STC 22302, title page
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Copy-specific information
Creator: William Shakespeare
Title: A midsommer nights dreame. As it hath beene sundry times publickely acted, by the Right honourable, the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants. Written by William Shakespeare.
Date: Imprinted at London : [By Richard Bradock] for Thomas Fisher, and are to be soulde at his shoppe, at the signe of the White Hart, in Fleetestreete, 1600.
Repository: Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC
Call number and opening: STC 22302, title page
View online bibliographic record
Terms of use
Images that are under Folger copyright are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This allows you to use our images without additional permission provided that you cite the Folger Shakespeare Library as the source and you license anything you create using the images under the same or equivalent license. For more information, including permissions beyond the scope of this license, see Permissions. The Folger waives permission fees for non-commercial publication by registered non-profits, including university presses, regardless of the license they use. For images copyrighted by an entity other than the Folger, please contact the copyright holder for permission information.
Copy-specific information
Creator: William Shakespeare
Title: A midsommer nights dreame. As it hath beene sundry times publickely acted, by the Right honourable, the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants. Written by William Shakespeare.
Date: Imprinted at London : [By Richard Bradock] for Thomas Fisher, and are to be soulde at his shoppe, at the signe of the White Hart, in Fleetestreete, 1600.
Repository: Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC
Call number and opening: STC 22302, title page
View online bibliographic record
Folger Shakespeare Library staff, "A Midsummer Night's Dream, first edition," Shakespeare Documented, https://doi.org/10.37078/269.
Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 22302. See Shakespeare Documented, https://doi.org/10.37078/269.
This is the first edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, printed by Richard Braddock for Thomas Fisher in 1600. Fisher registered the play on October 8 earlier that same year. The play was probably written between 1594 and 1596, and the text for this quarto seems to have been set from a draft, which might explain some of the mislineations (Oxford Companion 296).
The copy shown above is one of eight known copies recorded in the English Short Title Catalogue. Part of the Folger Shakespeare Library, it was acquired by Henry Folger as part of a large purchase from the library of Dr. John Gott, Bishop of Truro, around the time of the Bishop’s death in 1906 (Mays 169).
To learn more about the plot and early printing history of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, please visit the Folger's Shakespeare's Works and the British Library’s Shakespeare in Quarto, which also includes information about another copy of this edition.
Written by Folger Shakespeare Library staff
Sources
Andrea Mays. The Millionaire and the Bard: Henry Folger's Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare's First Folio. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015): 169.
The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. General editor, Michael Dobson and associate general editor, Stanley Wells, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001): 485.
Martin Wiggins, in association with Catherine Richardson. "1012. A Midsummer Night's Dream." In British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue. Vol. 3, 1590-1597. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 299-303.
Last updated January 25, 2020
