The University Library at Leeds Brotherton invites visitors to dive into Shakespeare's First Folio, a resource highlighting "the significance of the book and the history of this particular copy." The website is nicely set up to allow viewers to page through a table of contents, where commentary written by Shakespearean scholars is provided, along with the digital version of the folio. For example, Section 1.1, "The significance of the First Folio: the plays," points out that although many of Shakespeare's plays had already appeared in smaller quarto editions, "without the Folio, we would not have Macbeth or Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra or Coriolanus; we would be missing Twelfth Night and As You Like It, Measure for Measure and The Comedy of Errors; we would be without The Winter's Tale and The Tempest." Other sections investigate aspects such as the portrait of Shakespeare that is the frontispiece to this edition (commentary by Jane Rickard, a professor of 17th-century English literature) and the physical condition of the First Folio. Finally, those wishing to dispense with commentary can jump to Section 5 and view the high-resolution digitized version of the entire First Folio.
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