Enter the First Folio
It had been a creative project to assign colours to every letter in a specific text by Shakespeare and has been described in a previous post. It has always been unclear as to the best font to use. Fonts at the best of times are highly subjective like the cognitive experience of savouring the merits of single malt whiskies- so I am told.
With initially a ‘modern’ font selected, numerous texts were chosen and translated into scenes of colour where the eye at leisure could skip along a line of text and pick up the rhythm of the letters – not so obvious from the bare printed black and white page. But being essentially naive in the creative market place, it remained ‘quaint’ but commercially ‘quiet’ in the scheme of things.
Time passes, circumstances change, interests come and go but along comes the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio in 2023 which created interest all across the globe. There was an opportunity to inspect the First Folio at Mount Stewart on the Isle of Bute in Scotland – a memorable occasion. It was some time later that the realisation came that the obvious font for the ‘colouring Shakespeare’ project was that used in the First Folio.
Loading an available ‘First Folio’ font from the Internet was straightforward. This allowed editing of previously created items to incorporate the new font – not altogether a rapid process. The actual use of the font, however, requires insight. While in the modern era we expect every assigned letter in a printed work to be identical, that is all the ‘e’ letters look exactly the same, in the Elizabethan world, this was not so. Each printed letter had been made by a process of ‘punching’ the impression of a letter into copper and then casting the letter with liquid metal, typically lead. In addition, letters became worn through constant use. Variations in setting the type into blocks, inking the type and printing on paper variously contributed to additional changes in the appearance of the printed page. Thus a First Folio font will contain letters that are generally representative of the letters used in the original work as indicated in the figure below. The letters are typically shown with worn appearance, though perhaps capital letters being less used appear sharper.
The letter ‘s’ in the original First Folio used within words looks like an ‘f’ without its cross stroke though the ‘s’ is used as an ending letter in words such as ‘lookes’ and at the start of a word as in ‘Spirit’. The letter ‘u’ can be used to represent ‘v’ within words such as in ‘neuer’ meaning ‘never’ and ‘liuing’ meaning ‘living’. Sometimes ‘v’ is used as ‘vs’ meaning ‘us’. In the First Folio font, ‘j’ is essentially written in the ‘roman’ form of ‘i’. The letters x and z do not appear in the First Folio.
The text of the Bodleian Library First Folio in Oxford is available for browsing at:-
All these these issues of use of letters can be inspected directly and at leisure. The physical layout of the letters is evident from inspecting the texts. One line of thinking by Reed Reibstein is that the font used in the original First Folio had French origins from the workshop of Pierre Haultin.
While this provides unprecedented access to its contents, it is quite surprising to observe so many torn pages there are within the Bodleian First Folio. By comparison, the Mount Stewart First Folio, rebound over 100 years ago, is in excellent form.
The extract shown below from the ‘colouring Shakespeare’ project is taken from Othello Act II scene 1 using the revised First Folio font. The colour space is taken from personal colour images of Stratford-Upon-Avon. The colouring highlights the rhythm in the words ‘wonder’ and ‘content’.
The process of revising the previously created work is on-going. There are a lot of such patterns to identify. What this process highlights, also, is the subconscious use of word patterns in everyday language – hidden in plain sight in the First Folio.
