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The concordance on this website is based on the text of the Shakespeare First Folio at the Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) website. Please read and adhere to their copyright policy. The ISE text is demonstrably more accurate than T. H. Howard-Hill's text.
The ISE text has been edited by me for this website as described below and the edited version may be downloaded from this page as a spreadsheet.
All italic text has been converted to roman.
Through Line Numbers (TLNs) have been computer-generated for every line. The Norton facsimile numbers every tenth line. The TLNs given here have been checked to try to make sure they are the same as in the Norton facsimile except where the Norton facsimile is wrong.
Words and phrases either hyphenated or turned over into an adjacent line in the Folio have been joined and placed on the line where they started. This means that some lines are blank. These blank lines have been retained to ensure that the established through line numbering is not disturbed.
Only lines explicitly or implicitly assigned a TLN by Hinman are included. This means that play titles and lists of characters are excluded.
Transcription errors in the ISE text have been corrected where noticed.
Diacritical marks have been removed and where necessary the relevant words have been spelt out in full.
Multiple spaces have been replaced by single spaces.
Psycho-mechanical evidence, such as spaces before commas or the centring of stage directions, is not recorded.
Justified lines have been identified, according to the markup done by Howard-Hill in his Folio text. He marked 19,701 of the Folio's 109,220 lines as justified. For what it's worth I have done an independent markup and, while I agree with Howard-Hill for more than 99% of Folio lines, I disagree with him for 1,016 lines. These lines are asterisked in the relevant column of the file provided for download below. My disagreements are in many cases explained by my having made a greater allowance for Kable's warning that the compositor may have shortened some spellings to save himself the trouble of turning the line over. In such cases the line may not look justified but that is precisely because its spellings were shortened. See William S. Kable, 'The Influence of Justification on Spelling in Jaggard's Compositor B', Studies in Bibliography, 20 (1967), 238. There are some obvious errors in Howard-Hill's markup; for example, he marks Julius Caesar, 1801, as justified even though it contains just the words "How now Fellow?" Nevertheless, I have not made any corrections, to preserve the integrity of Howard-Hill's work and to ensure that users of this website know exactly what they are working from.
Compositor attributions are cited from two sources: Charlton Hinman's book The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare and the 2nd edition of the Norton facsimile, ed. Peter W. M. Blayney, which took full account of post-Hinman attributions by Howard-Hill, O'Connor, Taylor and Werstine. Hinman's introduction to the 1st edition records his change of mind about some attributions he made for the Henry IV plays (p. xviii). These have been taken into account on this website.
Each Folio page is given two numbers. One is the Through Page Number, starting at 1 on the first page of The Tempest and ending at 883 on the last page of Cymbeline (but ignoring blank pages and the list of characters pages, because they do not have any numbered lines). If you want to see the Folio lines in the order in which they are read, then order the spreadsheet by Through Page Number and then TLN (it is already so ordered). The other number for each page is the Hinman Order Number, again running from 1 to 883. This is the order in which the pages were typeset, according to Hinman [*]. If you want to see the Folio lines in the order in which they were typeset, then order the spreadsheet by Hinman Order Number and then TLN.
[*] Strictly speaking, Hinman deduced only the order of the formes, not the pages: most formes were set by two compositors working simultaneously so it makes no sense to ask about the order of the pages within the forme. In some cases when the same compositor set both pages in a forme, Hinman was able to deduce the order from type recurrence evidence; in other cases he simply assumed the order. In one interesting case, he deduced from type recurrence that in Julius Caesar Compositor B set page ll4v before he set ll3r (the opposite of the order normally assumed by Hinman), and John Jowett indirectly confirmed this later by deducing that there was a shortage of ssi ligatures for this forme which manifests itself at the end of page ll3r, suggesting that ll4v had been set first and had used up the available ligatures. See John Jowett, 'Ligature Shortage and Speech-prefix Variation in Julius Caesar', The Library, 6th series, 6 (1984), 244-53.
Typecases are cited from Hinman's book (except for pages dd3v, dd4v and ss6r which Hinman assigned to 'yx' but which I have left as '?', not least because for dd4v Hinman was unable to say where the y/x split occurs). For the moment I have not adopted Paul Werstine's identification of typecases in the early comedies in 'Cases and Compositors in the Shakespeare First Folio Comedies', Studies in Bibliography, 35 (1982), 206-34.
Download Folio Text (xlsx file, approx. 7.4MB)