Shakespeare’s First Folio Turns 400

Though Milton could not foresee it in 1630, his reading of Shakespeare would bring him out of “darkness visible” and into glorious light, for the relationship between the living and the dead does not move in only one direction. Shakespeare quickens the readers who partake of his living memory. His effect is not wholly unlike the sacraments’. All readers of Shakespeare, whether the aspiring poet called Milton or a young boy or girl reading him for the first time, suffer a magnificent change. This is what the young Milton knew. We become Shakespeare’s “live-long monument” as he continues to shape us, to craft not verse but our lives and souls. The First Folio has allowed him to do so for four hundred years. May it continue for four hundred more.