

They're -- Where do you meet the material and how do you mold together, I think, is the bit that's exciting about it.

-♪ There is a time ♪ -♪ A time to be born ♪ ♪ And a time to die ♪ -♪ There is a time ♪ -♪ A time to laugh and a time to cry ♪ -♪ The time ♪ -Every summer, the New York Public Theater performs Shakespeare in Central Park.

-♪ The time... ♪ -This year, they have chosen the most celebrated play of all, the one that each generation defines for itself.

-♪ Heaven ♪ -"Hamlet."

-♪ Amen, amen ♪ -And to the extent that I said... -Before rehearsals began, Director Kenny Leon and Shakespeare scholar in residence James Shapiro sat down to contemplate the challenge ahead.

-That play is a roadmap to say something about life now.

-And it's always been that roadmap, but life keep changing it.

-This is a story about the ugly and the beautiful.

-It's going to be a huge task for any actor you sign up.

I mean, it's -- it's the longest role in Shakespeare.

Even trimmed, it's the longest role.

-Yeah, well, it starts with a good script.

-Yeah, well, that you have.

[ Indistinct conversations ] -So you want to start with the fencing clapping or do you want to...?

-I want to get -- Let me get into this.

-Okay.

Great.

Alright.

Sounds good.

-Six months later, rehearsals begin.

-I also have one question about... -Quiet!

-Shh, shh, shh.

-♪ When you go, you'll have to go alone ♪ -"Hamlet" is about a family and a kingdom falling apart.

-♪ Go alone ♪ -This production is set in the political and Black church tradition of Atlanta, Georgia, but it is about all of us and speaks to everyone.

-♪ When you go, you'll have to go alone ♪ -The way I like to talk about this production of "Hamlet" is like taking 1590 and running it into 2023 and creating a fantastical place called "now."

-The play begins with Hamlet mourning his dead father, the king, and struggling with his mother's hasty marriage to his uncle, now the new king.

-♪ Have to wipe your tears ♪ -'Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, to give these mourning duties to your father, but you must know your father lost a father.

That father lost, lost his.

-We said it right after the pandemic.

The spiritual disconnect of community.

I'm trying to figure out what this specific Hamlet is going through.

So, what was his life like three years earlier when we had the political divide?

Where was Hamlet in that when young Black men were being arrested and killed?

You know, I think that Shakespeare's play is a 500-year-old play talking about why we should love on humanity more.

-Okay.

So we're doing the scene of everybody's dead.

-Kenny's production focuses on the connection between the worlds of the grieving, traumatized Hamlet and that of young people today.

-This is definitely an experience that I know will shift me.

We've just come through three years of pandemic, right?

And there's a lot of -- I know, for me, I'm still holding a lot of confusion as to how I reintegrate into the world.

What is this quintessence of dust?

What is this?

What are we contributing our time and energy to?

Does it matter?

I'm having a lot -- I'm having a lot of my very own existential questions around, um, what I'm contributing to.

-Hamlet in his pain is a character that will ask the most fundamental and eternal question of all -- why are we here?

-To be or not to be?

That is the question.

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them.

-There's much to wrestle with.

You know, I think the play begins with the love of a lost one.

It begins with a funeral.

This production is now, and it's -- you're dealing with life and death and love.

[ Gravelly voice speaking indistinctly ] -Hamlet's burden is made unbearable by the appearance of his dear father's ghost, bidding him avenge his murder.

-Hamlet... -The murderer?

Hamlet's uncle.

-Hamlet... -In this production, the ghost possesses Hamlet.

-Adieu.

Adieu, adieu, my son.

Remember me.

-[ Gasps ] [ Breathing rapidly ] [ Sobbing ] -"Hamlet," on some fundamental level, is about a young man who is looking to the generation above him, the generation in power, of his parents, of the authorities in the state, and recognizing the corruption and the hypocrisy and the degradation of that generation.

And he hates it, but he doesn't know how to fight back against it.

He doesn't know how to resist it.

His dead father urges him to take vengeance, but should he?

Can he?

Is that actually the right way to do it?

And watching Hamlet struggle with that ethical dilemma... and, by the way, Shakespeare doesn't give us an answer to what is right and what is wrong -- is incredibly powerful in every age when it's put on.

-Remember thee.

Ay, thou poor ghost.

Whilst memory holds a seat in this distracted globe.

[Sobbing] Remember thee.

Yea... -Hamlet will have to work out what it would mean to avenge his father's death.

-If you take a life, you have to wear that on you the rest of your life.

And what does that put on a young man, you know?

And, so, as this young man is thinking about the past, the present, and the future... [ Indistinct conversations ] -This production portrays genuine love between characters.

Hamlet has his Ophelia, but she will be constantly manipulated by her male relatives, and their relationship undermined.

-No more but so?

-Her brother will tell her not to trust the prince.

-Perhaps he loves you now, but you must fear.

His greatness weighed, his will is not his own.

Occasion smiles upon a second leave.

-This is a "Hamlet" that is deeply rooted in the truths of who we are.

I don't think there's a single female-identifying person on this planet who doesn't understand what it means and how it feels to not be listened to.

We decided that these are two people who love each other very deeply.

-I'll conduct it.

And... [ All vocalizing ] Great.

♪♪ -With scripts found and selections made, Heminges and Condell now face their final challenge.

To print all the plays, they must secure all the rights.

But who owned what play?

And how would they find out?

The answers lay in the Stationers' Register.

Here, all the owners of Shakespeare's previously published plays would have paid their sixpence fee and written their names -- exactly what Heminges and Condell needed.

-Hi!

-Hi.

-Hello.

-Is this your first time looking at the register?

-It is.

-There is something very magical about actually seeing the books themselves.

I'll leave you to it.

-Thanks so much.

-Enjoy.

-Thank you very much.

-Okay.

Thanks.

-Thank you.

Well.

Gosh.

This is genuinely brilliant.

♪♪ One of the most challenging issues of making the Folio is just how many people own just a little bit.

In fact, just one play.

You've got to negotiate with an awful lot of people who own a little bit of Shakespeare.

-Bookseller Edward Blount and printer William Jaggard owned the rights to some of the plays because they had printed them and registered them years ago, but all the other quartos were owned by the people who had printed those, and that included major titles.

-Some of the real big hitters are elsewhere.

These are owned by different people, and they know what they've got.

-The game was on.

-But, no, it's really cool.

So, this one entry on page 161 of this register shows John Smethwick entering both "Hamlet" and "Romeo and Juliet."

We've got 16 titles here altogether, but among them are these glinting jewels.

"A Book Called Hamlet."

Sixpence.

"Romeo and Juliet."

Another sixpence.

He's got a huge amount of bargaining power.

-The Folio makers needed to come up with a plan.

-There are a few different tools that the negotiating team have at their disposal, and one is just straight money.

So I can just give you money and lease the right to print your play.

There's another thing that you can offer, which is, I can give you copies of the book so we can negotiate about that.

Do you want some finished copies maybe?

And they're you're kind of getting a little bit of a deal.

There's another option, which is, you can actually take shares in the venture.

-It's this third option that tempts John Smethwick and William Aspley.

As shareholders, their names will appear at the end of the Folio.

-The difference is between you can take this money now or you can risk it, you can risk a gamble, you can bet that the project is going to succeed and earn you more money later.

So that's the gamble that William Aspley and John Smethwick take by signing up to become part of Team Shakespeare.

♪♪ -The entire Folio project was a leap into the unknown.

Would the gamble pay off?

With the pressure piling up, Heminges and Condell make an unprecedented decision to include an image of the man himself.

♪♪ Renaissance historian Cathy Shrank has gone behind the scenes in search of the source of their inspiration.

♪♪ -Nice to meet you.

-Nice to meet you.

-It seems to be really quite novel that the Folio opens with this sort of portrait of Shakespeare by the engraver Martin Droeshout, which people think is based on this portrait.

It's this engraving here... We don't know for certain if it's based on this, but if this is the only portrait made of Shakespeare when he was alive, it's highly likely that it is this.

You can see certain similarities.

I guess it's the eyes, the way the eyes are positioned in the composition, how they seem to look at you in this sort of searching way and almost follow you around the room.

