“After nearly four centuries of Shakespeare scholarship, with countless editions of the complete works and acres of scholarly debate about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ quartos (the form in which some of the play texts first appeared), you might think that the First Folio would have been subjected to the rigours of academic scrutiny. But no. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen are, apparently, the first to have the exceedingly good idea of providing a fully edited version of Shakespeare’s work, as it first appeared in print.”