The Fourth Folio
The Special Collections at David Wilson Library holds an original copy of Shakespeare's Fourth Folio. F4 was published in 1685 and edited by H. Herringman, E. Briwster, R. Bentley. It is larger than the previous editions and printed on royal stock using wider spacing and larger type.
The Fourth Folio keeps the seven plays added in F3 and also adds the Sonnets. Another interesting feature is the inclusion of further commendatory poems in the volume’s prefatory material thus both highlighting the increasing influence of Shakespeare on other poets and asserting Shakespeare's place as the paragon of the English literature.
The editors introduced a number of corrections and modernized the language of the text in order to facilitate reading as in the 62 years since the publication on F1, the English language was deemed to have changed enough to create some challenges to contemporary readers.
It was the Fourth Folio that Nicholas Rowe used as the base for his 1709 edition of Shakespeare's plays. In turn, subsequent editors of the Shakespeare's plays in multiple volumes, such as Pope and Theobald, were influenced by Rowe's text when working on their own editions.