The rarest of these treasures are the Shakespeare quartos. Within a classical exterior is a Tudor interior within that are steel vaults controlled for humidity and temperature, so as to guarantee the absolute security of the library's treasures. These he housed eventually in the Folger Shakespeare Library, a monumental gift to the nation. He became however President and Chairman of the Standard Oil Company, and devoted his large income to buying books. ![]() Sooner or later, a third of the extant copies fell into the hands of a great collector, whose name dominates the later story of the book: Henry Clay Folger.įolger (1857-1930) was not a man of huge wealth to begin with. That made it expensive, and the copies must have been fairly well looked after. It is thought that perhaps 1000 were printed, with a price at £1 (forty times the cost of an individual quarto). Some 240 copies are known to be in existence. Oddly enough, the First Folio, for all its fame, is not really a rare book. If you want to know about first folios, go to the Folger. ![]() No doubt this book dealer displayed naivety, but the man went to the right place. The book had been stolen from a display case in the University of Durham. He was immediately arrested and then charged by police in Durham. One such showed up recently, when a man took a stolen copy of the First Folio to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., to have the copy authenticated. Now known as the First Folio, that volume is the focus of the world's collectors, scholars, and-occasionally-thieves. That was the format in which a number of Shakespeare's plays had been printed, during and after his lifetime, and the Collected Plays (as we would say) came out in 1623, seven years after his death. The folio format makes for a large, prestigious book, which has to be bound quarto is half the size, suitable for a paperback edition. Fold it again and you have a quarto, with one sheet supplying eight pages. Retrieved from įOLIO, a sheet of paper which is folded in half, making two leaves or four pages. APA style: Shakespeare: the first folio.Shakespeare: the first folio." Retrieved from MLA style: "Shakespeare: the first folio." The Free Library.Only “Pericles” has gotten the official stamp of authenticity. If the First Folio was a financial risk, revisions to the Fourth Folio suggest it was a bigger risk not to try to make money off of Shakespeare, which is perhaps the main reason the editors of the Fourth advertise seven plays “never before printed in Folio,” most of which Shakespeare did not write. Shakespeare himself looms larger on the page while other figures diminish. The prefatory poems by Ben Jonson and others are much reduced in size. Hoffmann on the Fourth Folio: It’s interesting to compare the subtle differences between the First Folio from 1623 and the Fourth Folio from 1685. This is perhaps the rarest folio, as a result of the Great Fire of London in 1666, which consumed the entire city, including the area where booksellers and printers were located. Plein on the Third Folio: Interest in Shakespeare continues to rise with the Third Folio in 1664. Of note is the first appearance of a poem, An Epitaph on the Admirable Dramaticke, written by John Milton in 1630 while he was still a student at Cambridge. Plein on the Second Folio: The English language is in transition at this time (1632) and the Second Folio displays changes in spelling, punctuation and lettering that is readily apparent, especially when compared with the First Folio. Hoffman on the First Folio: Since he left behind no manuscripts or official publications of his own, we have others to thank for the preservation of his work: actors and audience members, patrons and poets, publishers and printers.Ī bulk of the massive book – as the title page promises – is made up of Shakespeare’s collected histories, tragedies and comedies 18 of these had never been published and might have been lost to history, including modern favorites “Macbeth,” “Twelfth Night” and “As You Like It.” ![]() We spoke with Stewart Plein, rare book librarian at WVU Libraries, and Christine Hoffmann, assistant professor of English, about the four folios.
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