The Play

The Book of Will, by playwright Lauren Gunderson, is a (mostly) faithful retelling of the true story of how Shakespeare's plays were almost lost to time.

This play opens several years after Shakespeare's death, as the surviving member's of the King's Men realise that they are losing more and more of their company - and with them, the memory of all of the plays that made them. While Shakespeare published his sonnets during his lifetime, he never published his plays. Few playwrights did.

Shakespeare had started giving his actors only their lines, not the full play, so that it was harder for other theatre troupes to steal the work. A fire at the Globe Theatre after his death had destroyed many of the original full copies of the scripts. On top of that, unscrupulous printers had sent people to memorise as much of the popular plays as they could, then recount them so the printer could publish the play and claim copyright on it - even if the repeated version bore little resemblance to the actual play.

Two of Shakespeare's dearest friends, John Heminges and Henry Condell, set out to gather and publish all of the plays in their "true and correct" form. The result was the First Folio, without which we would have less than half of Shakespeare's plays in a corrupted version, the rest having been lost completely.

Both hilariously funny and poignant, this play is a love letter to theatre, a meditation on legacy and loss, and a celebration of the friends who ensured Shakespeare's words would survive.