The line of the nose, the mouth, the receding hairline.

It's really close.

-So, if we didn't know this was Shakespeare, what do you think we'd think about the person here, the personality?

-It's difficult.

We'd say he's quite sort of mysterious.

-Because the portrait is giving very few clues, apart from the slightly ostentatiously disheveled collar.

But apart from that, yes, it's this sort of projecting mystery.

-And there's a sort of slight hint of a "Mona Lisa" smile on his lips.

-So it would have been a major expense to have an engraving done from the portrait.

I think 40 shillings is the sum that normally gets talked about.

That's 40 days' wages for a skilled laborer.

Putting a lot of faith and then a lot of money behind this idea that art is going to sell or help sell the works of the man.

-I think we have to just think back to the time this was published, the First Folio, what a revelation this would have been, that here is the hand.

This is the man, the mind behind this masterpiece.

[ Horn honking ] ♪ Hermana de tu hermana ♪ ♪ Eso eres tú ♪ ♪ Hermana de tu hermana ♪ -Their faith in the Folio saved half the plays.

One of them, "The Comedy of Errors," has now been turned into a bilingual musical by the Public Theater's Mobile Unit.

It will tour the diverse neighborhoods of New York, where Spanish is often the first language.

-♪ Thyself, that's you ♪ ♪♪ -♪ This is news, I won't lie ♪ -Shakespeare has become a touchpoint for many different cultures, nationalities, languages.

I mean, it is not unusual for Shakespeare to be translated into any other language, right?

I think there's a complexity and nuance to Shakespeare's plays that allow him to be read as part of any culture.

-♪ And if I ever thought I was missing ♪ -This production's decision to use two languages and song was to bring in audiences who don't usually feel Shakespeare is for them.

-Wait.

Me?!

-♪ Dear Luciana can't bear to be apart ♪ -Stay over there!

-One thing we were really thinking about is how music can sort of bridge the gap of accessibility.

With music, you're being invited.

-Like, "Come over here!

There's a party happening.

We want you to be a part of it!"

-Exactly.

Yeah.

[ Indistinct singing ] -In the case of this play, music could also help with the plot.

-My wife and one set of twins and the other -- My wife and one half of that group and then...

It's so complicated!

-Okay.

I'll try.

-Why is it so hard?

Why is it so hard to do?

♪ Sola ♪ -So, at the very beginning, there's this long monologue that gives you all the information you need to understand the story.

And if you miss it, you miss it, so... -The rest of the show will become very confusing for a good while of time.

And so we were like, "Okay, we'll put a song there just to make sure, if you missed anything, these are the people you should be following and this is the gist of the story."

♪ Search of my son Antipholus and his servant Dromio ♪ -The play is a crazy farce, but it's also about family, and that could have real resonance with this New York community when in three months' time it tours.

-♪ El hijo y su... ♪ -I think with many of Shakespeare's comedies, even though there is this silly layer on the top, it's always about something deeper.

-♪ Pues mejor muero ♪ ♪ Porque ahora de familia me queda cero ♪ [ Birds chirping ] ♪♪ -One morning back in 1621, the first stage of a momentous process was set in motion.

After months of preparation, the printing of Shakespeare's First Folio began.

At last.

What could possibly go wrong?

♪♪ -Where's the... -In Oxford's Bodleian Library, Richard Lawrence and Alan May will be working with the same 17th-century printing techniques used in Mr. Jaggard's original print room... and printing from a replica press that Alan has built.

-Hello, there!

-Hello.

-It's a piece of the quarto of "Romeo and Juliet."

-Just like the printers of the first Folios, Tiffany Stern is giving them different types of script to work with.

-And for you, Alan, manuscript in an early modern hand.

That's a little tougher than Richard's.

-It may be.

It'll take me longer.

Yeah.

-So, how did these pieces of text find their way into the Folio print room?

-So, what's happened is Shakespeare has written his manuscript.

It's gone to the theater company.

Then a manuscript works its way to the printers.

It might be Shakespeare's manuscript.

It might be a scribal manuscript.

It's very likely to be a mixture of both.

-Among these documents, they may have even used the actors' individual parts.

No actor ever received an entire script.

-One of the problems for the printers when they put the Folio together was the sheer variety of styles -- of handwriting and habits of punctuation of the different people who produced the texts.

-Printers would have preferred to have used printed copy, but even that would have had marked corrections.

-For printers, if you were printing, it was easy to set type from printed copy.

It was hard to set type from manuscript.

They clearly wanted to use printed copy if they could, so they might take an earlier quarto version and just annotate it from the playbook and then use that annotated quarto to produce the folio.

♪♪ -Setting print from Shakespeare's own hand was probably the hardest of all.

Any original drafts were generally a mess.

-You've had your second thoughts.

You've moved a bit, you know.

You've crossed some bit out.

You've put some alternatives in.

You know, you've got an arrow perhaps pointing or you've squeezed another bit in.

If you were trying to set type in the printing shop from this, it would be really, incredibly difficult.

-As for the compositor, total concentration was required.

-There are two massive cases of type -- an uppercase with capital letters, a lowercase, and each letter has its own separate box.

And each line is being set, as it were, backwards because it's going to be printed in mirror image.

It's a skilled and difficult job.

♪♪ -When it goes into print, then you've got the printing house and the compositors who are making changes based on their techniques and their methodologies.

-Sometimes errors crept in that could only have come from Shakespeare's hand, errors that seem to have slipped past Heminges and Condell.

-In "Romeo and Juliet," Lady Capulet doesn't have a name.

In one page, she will be "Capulet's Wife."

And then you go to another page, and she's suddenly "Old Lady."

And then she's "Mother."

[ Chuckles ] Either nobody spotted it or no one cared.

-At the end of the play, there is the most dramatic error -- comic yet marvelous, as it gives us a glimpse into a moment of true Shakespearean inspiration.

-When Romeo dies, he says, "O true apothecary!

Thy drugs are quick.

Thus with a kiss I die."

That's it.

And then, clearly, Shakespeare thought, "No, that's not enough.

I've got to give him more."

And he wrote 12 more lines for Romeo to say before he died.

"Eyes, look your last.

Arms, take your last embrace."

And so on.

And then presumably crossed off the initial few lines.

But the typesetter -- how was he to know?

So he set both.

He does die twice.

So what we have now is we get to see Shakespeare in the act of writing Romeo's death speech and thinking that -- "Those four lines, I've got to make it more substantial.

I've got to give him something more."

♪♪ -As the months go by, some pages will be proofread, others will slip past.

But at last, some two years later, the 900-page First Folio is finished, each copy brandishing its very own mistakes.

-The irony is that this is maybe one of the most famous, important books in the world, and it is absolutely full of error.

And I adore that.

I adore the people who made this iconic, extraordinary, and quite scrappy book.

♪♪ -With the book finally printed, the Folio makers have a triumphant return journey to make.

♪♪ They will secure their rights to their newly published plays, creating the most iconic page in the "Stationers' Registry."

♪♪ -Ah.

And here it is.

On this page, we can see that Edward Blount and Isaak Jaggard came to Stationers' Hall and listed the 16 remaining titles in the First Folio and signed that they were now under their ownership.

For Blount and Jaggard, on this day here, the 8th of November of 1623, this must have been a tremendous relief, a major milestone.

♪♪ -Approximately 750 First Folios were printed at a pound-per-bound copy -- already the year's salary of a laborer.

And as Shakespeare's popularity climbed, a Folio would be worth millions.

♪♪ Heminges and Condell would never know that, but the 8th of November must have been a special day.

-Here it is, a summation of the project, the final moment at which the First Folio is finally coming into being.

At this point, hopefully they can take a breath and wait for the first sales.

[ Horns honking ] ♪♪ [ Siren wailing ] -400 years later, and the fruits of the Folio are coming alive.

Hunts Point, New York, is a community with multiple challenges, but here Shakespeare is seen as a way of offering a different perspective.

[ Woman speaking indistinctly ] -So, a good foreword is to tell people where it's coming... -From!

-Yes!

