2023 marks the 400-year anniversary of Mr William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, known today simply as the First Folio. Without it, Shakespeare was unlikely to acquire his towering international stature and become the legend that inspired so much of language, art, education and public institution. Shakespeare's Book: The Intertwined Lives Behind the First Folio charts, for the first time, the manufacture of the First Folio against a turbulent backdrop of seismic political events and international tensions. It uncovers the friendships, bonds, social ties and professional networks which facilitated the production of Shakespeare's book. And it reveals how Shakespeare himself, before his death, may have influenced the ways in which his own public identity would come to be enshrined in the First Folio, shaping the transmission of his legacy to future generations and determining how the world would remember him 'not of an age, but for all time'.