“The book of his good acts”: Shakespeare’s First Folio onstage and on the page

Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare’s First Folio celebrates its 400th anniversary in 2023, and I confess that most of what I know about its creation I learned from Lauren Gunderson’s play The Book of Will, the 2017 stage comedy that depicts the efforts of King’s Men actors John Heminges and Henry Condell to gather and publish all of Shakespeare’s plays in one extraordinary volume. Happily, I can now report that Shakespeare’s Book, Chris Laoutaris’s handsome and informative new nonfiction account of the same events, confirms that Gunderson got much of it right.