Thanks to a buying spree that founders Henry and Emily Folger made over a century ago, the library already owns 82 copies. The Folger Shakespeare Library won’t be competing to acquire the book. The famous "Droeshout portrait" of Shakespeare from the First Folio. One of them is now on sale at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair - where it may go for millions of dollars The last one at auction sold for nearly $10 million, beating expectations. Only 235 copies of the First Folio are known to have survived - making them some of the most valuable books in the world.
The Bard had been dead for nearly a decade, and without the Folio, we likely wouldn’t know about 18 of his plays - histories like “Julius Caesar,” tragedies like “Macbeth” and comedies like “Twelfth Night.” William Shakespeare’s friends and close collaborators succeeded at publishing his works in a huge book - the First Folio - 400 years ago. Mark Antony’s famous speech beginning ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’, seen in the right-hand column of page 141, contains examples of the name ‘Brutus’ both with the ‘us’ ligature and with the final ‘u’ and ‘s’ printed from two separate pieces of type.Facebook Email Shakespeare's first folio was published 400 years ago. It can be inferred from the pages on display that the printing of Julius Caesar, a play containing a frequent recurrence of proper names ending in the letters ‘us’, posed typographical problems for the printer, who had an inadequate supply of the ‘us’ ligature in his stock of italic type. Indeed, the proliferation of the printed word was a major force for standardisation internal inconsistencies, such as that seen here in the running title, would become far less common as the century progressed. Spelling, still to some extent a matter of personal inclination in the 16 th century, would become increasingly standardised during the 17 th, especially in printed texts. Further evidence of Cotes’ carelessness is the inconsistency in the spelling of the word ‘tragedy’ in the running titles at the head of each page.
In the opening on display, for example, Cassius’s name is clumsily split between two lines in the first stage direction on page 141. It followed the same structure and layout as the First Folio the plays are grouped according to genre – comedy, history or tragedy – and the text of each play is printed in two columns.ĭespite the efforts made to correct some of the textual errors of the First Folio, many marks of carelessness remain. The Second Folio was printed by Thomas Cotes for a syndicate of publishers. Reproduced here is an image from a copy of Julius Caesar from the Second Folio edition. It was an expensive volume to produce and to buy, but it sold well, and in 1632 a second edition, the Second Folio, was published, incorporating numerous textual corrections and three additional prefatory poems (including John Milton’s first poetic appearance in print).
Opening from Julius Caesar, from the Second Folio editionThe first complete collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, commonly known as the First Folio, was published in 1623, seven years after the dramatist’s death and under the editorship of two of his friends and fellow members of the King’s Men company of actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell.
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