Kids at Play: Early Pedagogical Engagement with Shakespeare Through the St. Omers First Folio

Authors

Bridget Anderson

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, the first paragraph of the essay follows:

The First Folio of Shakespeare's collected works is highly prized both for its proximity to the celebrity of Shakespeare and for the historical information that its individual copies reveal about Shakespeare's early readers.¹ One copy of the 235 extant First Folios that merits extensive historical analysis is the St. Omers First Folio.² This copy, recovered in 2014 by librarian Dr. Rémy Cordonnier in the town of Saint-Omer, France, is multivalent in its mysteries and provocative revelations. The book is heavily marked and notated, particularly Henry IV Pt. 1 and Henry V, and the marginalia—ranging from spelling corrections, censorship of words and phrases, and doodles to stage directions and role assignments—tell important stories about early readers and players of Shakespeare in an educational setting.³ Since the Folio was found in a space formerly occupied by a Jesuit boys' school, the College of St. Omers, these readers and players were Catholic teenaged schoolboys and their teachers.⁴

Notes

1. Christy Desmet, "Shakespeare's Scattered Leaves: Mutilated books, unbound pages, and the circulation of the First Folio," in The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, eds. Desmet, Sujata Iyengar, and Miriam Jacobsen (New York: Routledge, 2019), 451.

2. Jean-Christophe Mayer, "The Saint-Omer First Folio: Perspectives on a New Shakespearean Discovery," Cahiers Élisabéthains 87.1 (2015): 8.

3. "The Henry IV play has clearly been performed because there are notes and directions on the pages that we believe date from around the time the book was produced." Dr. Rémy Cordonnier, interviewed by Kim Willsher, "Shakespeare first folio found in French library," The Guardian, Nov. 25, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/nov/25/shakespeare-first-folio-found-in-french-library.

4. A spelling note: scholars use three spellings to describe both the college and the town in which it was located. Saint-Omer is the correct spelling for the town, and the college is identified among various papers from its operations as St. Omer, St. Omers, and St Omers. "St. Omer's" is an incorrect Anglicized spelling that appears in later scholarship. In this work, I will use St. Omers to indicate the College, and Saint-Omer to indicate the town in which the College was located. I am borrowing this practice from Jan Graffius, the curator of the St. Omers College collection at Stonyhurst College (Graffius, Bullworks, 93, footnote). I will also use the title "St. Omers First Folio" to describe the object, rather than "Saint-Omer First Folio."

Recommended Citation

Anderson, Bridget (2025) "Kids at Play: Early Pedagogical Engagement with Shakespeare Through the St. Omers First Folio," Comparative Drama: Vol. 59: Iss. 1, Article 3.
Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/compdr/vol59/iss1/3