Together, the Public Theater and the Hunts Point Alliance for Children will help these 10- and 11-year-olds to learn and stage a 90-minute version of "Romeo and Juliet."

-As Elvin puts them down, speak it.

Can you make it sound like the most beautiful place in the world?

-Verona!

-Verona!

So, everybody.

"In fair..." Where?

Where?

-Verona!

-Verona!

-Yes...?

-"Two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona."

-Yes!

-Whoa!

-Shakespeare's hard, but Shakespeare's active.

And so I think most of what it is about finding the effort to say something both physically and creatively are linked.

Chelsea, you and I are in a fight, and I just can't get over it, and now I'm holding quite the -- What am I holding if I just can't get over -- -Grudge!

-Grudge!

-Yes, ma'am!

-Two, three, four, and five.

Six, seven, eight.

A-one, two... -Can you hand these out to your group, Heaven?

Here is one for your group.

Could you hand those out?

And what is your character's objective?

And work together to see if you can figure out what your character wants.

-I think they're gonna go and get married.

-Mutiny.

-Mutiny.

-And mutiny... -In a school where English is not the first language of many of the students, Shakespeare may seem a strange choice, but there is another way of seeing this.

-I am a Black woman who grew up working-class poor.

I did not feel that Shakespeare was for me.

There was only a moment later in my life when I was in graduate school where I realized all the things that I'm interested in, all the tension points that I want to explore, solve, right, are actually in Shakespeare's plays!

So this thing that became -- that was, for me, a symbol of, like, white, you know, oppression then became the thing that I embrace the most now and that I use in my work trying to say, how can we have all the conversations that we need to have?

Well, Shakespeare is a great place to do it.

♪♪ [ Laughter ] -Three months later, the show is cast.

[ Children shouting playfully ] ♪♪ Angel, a boy who has never been on a stage before, will play Romeo.

♪♪ -That was... -His Juliet is Ariana.

♪♪ -Juliet starts out young and naive and ends up making choice after choice, trying to stand up for herself in circumstances that don't allow it, and ultimately, sadly, making the ultimate decision for herself at the end.

-Already our Juliet is younger than the Juliet as written, which is unusual.

Our Romeo is, of course, quite a bit younger, as well.

And I think for a young man to play Romeo, what they're still discovering is that balance of who am I, what do I want, and how can I also just have a good time with my friends?

He finds his own power and his own path, as well, because of what he's lost.

[ Laughter ] ♪♪ -The Folio had been printed to keep Shakespeare's plays in the world, but once the book is bound, it takes on a life and meaning of its own.

Artist Suzanne Coley, who creates embroidered books of Shakespeare's sonnets, is about to see a very different kind of Folio.

♪♪ -I love it.

-She's meeting with Ayanna.

♪♪ -Wow!

This is monumental.

This is huge.

-What do you think?

-That's interesting.

-Just 15 years after the publication of the Folio, it appears in a painting by Van Dyck.

It's held in the arms of a young John Suckling.

The Folio had become a status symbol.

-Hello.

Hi.

I'm Xavier.

-Hi.

-Curator Xavier Salomon is fascinated by this painting and by what it says about the Folio.

-We know that Suckling was very wealthy, so he came from a wealthy background.

He's a wealthy young man at this point in his late 20s, early 30s.

But he is also a poet himself and a successful one, a playwright.

And, you know, he's shown with the Folio, life-size pretty much.

-So, is this typical of a Van Dyck?

Does he -- Does he have books in other of his portraitures?

-There are books in other portraits, but never books that can be identified so precisely and never books that are so famous.

As far as we know, it's the very first representation of a Folio, a Shakespeare book, in art that can be recognized.

Very handily for us, it says "Shakespeare" over here, and then it says "Hamlet" over there.

And for a character like Suckling, I think, you know, maybe it was his favorite play and he clearly asked to be shown with "Hamlet."

-And also, with the book, it's like he's turning the pages of "Hamlet."

You know, it's not just centered on one page, but, you know, we should read it.

And he's holding it with such care.

-I think he's clearly thinking about Hamlet as a role model in some way.

-Yeah.

And Shakespeare, as well, right?

That Suckling in some way is tracing his artistic genealogy through Shakespeare and "Hamlet" to his -- his new play.

-And, in fact, you know, once you know more about Suckling's life, you realize how "Hamlet," in a way, comes into it, also, in a tragic way at the end, because this is a man who a few years later commits suicide, Suckling.

-Oh.

-So, you know, that kind of idea of sort of looking inside yourself... -Oh!

-...and the whole drama of "Hamlet," it's sort of almost predicting that in some way.

-Wow.

-Wow.

-You know -- Wow.

-Yeah.

I know.

-Kind of deep.

-Yeah.

-You know, maybe he was trying to let himself be true, you know, like, looking for something in "Hamlet."

-John Suckling will be caught up in the horrors of the 1642 English Civil War, an event that tore the nation in two.

-He fights for the king.

He's an ardent monarchist.

That is the losing side.

And he decides to flee.

And what we know from accounts is that he basically runs out of money, runs out of resources there, and he poisons himself, aged 33.

-It's kind of sad in a way now that I know this information.

I mean, he's an elite person.

Shakespeare is not.

But he survives.

His work survives.

And it reminds me of, you know, the sonnet -- "Not marble nor gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme."

You know?

It's -- -Beautiful.

-Something about that.

-Yeah.

♪♪ -Soon, within the leaves of the Folios would lie the stories of those who read them.

♪♪ It was here at Windsor Castle that King Charles I slept just days before his execution.

♪♪ He had lost the English Civil War but was allowed to keep his Shakespeare Folio.

[ Ticking ] ♪♪ -[ Laughs ] -Today King Charles III is meeting with Greg Doran of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Jonathan Bate to talk about this Folio, a second edition.

-So, can we...?

-Please.

-Absolutely.

-So, what makes it such a moving book to have and particularly to have here in Windsor is that it was your predecessor, King Charles I's, copy.

And so we have at the top of the page very faint handwriting.

"Dum spiro spero.

C.R."

"While I breathe, there is hope."

C.R.

-- Carolus Rex.

King Charles I.

And we know that he was -- he was reading it while he was held here in Windsor prior to his execution.

-And at Carisbrooke.

-And at Carisbrooke, as well.

That's right.

-And do we know what -- which place he was reading?

-Well, that's the fascinating thing, because he knew all the plays well.

Although, you would sort of feel in that -- in those terrible circumstances, the histories and the tragedies, maybe not the best place to be, given what happens to kings.

[ Laughter ] So, this is the catalog of all the plays.

And, Greg... -So, he's retitled -- Maybe he's retitling them.

So, Benedick and Beatrice for "Much Ado."

-Yes.

-Pyramus and Thisbe for "Midsummer Night's Dream."

Rosalind for "As You Like It."

And, of course, Malvolio for "Twelfth Night."

And he's gone to the trouble of putting in the pagination of where to find these all, so it feels to me as though he's sort of just nominating where these plays -- -Or do you think these are his favorite characters from the plays?

-Yes, maybe.

-Or the ones he enjoyed most.

But I've got a wonderful, great, big, you know -- all the collected plays of Shakespeare.

Beautifully bound.

It was given to me long ago for my 21st birthday, I think.

But I filled it with all sorts of markers with endless comments... -Have you?

-...on the plays I saw at Stratford.

-And did you -- did you -- -And the favorite bits and speeches and.... -And how did you mark it, as a matter of interest?

With little annotations?

-Little bits of paper like that.

-Yes.

-Inside.

They all got curled over... -I definitely want to see that one day, sir.

-I'll show you.

You can come along.

I'll show you later if you want.

-Yes, please.

Because I never realized that King Charles did this.

-Right.

-But then I did it myself without thinking, just because I wanted to try and remember these things.

-Yes.

-Of course, all the royal family at that time were great -- great theater lovers, great playgoers.

I mean, I think the other very poignant thing is that we know that there was a special performance of "King Lear" in the Palace at Whitehall for King Charles' father, King James.

And Charles may well have been there as a child.

-Because he was 15, I think, wasn't he, when Shakespeare died?

-Yeah.

That's right.

-Something like that.

