The best books on Shakespeare's reception or after-life, recommended by Shakespeare scholar Emma Smith of the University of Oxford
And I gather from your book that Oxford’s Bodleian Library didn’t have any Shakespeare plays before the First Folio because its founder, Thomas Bodley (1545-1613), thought having plays would bring it into disrepute.
Yes, absolutely. The Bodleian Library in Oxford had a deal with the Stationers’ Company that they could have a copy of any book published. But they didn’t take the play books, because Thomas Bodley was explicit in excluding them saying that everybody would laugh at his new library if it was filled with plays.
One of the things the First Folio was trying to do when it was first printed—and it was a bit of an uphill struggle—was to reframe drama as serious literature. It does that by printing it in a format that looks like a Bible rather than like a pamphlet. This isn’t convincing, necessarily, to everybody, but the Bodleian Library do take the First Folio. The format perhaps already makes it looks a bit more respectable than other versions.
Then there’s a hiccup in this story, because probably when the third edition of the book was published with some extra plays in 1663, the Bodleian got rid of its First Folio. It was probably a textbook updating move which, of course, in retrospect looks like a terrible mistake, but was completely a standard thing to do at the time.