Dench and Doran to introduce Folio Society edition of Shakespeare’s The Complete Plays

Dame Judi Dench and Gregory Doran, artistic director emeritus at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), have written the introduction and foreword for a landmark Folio Society edition of William Shakespeare’s The Complete Plays.

Dench has starred in numerous Shakespeare and Shakespeare-inspired productions on the stage and screen, from playing Ophelia in "Hamlet" to portraying Queen Elizabeth I in "Shakespeare in Love". Meanwhile, Doran was with the RSC for more than three decades, spending 10 years as artistic director.

The traditionally crafted limited edition will be published to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s First Folio, which was published in November 1623 and is considered one of the most influential books in history.

Limited to 1,000 sets, each hand-numbered and signed by artist and illustrator, Neil Packer, The Complete Plays will be priced at £1,000 each and available exclusively from The Folio Society from 26th September 2023. Packer has illustrated 56 projects, including Harry Potter, The Divine Comedy and The Odyssey.

The new set of The Complete Plays will be published in three volumes: comedies, histories and tragedies.

Containing 36 of Shakespeare’s plays, the First Folio was compiled by Shakespeare’s colleagues seven years after the playwright’s death, ensuring that his work was preserved for future generations. With 750 copies originally published, there are now 235 copies known to remain, with 50 copies in the UK.

The majority of the surviving copies of the First Folio are owned by institutions around the world, with 27 in private ownership. In 2020, a "complete" copy was sold at auction for $10m.

The Folio Society edition of William Shakespeare’s The Complete Plays will include two originally omitted works, "Pericles" and "The Two Noble Kinsmen".

Packer said: "This edition is a celebration and a homage to the 1623 First Folio and although it is in no way a facsimile of that edition, we did want it to look and literally feel like it is a direct successor.

“I was keen to tie the images to the ‘theatre’ rather than ‘real world’ and so I have tried to inject an element of toy theatre into them. You could almost imagine the figures depicted as tiny cardboard cut outs in a miniature theatre.”

The Complete Plays will be printed and bound by book binders Smith Settle. Each copy will be hand-made by experts in artisan bookmaking.

The bindings of the books, which will be created using techniques established in Shakespeare’s lifetime, have been inspired by 16th-century blackwork embroidery. Designed by Packer, these bindings have been woven using using silk and linen by Stephen Walters & Sons, the British weavers known for recently creating Queen Camilla’s Coronation robes.

Tom Walker, publishing director at The Folio Society, said: “This is a thrilling example of contemporary bookmaking at its very finest: using the most traditional of production techniques at the same time as designing and crafting an edition which is exquisitely modern and made to last for generations.”