What must have been so marvelous in those days was when The King's Men, with King James I, they had the court season, didn't they?

-Yes.

Yes.

-When -- Was it autumn?

From November to... -It was Shrovetide.

-Shrovetide.

-There was a big -- There was a Christmas.

They were often performing on Saint Stephen's Day, on Boxing Day.

-Because it's so wonderful to have had it all happening, well, here or presumably Whitehall every year.

-Yeah.

And then I -- -You know what I hadn't realized?

Sorry.

Was the First Folio -- Was that unless that had been done... -Yeah.

-...we really would have lost 18 plays.

-It's so moving, isn't it?

Because it takes you back to a very particular moment of readership of this book.

-Yeah.

-Absolutely wonderful, isn't it?

♪♪ -Every Folio holds the secrets of hidden lives, with clues to their owners that both intrigue and confound.

♪♪ The markings in one such Folio, glimpsed by Claire Mary Louise Bourne as a student, would absorb the next 10 years of her life.

♪♪ -There are so many marks and notes on the pages of this book -- an unusual number of marks and notes on the pages of this book.

I needed to sit with this book for a while and list every single mark.

-Held in the Philadelphia Free Library for 80 years, despite its 700 handwritten annotations, it had never been closely studied.

♪♪ Inserted into "Romeo and Juliet" was the now-famous prologue, a passage that had only existed in a quarto but is absent from the Folio.

-It's breathtaking.

Here we have a very early reader understanding that this is an integral part of the play and supplying it in their own handwriting.

This is not an average reader of Shakespeare.

-The reader was also aware of earlier texts of "Hamlet."

-"Vide supple."

For "Vide supplementum."

"See the supplement."

What is going on here?

And then I went and I looked at the quarto versions of this play and I noted that there are four extra lines in Horatio's speech.

They elaborate on why Hamlet shouldn't follow the ghosts.

-Claire could see the reader was fascinated by ghosts, witches, powers beyond human control.

-When we turn to "Macbeth," the reader doesn't bother to annotate single lines.

The reader is marking this entire speech with these horizontal shoulder brackets, which just indicates, "Everything here is engrossing to me."

-After a decade of detailed study, Clare had real insight into this reader's mind... but no idea who they were.

She decided to publish.

-I sent it off to the editors.

It got published.

And hopefully it's interesting to some people.

♪♪ -Thousands of miles away in Cambridge, England, Claire's article landed on the desk of another scholar, Jason Scott Warren.

To his surprise, Jason thought the handwriting looked strangely familiar.

-Once I started to suspect who the reader might be, I mean, firstly, I was -- I was scared, I think.

[ Laughs ] I just thought, "This is impossibly big."

I was freaked out, really.

-To confirm his suspicions, Jason set about gathering the evidence.

-I'm kind of scrabbling for examples of the hand -- what kinds of marks this person makes in their books.

And it turns out that very few books survive, and the evidence is very scattered.

-But Jason's attention was drawn to a handwritten note in "Romeo and Juliet," allowing him to match the "Hence will I" from the Folio with a "Will I try" from this reader's other manuscripts.

The "R" and "I" in "enshrine" matched the "R" and "I" in "shrine."

-So I'm desperately trying to find overlaps between the Folio and the manuscript where I can kind of find individual words to compare.

All the time, I'm sort of slightly atremble because quite a lot of things are lining up.

-While Jason was strengthening the evidence, Claire remained oblivious.

-I had zero expectations.

Several people asked me, "Oh, do you know who the reader is?"

And I said, "No, I don't because I don't recognize this handwriting."

-Finally, Jason felt he had his case.

-I knew that Claire was on Twitter, so I sent her a Twitter direct message just saying, "Hi.

I've been reading your article.

Really exciting.

Really excellent.

Wonderful work.

I'm just wondering whether the reader could possibly be John Milton."

-Just had to take a beat.

[ Laughs ] Author of "Paradise Lost."

Um...

Many people think John Milton as the inheritor of Shakespeare's legacy.

And I said, "Okay.

What makes you think this?"

He sends me the draft of a blog post in which he lays out the handwriting evidence.

I said, "This is pretty persuasive."

And he says, "Can I publish it?

Do I have your blessing to publish it?"

I said, "Of course.

Publish it.

Let's see what comes back."

-Within a few hours, you started to get these kind of, you know, expressions of, like, "Oh, yeah, this is incredible."

Real enthusiasm.

-The Folio had belonged to Milton, a poet known to be deeply influenced by Shakespeare.

-Shakespeare wrote these immensely powerful roles for women.

And Milton, of course, was one of the first writers to speak for the right of a woman to divorce.

Equally, Shakespeare has many an anti-hero, a scheming anti-hero.

"Richard III" is the most notable example.

You then think of Milton writing "Paradise Lost" in which the central character is the figure of Satan.

♪♪ -Shakespeare's "Richard III" shows us both an arch villain and a courageous woman.

-Let me put in your minds what I have been, what I am!

-A murderous villain, and so still thou art!

-In a gender-blind casting, Richard III was played by Danai Gurira.

The bold queen who challenges him -- Sharon Washington.

-Ah!

Gentle villain.

Do not turn away.

-Foul, wrinkled witch!

[ Audience laughter ] What makes thou in my sight?

-A husband and a son!

Thou owest to me.

-Famous for her portrayals of powerful and complex Shakespearean women, Sharon is on her way to the Folger Library to see a First Folio, one that may have a particular resonance.

-Sharon, you're an amazing Shakespearean actor.

-Well, thank you, -But this is your first time seeing a Folio?

-Absolutely my first time, and it's -- -I'm kind of speechless, which is rare for me.

[ Laughter ] Please, you have to talk because I-I'm just staring at the book.

-So, I think a lot of the story about the Folio seems as if it's only having to do with men because it was Shakespeare's male actor friends who put it together.

But, actually, of course, women were deeply involved in the Shakespearean world, not only as audience members, but as owners of the First Folio.

As you can see, it was owned by someone named Elizabeth Brockett.

And it says "Her Book."

-"Her Book."

It says "Her Book"!

-[ Laughs ] And so, of course, women were very interested in Shakespeare.

What's particularly interesting about this copy -- and I'm going to turn the page very carefully -- she's also copied some lines from a poem written by a woman that are about why women shouldn't get married.

[ Laughs ] -Oh, you're kidding me.

-So, it says, "Wife and servant..." -"Are the same."

-"And only differ in the name.

For when the fatal knot is tied, which nothing, nothing can divide, then all that's kind is laid aside and nothing shown but state..." -"And pride."

-Wow.

-Yeah.

-It's really strong.

I mean, it really speaks to... what she felt she was losing of herself.

-Yeah.

Yeah.

And, of course, what's important to remember is that this is a big book of famous plays.

And she wanted to make sure that this is tied into this famous book.

-I honestly had no idea this existed.

[ Horns honking, siren wailing ] -One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

-At Hunts Point, the theme of marriages forced and thwarted is being explored in "Romeo and Juliet."

-What happens if you add a little "VVVV" to the end of it?

-"Lovvve."

-Yeah.

"Lovvve."

Because can you feel it?

What does it feel like on your lip?

-Like -- It kind of tingles.

-It is a little tickle.

-Oh, I found one.

-Okay.

Can I hear it?

Let's have it.

-With lovvve's light wings did I o'erperch these walls.

-Yeah.

Great.

What did "VVVV" do?

Anything -- -It made it more like that I actually felt love.

Yeah.

It's fun because you can, like, feel how another person probably felt at some point.

With love's light wings... And you're getting to play a character that you never, like, felt connected to at all, and it's like you're just a whole different person in the play.

-'Tis but thy name that is my enemy.

Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.

-Go then, for 'tis in vain to seek him here.

-Given the length of her role, Ariana has the support of a previous Juliet as a mentor.

-There are a whole bunch of things that go into it, but I definitely think understanding the text comes before memorizing it, but she is also an extremely fast -- She memorizes pages within like one day.

It's insane, so... -Do I like her?

Um, I think -- Yes, I do.

It feels like I'm living her life in a certain way.

And once I memorize it, I can finally take a good look at it and see, why is she reacting in these certain ways?

