“Not exactly,” she said. “The First Folio, which was put together by John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare’s colleagues, was published in 1623. Shakespeare passed away in 1616. He didn’t know about it and he certainly couldn’t have vetted the contents. Although a number of his plays had been published before 1623, what makes the First Folio so important, perhaps the most important document in the English language, is that it is the first time all of Shakespeare’s plays—that we know of—appeared in a single bound book. The exceptions are Pericles, Prince of Tyre, and Two Noble Kinsmen. Then, of course, there are the two ‘lost’ plays: Cardenio and Love’s Labour Won.”

Frankie had sent me to the right place. But surely Prescott knew all of this, even if I didn’t have my facts completely straight. Jock had contributed financially to the Folger when it was being built. Prescott had done considerable research here.

“You need to remember that in those days, members of the cast weren’t given a script containing the entire play the way they are now,” Tana went on. “Everything was handwritten and what an actor got were his lines—only his lines—with the last few lines of the previous actor’s part and the first lines spoken by the next actor. The plays were written out on long rolls of paper and then each part was torn off and handed to the appropriate actor. It’s is where the word ‘role,’ as in role in a play, comes from.”

I had been making furious notes with my new Folger pencil in a notebook I’d brought with me. Now I sat back and stared at her.

She smiled. “I know. It was a different world.”

“Clearly.”

“So,” she said, “do you have any idea what happened to these ‘rolls’—rolls of paper—when the play was finished? What each actor did with his individual part?”

“No,” I said, but I had a feeling I could guess what her answer would be.

“They were thrown out as scrap paper or the paper was reused, perhaps for the binding of a book,” she said. “Which is what makes the First Folio so important. Because in it we have thirty entire plays in one place. If it weren’t for the First Folio we never would have known that The Tempest, Macbeth, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night even existed. Can you imagine?”

The Tempest. The last play Shakespeare wrote on his own and supposedly based on the wreck of the Sea Venture. Without the First Folio no one would have known about that play.

“Are you saying that anything in Shakespeare’s handwriting—all those different papers for each actor in each play—didn’t survive?” I asked.

“Not only his plays,” she said, “but anything in Shakespeare’s handwriting. Do you know where we get most of our information about his life?”

I shook my head.