John Heminge was baptised on 25th November 1556 at St Peters Church Droitwich Spa. He later moved to Stratford upon avon where he met a young William Shakespeare. The two become good friends and moved to London to pursue acting careers.

The First Folio

Seven years after Shakespeare’s death, John Heminge and Henry Condell, his friends and colleagues in the King’s Men, collected almost all of his plays in a folio edition. (A folio is a large book in which printed sheets are folded in half only once, creating two double-sided leaves, or four pages. Folios were more expensive and far more prestigious than quartos).

The 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare, however, is the earliest folio consisting only of an author’s plays. The first Folio groups the plays for the first time into comedies, histories and tragedies. More importantly, the First Folio preserved eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays that had never been printed before.

The Preface to Shakespeare’s first Folio written by Henry Condell and John Heminge reads:

‘We have but collected them and done an office to the dead to procure his Orphans, Guardians, without ambition of selfe-profit or fame, onely to keepe the memory of so worthie a Friend and Fellow alive as was our SHAKESPEARE.’