[ Indistinct conversations ] -Today, the day of the show, every single child will be on stage.

For many of them, it will be the first time, but they seem undaunted.

-Down with the Montagues!

Down with the Capulets!

Down with the Montagues!

Down with the Capulets!

[ Indistinct conversations ] -No.

Keep on going.

Amy and -- Amy and your little brother.

-It seems this play has always had many entry points.

-Ready?

Three, two, one.

-When I was in ninth grade in high school, I read my first Shakespeare play, which was "Romeo and Juliet."

I was very surprised that I could relate to it.

I grew up in a -- in a Pakistani household.

Juliet not being able to choose her own spouse was the experience of my grandmother.

♪♪ -Down with the Capulets!

Down with the Montagues!

Down with the Capulets!

Down with the Montagues!

-If ever you disturb our streets again, your lives shall pay the forfeit of the peace.

♪♪ -The production is an ensemble piece that builds to what is the most famous scene of all.

-What light through yonder window breaks?

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

Arise, fair sun.

-It is inevitably the role of Juliet that presents both the biggest challenge and the greatest opportunity for a young actor.

-O, Romeo, Romeo.

Wherefore art thou, Romeo?

Deny... -To me, Juliet is the strongest literary woman I know.

-O God, she comes!

-And for a young woman to investigate that power, to have a chance to find both the youth and the joy and the exuberance of an early-in-the-play Juliet... -O honey nurse... -And then the fight that she undertakes for her love, for her choices.

It is actually a wonderful path towards real empowerment.

-I would thou hadst my bones and I thy news.

-Can you not stay a while?

Do you not see that I am out of breath?

[ Audience laughter ] -How art thou out of breath when thou hast breath to say to me that thou art out of breath?

Is thy news good or bad?

-The scenes for all the young actors will be emotionally complex.

-Hold, Tybalt!

Good Mercutio!

[ All gasp ] -Romeo will kill Juliet's cousin and be banished.

-Away, Tybalt!

-The two young lovers will take their own lives.

But by the end of the play, the children will have their own take on this experience.

[ Cheers and applause ] ♪♪ [ Children cheering ] -They found so much joy in this tragedy because nobody told them, "Oh, I have to be thinking this is a tragedy."

They came in and thought, "I have these things I need to learn.

And let me bring the joy of my life and my youth and the hardships and the feelings... and let me take this play as an opportunity to play."

[ Indistinct conversations ] ♪♪ -Today is Shakespeare's birthday, when pilgrims flock to Stratford-upon-Avon.

But this ancient tradition is not that ancient at all.

It started 200 years after Shakespeare was born.

Its creator -- an 18th-century actor, David Garrick.

-He had a temple to Shakespeare.

-He did, indeed.

-Greg Doran and scholar Michael Dobson are the inheritors of the Garrick legacy.

[ Indistinct conversation ] -So, Michael, where are we and why are we here so early?

-[ Chuckles ] I was wondering that, too.

We're in this charmingly empty room because this is about the only time of day you can get into it and find it really empty.

Here we are in the room adjoining the very room in which Shakespeare was born.

In Shakespeare's birthplace.

A house that had relatively little significance until it was made the focus of the first great Shakespeare fan festival.

-It all started with the town council feeling that it ought to have a statue of Shakespeare but not knowing who would pay for it.

They asked around, and the name Garrick came up.

-"Well, David Garrick's incredibly vain, and he's made a lot of money in show business.

Why don't you approach him?"

And Garrick leapt at the chance.

He thought, "I can really make something out of this."

And he suggested to the town council that rather than him just modestly giving them a statue, he should come in person with an entire theater company and an entire temporary building and write a poem with specially composed music all about him giving the statue to Stratford.

-Wow.

So David Garrick turns the opportunity of donating a statue for the niche in the town hall to a three-day jubilee.

That's basically what he did.

-Yeah.

-This one event would transform the image of Garrick and Shakespeare.

The memorabilia from the first jubilee is all part of the making of a myth.

-Some of this stuff has really barely moved since 1769.

-Here's the ticket.

And here is one of the real jubilee ribbons.

-Wow.

-I guess that is a real point, that there's, in a way, Shakespeare's reputation is enhanced by the jubilee, but it's also -- it's the start of the kind of fridge-magnet end of the Shakespeare industry.

-Yes.

Yes.

Exactly.

A lot of what we're looking at down here is "merch."

-Yeah.

This way up.

-There they are.

-Oh, gosh.

-Look.

-Look at that.

Mrs. Garrick's shoes.

This is the founding tat of the Stratford tourist industry.

-So, you know... -Most significant of all is the ode penned and performed by Garrick himself, unashamedly elevating Shakespeare into a deity.

-Give us that bit of verse, Michael.

-[ Chuckles ] That wonderful opening.

"To what blessed genius of the isle shall gratitude her tribute pay.

Decree the festive day.

Erect the statue and devote the pile.

'Tis he, 'tis he..." -"The god of our idolatry."

[ Laughter ] [ Organ playing ] ♪♪ -In 2022, the spirit of Garrick returned when a cleaned and restored version of the statue Garrick had donated was unveiled by Sir Kenneth Branagh and Dame Judi Dench.

[ Applause ] -Keep your fingers crossed, and we'll give it a go.

[ Cheers and applause ] -But though well-intentioned, there is a problem with the Garrick legacy.

-What happens subsequent to the publication of the Folio is Shakespeare becomes lauded as a sort of godlike figure, and this happens more and more as you move into the 18th century and then into the 19th century.

Now, in our decolonial moment when we are trying to make space for lots of different voices and lots of different ways to engage with Shakespeare, the problem with this notion of what I've called "The Great White Bard" is that he's still with us, and that's why he feels inaccessible to a lot of communities.

So I think it's important to decouple Shakespeare from that legacy.

-There are lots of people who don't feel like Shakespeare is for them, which is, of course, ridiculous because the plays have things in them that they could relate to on a fundamental level.

But that's just the way that history goes.

And so, yeah, we have to work.

I think in the next 400 years we have to work, get back to the place where Shakespeare's plays are for the groundlings and the royalty, right?

Where everyone feels that they have access and can see themselves in the plays.

[ Indistinct singing ] -♪ "The Comedy of Errors" ♪ [ Indistinct singing ] -Passionate about reflecting and including their entire community is the Public Theater's Mobile Unit.

-♪ Pero no se preocupen ♪ ♪ Nosotros servimos para eso ♪ Their performance of "The Comedy of Errors" in a Latino neighborhood of New York will effortlessly switch between English and Spanish.

-♪ I should mention that most of the show ♪ ♪ Will be performed in English ♪ ♪ Though it's supposed to take place ♪ ♪ In two states in ancient Greece ♪ -This tale of separated identical twins and mistaken identities follows a ludicrous plot, but it's the first play the unit is performing since the pandemic.

-What we wanted to lead with was joy.

And in Shakespeare, you have to go with comedies to get that joy.

♪♪ -A joyous and abundant use of music and imagination will also help tell the plot.

-♪ To complicate matters, this family of four took in... ♪ -The story is about two sets of twins that get separated at birth and end up in the same town at the same time with their father.

-♪ Ten mucho cuidado ♪ -No one understands and knows why folks are there.

It causes a lot of confusion, but it also makes it so hilarious.

-Hi!

I'm looking for my mother and my brother.

-Soy de un lugar... -One set of twins are masters.

The other set of twins, their servants.

In this production, one actor plays both the masters and another, both the servants, each changing identity with a mere flick of the hat.

-How chance thou art return... -Confusion arises when one master mistakes the wrong twin for his servant and demands money he believes he has given him.

-He asked me for a thousand marks in gold!

"'Tis dinner time," quoth I.

"My gold!"

quoth he.

"Will you come home?"

quoth I.

"My gold!"

quoth he.

-Then one of the twin masters starts professing love to a woman who mistakenly believes he's her brother-in-law.

-Are you a god?

Would you create me new?

-It is so funny because she, thinking that, "You're married to my sister.

This is wrong."

-I'll take these.

