Shakespeare’s Scattered Leaves: Mutilated Books, Unbound Pages, and the Circulation of the First Folio

The life cycle of books is often expressed through tropes of destruction. Most common are the metaphor of books as a tortured bodies or objects dissolved by water, but the book as a tree whose leaves are scattered to the winds offers an alternative, and less, negative model. This essay examines each of these tropes to argue that contemporary narratives surrounding the creation, circulation, and consumption of William Shakespeare’s First Folio of 1623 figure the cultural fate of that text in elegiac terms of mutilation and dissolution, but that the celebratory tale of “Shakespeare unbound” through the scattering of the First Folio’s “leaves” or pages emerges in our discourse about the bard as a counter-narrative, confirmed and sustained by the First Folio’s increased dissemination, in both material and digitized form, during the twenty-first century.