Collection: Þe Fourþ Folio · 1685

These are our Fifth Folio editions in a precise Fourth Folio sequence, re-divided by its categories of comedy, (English) history, tragedy, and novelty.

Late century novelties were Pericles, Prince of Tyre; Locrine; The London Prodigal; The Puritan (Widow of Watling Street); Thomas Lord Cromwell; Sir John Oldcastle; and A Yorkshire Tragedy. Aside from Pericles, wherein Shakespeare's thinking is plainly arrayed, the other six are now discounted amongst his Apocrypha.

Published posthumously (William Shakespeare died in 1616), the folio vehicle gathered a scattered body of playbooks into a venerable, enduring volume.

Over the four seventeenth-century folios, we descry a steady normalization toward the appearances of modern English, though it isn't substantive.