♪♪ -The production's larger-than-life quality is designed to embrace an audience who may never have seen Shakespeare, but as it reaches its conclusion, there is a real poignancy.

The play had begun with a man seeking his long-lost family.

It ends with a revelation.

-...más lisonjero me vi.

Pero si no sueño, Emilia, eres llamada desde nuestra balsa naufragada hasta ahora junto a ti.

Y son estos los hijos que tanto amamos para que podamos finalmente ser feliz.

-The father is looking at his family.

♪♪ -I choke up every single time I watch the show because it just reminds me of families who don't have the opportunity to be reunited.

So it's a lived experience that happens in our world.

Ellis Island is not too far away, right?

-♪ Agua ♪ ♪ Y de cambiar ♪ ♪ Y de cambiar ♪ -But it's a bittersweet ending.

One set of twins are delighted to see their parents again, but for the other, the years have built a barrier.

-♪ Ta-ra ♪ ♪ Y qué cambiar ♪ -They're not necessarily jumping for joy to see their parents because they don't -- they've never known them, right?

♪♪ -♪ Porque sigue... ♪ -Which is real.

You know?

You can't ignore the fact that just because you've been reunified with somebody that you're immediately going to feel at home.

They have to then go in and build a relationship.

-♪ Cambiar ♪ ♪ Y de cambiar ♪ -The pain of losing and the hope of finding was a theme Shakespeare returned to again and again.

It was also one of the main reasons the unit chose the play.

[ Cheers and applause ] -I've heard folks say that that was an added theme, but it's actually in the story.

You know, it's embedded in Shakespeare's text about this idea about family separation.

Shakespeare wrote about it back when he wrote "The Comedy of Errors," and so that in itself shows that folks have been experiencing this for generations.

And he was brilliant enough to put it in a funny story.

[ Cheers and applause ] ♪♪ -In the centuries since the Folio was published, copies have traveled around the world, though most still reflect their Western origins and the purchasing power of the collectors.

-What's this?

An art museum?

-It's the National Museum.

-Today, actor partners Brian Cox and Nicole Ansari have come to hear about the greatest collectors of Folios in the world and their ambition to share their collection -- Henry and Emily Folger.

-So, I'm going to welcome you to our reading room, the Tudor mania that is this incredible space.

-Michael Witmore is the director of the Folger Library, built to house 82 Folios, a third of all those known.

A new wing here will soon make every one of them accessible.

-This is like the Shakespeare Church.

The Church of Shakespeare.

-[ Laughs ] So... Let's begin with him.

Here's Henry Folger as a child.

And his wife, Emily.

Of course, they don't know each other at this point, but they do meet in a literary club.

-I'm fascinated by this photograph here.

-Yes.

-What is that?

-This is a club at Amherst College where Henry went.

And this is Henry right here.

And that's -- -That's him?

-That's him?

-That's interesting.

-If you looked at this man or that woman and said, "Will they create the greatest Shakespeare collection in the world?"

-You wouldn't have thought so.

-Your answer would be no.

-Absolutely.

-Funded by Henry's job in Standard Oil, they embarked on one of the most substantial buying sprees in history, fueled by their love of Shakespeare.

-"Comedy of Errors."

-What is this?

-"Othello."

-Oh, this is... -"Much Ado About Nothing."

"The Tempest."

"Winter's Tale."

-And it gives you a sense that right around the time when he is collecting, in his most ambitious way, he is still attending these plays.

The tickets.

You can see this ticket stub.

This is their diary.

-Did they do critiques or is it just descriptions?

-I was wondering.

Yeah.

-This is "Antony and Cleopatra."

Henry thinks the theater too large for anything but opera.

The beautiful lines couldn't be heard.

Henry said there were many cuts.

The performance was from 8:00 to 1130.

And, after, tiresome.

[ Laughter ] Wow.

-And the fact that he notices where the cuts are shows you that he's really studied the plays.

-His knowledge must have been incredible.

-In the mid-19th century, 95% of all Folios lay across the Atlantic.

-These are images of the ship that Emily and Henry traveled with when they went to England.

-And it was always the same boat, was it?

-It was the same boat.

-Wow!

They're fans.

-Absolutely.

-They are fans.

They're total fans.

And they met.

They came together, and they shared this fandom together, which created all this.

It's obsessive behavior.

-Yeah.

-There's no question about it.

But when you start -- My thing was classics.

There was a thing called "Classics Illustrated" comics.

I became obsessive.

And so I've got this huge collection of "Classics Illustrated," but it's in a storage.

I don't -- I never see it.

-You're a collector.

-Well, I was a collector of that.

I mean -- -A collector is a collector.

-I'm a collector.

-A collector is a collector.

-I'm a collector.

-Of all their Folios, the most treasured was one that almost got away.

Early in his buying career and unfamiliar with the English aristocracy, Henry makes a deal for a Folio with a Coningsby Sibthorp of Canwick Hall.

He hears part of it may be damaged and asks for a reduction.

-Coningsby Sibthorp says, "If you want to chip away at this magnificent book and try and get me down in price, I'm offended."

Deal falls apart.

So this is the beginning of a conflict between an aristocratic set of values, the family that owns this book... -And also a pride probably in the family, too, that this upstart American dare question my motivations for selling this.

You just buy the thing and pay the money.

-Three years of desperate letters and panicky telegrams follow as Henry tries everything to recover the deal.

-So, tell him he can keep it for five years.

-Wow.

-"Would my coming to London help?"

-Answer -- No.

Sending five telegrams in one day, Henry raises the price.

-He's already up to eight.

-Wow.

-Which is a heck of a lot of money.

-A heck of a lot.

-It is a heck of a lot of money.

-The trail goes cold until finally, after three years of strife, Sibthorp sells him the treasured book for 10,000 pounds, double the original price.

But it bears the name of the printer -- Jaggard.

-This is the title page that includes the wonderful portrait of Shakespeare.

-So beautiful.

-And this is the inscription that says, "This is a gift from Jaggard.

1623."

-Wow.

-So there's the handshake with the original printer right there.

-That's Jaggard the printer.

Yeah.

-Correct.

Folger is excited about it because he can trace back every step, if he owns it, from himself right to the printer.

-For Brian and Nicole, seeing the Folio takes them back to the moment it was conceived.

-Heminges and Condell, we've got to be very grateful for.

-Absolutely.

-The actors did the work.

They actually said, "Somebody's got to do something in this man's name.

This stuff is going to be lost forever if we don't do it."

And they were hoping probably, as usually actors always are, hoping that somebody else would do it, and then nobody was going to do it.

So they thought, "Well, bugger it.

We'll do it."

-They'll do it.

-Yeah.

-This was a masterstroke on their part to do this.

And it also makes one very proud that it was the actors who did it, you know, that they actually did it.

They actually took the care and they gave it the care and attention that his life deserved.

-Yes.

♪♪ -In 1998, on an ordinary winter afternoon in Durham, a First Folio that had been in the city for over 350 years was about to vanish.

♪♪ Once belonging to their bishop John Cosin, the soaring status and value of a Folio had made it vulnerable.

♪♪ It's the one copy of the First Folio that has been in the same ownership for all of its existence, so losing it from the city and from his library was a real shock.

♪♪ -The book was an icon to the city and to its university students.

-I went to consult it on the morning of my Shakespeare exam with two friends, and we spent some time with it and we were able to flick through it.

Fast-forward three years, it's been stolen.

That book that I touched and looked at and felt close to was gone.

♪♪ -Without any trace of how it was taken, the investigation faltered.

♪♪ 10 years later, on the other side of the world, the Folger Library received an unexpected visitor -- Raymond Scott.

-This man in yachting costume arrived at the library, announced himself to the guards, and he produced in a box this mutilated copy of a book saying that it belonged to a Cuban family that he had -- and he was their representative.

And they very much wanted the Folger Library to authenticate it.

When you have as many First Folios as we have, it is not difficult to compare a copy that comes in with any number of one of our First Folios to say, "Yes, indeed, this is a First Folio."

♪♪ -Confident it was a First Folio, the Folger then put out a call to a rare-books expert in New York.

-Could I come down professionally and look at what purported to be a First Folio of Shakespeare?

