"To dye, to fleepe, to fleepe, perchance to Dreame;"

June 10, 2007 11:25 PM

Fontfilter: What's the font used in Shakespeare's First Folio?

What font should I use to most accurately recreate the type seen in "Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies"? An example of what I mean can be found here.

posted by trim17 to media & arts (3 comments total)

Crazy Diamond (UK) sells the Seventeenth Century Record Print (OpenType) font online. (Excerpts from "Romeo & Juliet" and "Hamlet" set in 17th C.)
posted by rob511 at 11:44 PM on June 10, 2007

This is better than most. I recall stumbling on it several years back; it was designed in-house and used by some Theatre company in Illinois to print up posters and programs for their Shakespearean Festival.
posted by RavinDave at 1:22 AM on June 11, 2007

If you don't want something autotraced or designed to look like rough printing, Garamond Premier Pro is a reasonably close match with historical ligatures, the long s, alternate swash italic characters, and different optical sizes.

Whatever font you use, be sure to use old-style figures (numbers) throughout. Don't use any bold weights. If you are trying to set running text, the word spacing would need to be reduced from modern defaults. Notice also in your example there appears to be no added lead.

Several years ago I wrote a little script for InDesign which randomly shifts the baseline of individual characters by small amounts, occasionally adding a little extra letter space, to simulate the look of roughly set metal type. I never actually had use for it in a project.
posted by D.C. at 2:41 AM on June 11, 2007