First Folio

• LONDON, Sept. 15, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Celebrating the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare's First Folio, The Folio Society will release a landmark limited edition of Shakespeare's The Complete Plays on Tuesday, September 26, its most ambitious limited edition in the company's 75-year history.
• Published in three volumes: comedies; tragedies; histories; and limited to 1,000 sets, each hand-numbered and signed by renowned illustrator Neil Packer.
• The Complete Plays will be priced at $1,500 each and available exclusively from The Folio Society from September 26, 2023.
• Joanna Reynolds, CEO of The Folio Society, said: "The Complete Plays is the most ambitious limited edition The Folio Society has produced.

• In fact, the common but misleading phrase “industrial revolution” masks the long history of resource extraction and ecological degradation in the British Isles stretching back at least to the arrival of the tin-hungry Romans.
• Renaissance England was reeling from the effects of all these problems.

King and countryside

• When King James became his patron in 1603, Shakespeare was tasked with writing plays to entertain a keen outdoorsman and hunter who was as much preoccupied with the material state of the British countryside as with matters of state.
• No wonder, then, the Shakespearean stage encompasses a remarkable variety of landscapes and features an abundance of animal imagery to rival the royal menagerie – basically King James’s private zoo – and compensate for England’s dwindling numbers of wild game.
• These articles mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of the First Folio, the first collected edition of William Shakespeare’s plays.

Enduring environmental issues

• Shakespeare adapted the story from a writer whose father had proposed the existence of a flooded land-bridge linking Britain to the continent (now known as Doggerland.
• While the shipwrecked king refutes claims to rule the unruly seas, the costumes donned by Shakespeare’s actors would have told a different story.
• Hermione acts like her namesake when she exclaims she too would rather die than stain her name as an adulteress.
• In inserting these environmental issues into his plays, Shakespeare forced his audience to reflect on the political, moral, and spiritual implications of early modern England’s growing power to transform the natural world.

• He lived and wrote in the late 16th century, when new mathematical concepts were transforming perceptions of the world.
• Part of the role of the theatre was to process the cultural implications of all these changes.
• People in Shakespeare’s time were used to the idea of the infinite: the planets, the heavens, the weather.
• But they were much less used to the inverse idea that the very small (and even nothingness) could be expressed by mathematical axioms.
• With the growing influence of neoclassical ideas in England, small, insignificant figures had begun to be used to represent very large concepts.
• This was happening both in modes of calculation (which used proportion) and in the practice of writing mathematical symbols.