And I said, "Of course."

All-expenses-paid trip to Washington.

This was a great opportunity.

I think I may have been told that the Folio had come from Cuba and that it came in with a rather sort of strange fellow with a Geordie accent.

Yes, of course, it was deeply suspicious.

-The story now moves to Stratford-upon-Avon and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, where one-time student Paul Edmondson now works.

♪♪ Inside is an early 20th-century census compiled by Sidney Lee that records the unique, defining features of every known Folio, demonstrating that no two Folios are the same.

-We ask the same questions of everyone.

What are the measurements of the copy?

Does your copy show any discrepancies or particular markings?

And, of course, what this allowed him to do was to have as much information as possible about each individual copy.

And, of course, it includes the Durham copy, which was stolen.

-Now in Washington and with his suspicions aroused, Stephen had consulted an up-to-date copy of the census.

-Within between 5 and 15 minutes at a large table in the Folger, one just did the measurements.

The measurements matched.

So the good news is that it's a First Folio.

The bad news is it belongs to Durham University Library.

♪♪ -Well, what do you do at that point?

What do you do?

And I did two things.

The first thing was to call the FBI and say, "I'm reporting a stolen Shakespeare First Folio."

And the second thing was to call the British Embassy.

♪♪ -10 years after the theft, and Durham finally has news of the Folio.

-I got a phone call from the FBI to say, "Mick, we've got your Durham Folio."

The first question I said was, "What's a Folio?"

-The story Scott had told the Folger baffled the police.

♪♪ -He's got this Folio.

He's been to Cuba.

He's got it from Cuba.

And I was just thinking, you know, who is he?

-Having left the Folio with the Folger, Scott had disappeared but clearly hadn't thought this through.

-The mistake he made was he gave them a mobile phone number.

So I got contacted to say, "Mick, the mobile phone is in Washington."

And I just thought, "Oh.

no.

Washington, D.C., in America."

And they went, "No, no.

Washington County, Tyne and Wear.

10 miles up the road."

-Two years after his visit to the Folger Library, the flamboyant Raymond Scott was charged with handling stolen goods.

-I will, of course, be pleading very much not guilty, and I will relish my day in court.

-He would be found guilty and sentenced to eight years in prison.

-Oh, but there we are!

-So it's in several layers of packaging.

-Yeah.

It's like a mummy or something.

-It certainly is.

-There we are.

We start with the plays.

So we start with "The Tempest."

I always love those kind of moments.

Somebody's made a splodge.

-The Folio is at last back in Durham, but badly damaged.

-When I'm looking at this book, the images that come to mind are of sort of sickness or illness or somehow here it is in the hospital, in the conservation hospital, rather than out in the library.

What do you think's in store for this book?

-At the center of this is -- is it still a working book or is it more of an object?

Are we thinking of researchers wanting to read it or is it more like a museum object?

-It does make me think, when is a book not a book?

Is this a book to you?

-I lean more towards it as an object.

-I agree.

This feels like more like an object to me.

And that's partly a kind of frustration about thinking.

I'd love to look at my favorite bits, although I completely understand why I can't.

So it's not living its full book life to me.

Um, uh... and I hope it can.

♪♪ -The tortuous tale of the Durham theft has a complicated ending.

The book itself lies broken, and Raymond Scott took his own life in prison.

-It's amazing to see this book back here in Durham.

It clearly belongs here, but I've ended up with actually really mixed feelings about this.

I think the story of Raymond Scott does cast a bit of a shadow over this book.

And it should do.

It should make us think.

He was convicted of handling stolen property.

He got a very long prison sentence.

He took his own life in prison.

♪♪ He did pay an enormous price.

♪♪ -The Public Theater's "Shakespeare in the Park" show is director Kenny Leon's "Hamlet."

Set in a contemporary context, Hamlet is a young man growing up in a corrupt, racist world who has impossible demands laid upon him.

♪♪ His father has been killed by his uncle, and he's now been summoned by his father's ghost to avenge his death.

His mother has married his murderous uncle.

♪♪ To test the king, Hamlet stages a play where a king is murdered and his widowed queen falls in love with the murderer.

-Give me some light!

Away!

-Lights!

-Lights!

-Convinced of the king's guilt, Hamlet confronts his mother in a scene Kenny sees as contemporary.

-You are the queen.

Your husband's brother's wife.

And would it were not so, you are my mother.

-...those to you that can speak!

-Come.

Come and sit you down.

You shall not budge!

-Hold.

Let's do that much again.

And, yeah.

We keep working on it.

It's just, like, our production is about when the love -- Who's loving who?

Where the love is absent.

Where the love is present.

What's the specifics of this relationship?

I can even tell now that you guys have a closeness, that something has happened that you're going through because you're fighting.

You're fighting to get back to something.

You know, it's like that ownership thing.

Like, this is my mama.

This is my woman, which... My woman, my mama.

Anyway... -When Mom has married someone else and when you've got a man-child on the other side of your man, there's this incredible emotional tug of war.

And that's tough.

-Y'all want to go back and try it right away?

-Sure.

-Okay.

-Nay, then.

I will set those to you that can speak!

-Come.

Come and sit you down!

You shall not budge!

-You go not till I set you up a glass where you may see the inmost part of you!

-Ohh!

Ohh!

[ Gasps ] What wilt thou do?

Thou wilt not murder me?!

-Hold right there.

That's good.

When she says -- Her line is, "Will thou murder?"

-Mm-hmm.

-Why does she go straight to murder?

Like, you just had this son.

You just had this love thing.

You just had this.

That would be like -- Or either maybe -- I don't know.

Maybe it's the way we were doing it.

I know the slap is right.

"You might not like me.

Whatever.

But you got to -- The Bible said you got to respect."

If I were to, like, even now, came and I started doing something to you, and you would be like -- it would take you a time to realize, like... -What are you doing?

-Yeah, but then if I put real pressure on you, you'd be like, "Boy, you -- you're trying to kill me!"

Yeah.

So it goes from disbelief.

I mean, denial, disbelief to a little bit of the truth until, like, this... "You're trying to..." [ Grunts ] So I don't know if I need to -- But it's like it's -- Yeah, that's what I need.

Like, because this is right.

The gentle, the love.

Boom, boom.

But the part about, like, taking time to digest what is really happening or something.

-The Gertrude that goes into that scene doesn't even remotely resemble the Gertrude that comes out of that scene.

She turns a corner and will never go back.

♪♪ -Alongside Gertrude's pain, Shakespeare will even offer us the perspective of her murdering husband.

-[ Shouting ] -O, my offense is rank.

It smells to heaven.

It hath the primal eldest curse upon't.

A brother's murder.

-There's a lot about loss and betrayal, um, and being a part of a world that doesn't seem to be right.

Right?

Full of crimes.

Full of lies.

-But, O, what form of prayer can serve my turn?

Forgive me my foul murder!

-Wherever you're at, the play will meet you there and give you some food, give you some solace for the place where you're at in your life.

-Help, angels!

Make assay!

Bow, stubborn knees!

And, heart with strings of steel, be soft as sinews of the newborn babe!

All may be well!

-Every one of the characters is not judged by Hamlet.

Every one of the characters gets to represent -- even Claudius -- gets to represent his own point of view, which means he is speaking for himself and he's available for me to connect to.

♪♪ ♪♪ -The power of Shakespeare's plays has sent them 'round the world and, with them, the Folios.

About 235 are known to exist, but there is always the chance that others could be found.

In 2014, in Saint-Omer, Northern France, a librarian planning an exhibition of Anglo-French literature came across a book that had lain undisturbed for decades.

♪♪ It had once been in a Jesuit college but like all books belonging to the clergy had been placed in a municipal library after the French Revolution.

The book was a collection of Shakespeare's plays.

-The book number in 2227, so I just have to find it.

"Guillaume Shakespeare.

Poète tragique et comique."

-The book was catalogued as an 18th-century work, but there was something about it that caught the librarian's attention.

-[ Speaking French ] -Several more days of research, and Remy felt he had to share his suspicions.

-[ Speaking French ] -Further studies all pointed to the same conclusion, but Remy could not be sure.

