Season 4, Episode 3: From Scattered to Sorted(?)

After the chaos of the 1619 “False Folio,” Shakespeare’s friends John Heminges and Henry Condell decided enough was enough. If anyone was going to collect Will’s plays properly, it would be the men who’d spent over twenty years in the trenches with him.

In this episode, we trace their likely first steps, from digging through the King’s Men’s prompt books and cue scripts to tracking down the “good” quartos of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. Along the way: bootlegs, brand management in the 1590s, and the thorny business of negotiating publishing rights in a world without copyright as we know it.

They pulled off the unthinkable and gathered the plays. But collecting them was only half the battle.