I recently (July 29, 2023) attended a performance of The Book of Will at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival. Here are a few thoughts on this wonderful play. If your local theater company produces it, don’t miss it!

The Book of Will That Almost Wasn’t

Three years after William Shakespeare’s death, his plays were wildly popular and in production all over London. But these plays were often vague approximations of Shakespeare’s actual words. Pirates ruled printery row, churning out cheap quarto versions of the plays.

The Book of Will opens with the playwright’s friends, old actors from the most iconic roles, lamenting the state of affairs; the words live on, but mostly in their own memories. When the actor with the most extensive Globe Theater institutional memory, Richard Burbage, dies suddenly, the remaining friends, Henry Condell and John Heminges, hatch an audacious scheme. They will gather and publish the play versions as Master Will wrote them. The project is not as easy as it sounds, what with the ephemeral natural of scripts and the Globe Theater fire (1613) hampering the source material’s availability. Copyright laws of the time are, at best, odd, and little thought was put into the future needs of the theater company. But through much adversity and with a great deal of help from their families and even Ben Jonson, the friends persist.

History in Context

History often is written as the doings of great men, bald facts and dates. We don’t get any sense of the process, other people involved, the barriers, or the emotional toll. Every member of the audience knows that the First Folio was, indeed, ultimately published in 1623. So, the audience investment comes from the tension of seeing the conflicts that almost upended the project, time and time again. “How will Henry overcome this new problem?” “How can John possibly go on with the struggle now?”

The Book of Will’s Human Relationships

Pithy quotes from Shakespeare plays are known to almost everyone, but Shakespeare’s people are often what stick with theater goers long after the play ends. And The Book of Will is decidedly character driven. The wives are equal partners with their husbands, just as invested in the folio because they love the plays and characters as much as the actors. Elizabeth Condell and Rebecca Heminges’ attitude is “Do this book for them—for the characters, so Beatrice and the rest will live on.”

A Loving Tribute

A play is a special form of storytelling, a group endeavor in which writer, actor, production staff, and audience all have an indispensable role. The Book of Will honors everyone whose imagination and hard work create the unique spectacle that is live theater. No show is ever identical to another. It happens and is gone. But the gift of the First Folio at least provides us the trusted guide, a standard we’ve looked to for four hundred years.

If you found The Book of Will interesting, you might enjoy reading my review of The Lifespan of a Fact.

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