-[ Speaking French ] ♪♪ -Eric Rasmussen just happened to be working in London.

-Well, it was out of the blue.

An e-mail from a public librarian in the north of France I'd never heard of before.

And the public library?

How could they have a First Folio?

But then I did a little bit of looking.

And Saint-Omer -- they have a Gutenberg Bible!

This is -- This is not your ordinary public library.

-Eric has come back to Saint-Omer to see the Folio again.

♪♪ -[ Speaking French ] The book.

But I think I should not say "the book."

Because "the book" is the Bible, no?

But it's kind of Bible of its kind, no?

-Indeed.

It's missing the first preliminary pages, the famous portrait, the title page.

-The missing of the pages was the very first problem for the cataloguing and why I needed to call you.

-So, one of the first things I noticed -- Someone has written the name "Neville."

-Mm-hmm.

-Very first page of "The Tempest."

And Neville was a -- was an alias code name that English Catholics used when they came to Jesuit colleges on the continent, such as the college at Saint-Omer.

-The Protestant Reformation had banned the training of Catholic priests in England.

-We had indeed a lot of English Catholic people here, and some of them from the most prominent Catholic family of England.

So this Neville might be one of them.

-The clues to a Catholic connection continued into the Folio.

-As I was paging through this book, you find really fascinating annotations.

In "Henry IV," they're taking the character of the hostess.

-Yes.

-The woman who runs the tavern.

And they're making her "host."

And every time she appears, someone has scratched off the "E-S-S" and made it just "host."

Someone has not only crossed off the "E-S-S" in "hostess," but crossed off "wench" and has it "fellow."

-"Fellow."

-The Jesuits had a great tradition of theatrical performance, but they weren't -- The all-male college, they weren't allowed to act female roles.

-Indeed, yeah.

-So they were always clearly on the lookout for a play that didn't have many women in it, and they found it in "Henry IV" and have gone through and created this all-male play by doing this with the hostess.

Absolutely fascinating.

So all the circumstantial evidence, this is a book that comes from a Jesuit college that was in existence during Shakespeare's time.

All of that suggests that this could be an authentic First Folio.

-There was one way to find out.

Paper was made from a slurry of linen rags laid onto a wire mesh on which was stitched a design.

When the slurry dried, the resulting paper would carry the impression of that design -- the paper maker's signature watermark.

-The one way that we can confirm that this is a First Folio is if we can find one of those watermarks with a crown with an "I.G."

-I didn't know the specificity of the First Folios.

And this is when you were most welcomed... -[ Laughs ] When I came in.

So, what we'll do is take a light sheet and put it through so that if we can see the watermark on the other side.

And look at that.

It's a crown with some stars.

And the initials... -Matches.

-"I.G."

right there.

And so, yes, this is a genuine First Folio.

-This is when you jumped on your chair with a... -With a thumbs-up.

Exactly.

-[ Laughs ] Yes.

♪♪ -The opening date of Kenny Leon's "Hamlet" is approaching.

Set in the aftermath of a post-pandemic world, Leon's production links the damaged world of today to the traumas in the play.

♪♪ But it also focuses on the love and honesty between the characters and, in that love, the hope.

-What I would like to happen today if possible, or tomorrow... You can pick.

Today or tomorrow, I need to see the play.

Like, fully.

So, anyway... And this is a play about... how to treat people.

It's also a play about how to use your knowledge and how to live.

And keep reminding yourself this is a play about feeling.

That's all.

-Everybody ready?

John, you good?

-Yeah.

-Thank you.

Ato, you good?

-In this final part, we will see the consequence of repressed feelings.

-Sister.

Hey, hey.

Sweet Ophelia.

-[ Singing softly ] -Hamlet has killed Ophelia's father, mistaking him for the king.

In her isolation and her grief, she is driven mad.

-Fare you well, my dove.

-Hadst thou thy wits and did persuade revenge... -Ophelia is the only character in this story who says, "No, you're..." She goes unlistened to the entire time.

-A-down.

A-down.

And you call him!

The wheel becomes it.

It was the false steward that stole the mayor's daughter.

-Ophelia is told to obey throughout this entire story until it's too much.

-There's fennel for you.

Columbines.

Here's a daisy.

[Sobbing] I would give you violets, but they withered all when my father died.

They say he made a good end.

-Amidst all this pain, there is one person with whom Hamlet can share his feelings and whom ultimately he will trust to tell his truth.

-Hail!

To Your Lordship!

-I am glad to see you well, Horatio!

[ Laughs ] -That relationship of two men that love each other deeply and what that looks like, to be quite honest with you, having two Black men love each other.

Men don't really say, "I love you," without the, "I love you, man," or, "I love you, bro."

You know, there has to be some qualifier at the end.

So I was very, very interested and excited to explore what love between two men, you know, that truly care about each other, what that looks like.

-The king, aware that Hamlet knows of his guilt, has determined that Hamlet must die and devises a duel with a poison-tipped sword.

Horatio will try to protect his friend, but Hamlet seems strangely resigned.

-You will lose, my lord.

-I do not think so.

Since he went abroad, I have been in continual practice.

I shall win at the odds.

But thou wouldst not think how ill all's here about my heart.

-I think from Horatio's lens, he knows that something is afoot.

You know, he knows that, at best, you'll be injured, but at worst, you'll be dead.

-If your mind dislike anything, obey it.

I will forestall their repair hither and say you are not fit.

-Not a whit.

-There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.

If it be now, 'tis not to come.

If it be not to come, it will be now.

If it be not now, yet it will come.

The readiness is all.

Let be.

-Hamlet gives that line that, you know, "What will be will be."

It almost feels like you're giving up.

♪♪ -As we come to the end of the play, the murder and deceit that began it will finally be exposed.

But it comes at a devastating price.

♪♪ Claudius' plot will end in the death of Gertrude, Ophelia's brother, and Claudius himself... ♪♪ ...until finally death will take Hamlet away from Horatio...and us.

♪♪ What Hamlet will ask for is to be remembered.

He has a story, and he wants Horatio to tell it.

♪♪ -If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity a while... and in this harsh world, draw thy breath in pain to tell my story.

♪♪ -Someone's last words are their -- That's the truth.

For that to be the charge that Hamlet leaves with Horatio... you know, there's a impulse to say, "No, I've not accepted you dying, no, I'm not going to do this," and to kind of sit in the tragedy of it.

-Good night, sweet prince.

-One of the things that we're exploring is the hopefulness of it, the charge of allowing this story, his legacy to live on because it's the end of a life and you should be telling the story.

-♪ Amen ♪ -"Tell my story."

That's the responsibility of all of us.

Tell the truth.

♪♪ -As the lights are being set on the stage, it will be Hamlet, Ato, who will embrace the biggest challenge of all.

-I would be lying if I said it didn't terrify me still.

But I do have this feeling that once I'm on the Delacorte stage, once there are 1,800 people there and really asking people, "Why do you think we should keep doing this living thing?"

You know?

I think I'll find some depth of truth through that.

One element that I think is missing right now is the audience.

I just -- I am so excited to look into people's eyes and ask them questions and hope for solution.

♪♪ -At the Delacorte Theater in July 2023, once again, they ask the questions Shakespeare gave us.

They will tell the story he gave us... the Folio's story... Hamlet's...and ours.

-[ Men vocalizing ] [ Fingers snapping ] -♪ When you go, you'll have to go alone ♪ ♪ When you go, you'll have to go alone ♪ ♪ No one... ♪ To find out more about this and other "Great Performances" programs, visit pbs.org/greatperformances.

Find us on Facebook and follow us on X.

-♪ You go alone ♪ -♪ When you go ♪ -♪ When you go ♪ -♪ When you go ♪ -♪ When you go ♪ -♪ So when you take that lonesome road ♪ ♪ Whoa, oh ♪ ♪ No one in this world ♪ -♪ No one ♪ -♪ Can take your journey ♪ -♪ Can take your journey ♪ -♪ When you go, you'll have to go alone ♪ -♪ Ooh-ooh-ooh ♪ -♪ When you go, you'll have to go alone ♪ -♪ Alone ♪