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The central highlight of Sotheby’s 13 July English Literature & History sale is a remarkably untouched copy, in a mid-17thcentury binding, of the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays (1623), the sole source for 18 of his plays, and – with the King James Bible published just a few years earlier – one of the two greatest books in the English language. (Estimate: £2,500,000-£3,500,000.) The First Folio contains 36 of Shakespeare’s plays, printing 18 of them for the first time. Two collaborative plays, Periclesand The Two Noble Kinsmen, were almost certainly deliberately omitted by the editors either because they knew they were not entirely Shakespeare’s own work or there were problems with the surviving texts or with the rights. A lost play, Love’s Labour Won, may have been omitted for similar reasons, or it may be an extant play under a different title. With the probable exception of three pages in the manuscript of the collaborative play Sir Thomas More, now held in the British Library, no contemporary manuscripts or prompt copies of any of Shakespeare’s plays survive (three manuscripts of a play called Cardenio, possibly by Shakespeare and Fletcher, survived until the 18th century, but are now lost). Without the Folio, therefore, these 18 plays – All’s Well that Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, Henry VI part one, Henry VIII, Julius Caesar, King John, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Timon of Athens, Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Winter’s Tale– may well have been lost forever. A

German abridgement of The Two Gentlemen of Verona was published in 1620 by an English touring company, but aside from this no other printed versions of any of the 18 had appeared before. The text for the second, third and fourth folios published later in the 17th-century is based upon it; furthermore it provides the copy- or ‘control’-text for 27 of the plays in the most recent scholarly edition, The Oxford Edition (see Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare, A Textual Companion, pp145-47 and p70). Shakespeare had died in 1616 and seems to have made no effort in his lifetime to get an edition of his plays published. He may or may not have had a sense of his own greatness as a dramatist, but the lack of a proposed collected edition is not necessarily that surprising. At this time plays were written principally to be performed, and no author before 1623 had had one volume devoted entirely to his complete plays: this is another remarkable fact about the First Folio (Ben Jonson’s Workes appeared in the middle of his career in the year of Shakespeare’s death, but this included verse). It was also probably not thought to be in the interests of an acting company like the King’s Men, of which Shakespeare was a member and shareholder, to have the plays they were performing – and which were legally their property – circulating in print. By 1592 Shakespeare was certainly known as a playwright but after this time the closure of the London theatres because of plague would have encouraged him to move away from dramatic

THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE The appearance at auction of a rare Shakespeare ‘First Folio’is sure to provide international interest. Peter Selleylooks at the history of the greatest stories ever sold

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