When Shakespeare was a boy, owning books was still something of a novelty.
Only a century earlier, in 1455, Johannes Gutenberg had developed movable type, in which separate pieces of type printed each letter on a handpress. This invention made it possible for multiple copies of a book to be printed. Until that time, books were handwritten, expensive, and generally limited to official and scholarly subjects. They were mostly written in Latin.
When Shakespeare became a playwright, the book business was still in its infancy. Many of the early editions of Shakespeare’s plays were filled with printing errors, but they are still valuable because they contain lines that aren’t printed in the First Folio, which was printed after Shakespeare’s death. So, what are the “real” versions? Join the debate.