William Shakespeare Folios Net $3.6 Million At Christie’s

                                                                       

LONDON — Led by an unrecorded first folio at Christie’s, the firm’s sale of the William Shakespeare’s first four folios on May 25, commemorating 400 years since the playwrights’ death (1564–1616) totaled $3.6 million. 

The folios were offered in a four-lot auction celebrating the Shakespeare anniversary. The sale was led by an unrecorded copy of the first folio, which was bid to $2,714,276. This first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, widely considered the most important literary publication in the English language, contains 36 plays, 18 of which had not previously been printed and would have otherwise been lost forever.

The plays of Shakespeare, preserved for posterity in these volumes, define our knowledge of Shakespeare the man, the playwright, the poet and the actor.

Published in 1623, the copy of Shakespeare’s first folio is one of the most desirable examples remaining in private hands. It was bought in 1800 by renowned book collector Sir George Augustus Shuckburgh-Evelyn (1751–1804) and had been hidden from public view for more than two centuries. Even on publication in 1623, the first folio was considered a privileged acquisition and would have taken pride of place on any bookshelf. 

Similarly today, ownership of the four folios is considered the Holy Grail of book collecting. Without the first folio 18 plays would have been lost forever, including Macbeth, The Tempest, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Measure for Measure, A Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew, All’s Well That Ends Well, Twelfth Night, Winter’s Tale, King John, Henry VI part I, Henry VIII, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Cymbeline.

Also from the Shuckburgh collection and appearing on the market for the first time in more than two centuries are the third folio, which was published in 1664, realized $524,900, and the fourth folio, which was published in 1685, took $68,780. The third folio includes Pericles for the first time and is illustrated with Shakespeare’s iconic portrait by English engraver Martin Droeshout. It is rarer than the second folio, due to copies being lost in the Great Fire of London (September 2–5, 1666).

The first folio was a commercial success and was followed only nine years later by the second folio, published in 1632 and providing a page-by-page reprint of the first. The copy of the second folio also contains the iconic portrait of Shakespeare by Droeshout and it finished at $281,636. The second folio is celebrated as containing the first appearance in print of John Milton, whose epitaph on Shakespeare is included.

Prices reported include the buyer’s premium. For information, +44 20 7839 9060 or www.christies.com.

With many thanks to Antiques and The Arts

Related:
 
The Leicester Codex sale price.
World’s Most Expensive Printed Book - “The Bay Psalm Book” - Sells For $14.2 mn 
 Rorke's Drift: Rare Account Of Zulu Battle Written The Day After Sells For £15k
 Rare Copy of Old Testament Reunited With 'Twin' in Israel
Shakespeare First Folio discovered In French Library
Original Magna Carta Copy Found In Sandwich Archive
Scribbled Draft Lyrics of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” Sells for Record $2 Million 
'American Pie' Lyrics Sell For $1.2 million In New York
 Beatles’ First Recording Contract to Be Auctioned For An Estimated $150,000 
 Alan Turing Manuscript Sells For $1 million 
Shakespeare’s World Revealed In 400-year-old Handwriting
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Press Pass for the Spanish Civil War Found 
Letter From Paul McCartney To Prince Sells For $15K
The Voynich Manuscript: World's Most Mysterious Manuscript To Be Released
500-Year-Old Hidden Images Revealed In Mexican 'Manuscript'
John Lennon MBE Return Letter Valued At £60k

 

 


More on Literature: 
 'The Great Gatsby': Seven Life Lessons
Shakespeare First Folio found on Scottish Isle of Bute
The Musketeers

William Shakespeare: The World As He Made It

Cleopatra: Was She Killed By A Snake?

Where Do Fairy Tales Come From? 

Winnie The Pooh Named Kids' Favourite Book 

The Best and Worst of Hollywood's Book Adaptations? 

Is This Pasted Note Jane Austen's Final Missive? 

Sherlock Holmes: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hero Still Going Strong 

Alice in Wonderland at 150 

Fairy Tales Are Grim! 

Diggers discover Thomas Hardy’s ‘Tess’, Martha Brown

Ben-Hur: A Remake On The Way

Shakespeare’s World Revealed In 400-year-old Handwriting

The Banjo: A History by Laurent Dubois

The Battle Over Troy

Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book" Remade Again

Maggie Smith: Michael Coveney’s Biography 

Sir John Monash: Grantlee Kieza’s Biography

Mysterious 'Man in the Iron Mask' Revealed
Father Of Anne Frank Listed As Co-Author Of Diary To Extend Copyright

The Book Of Kells: A Medieval Treasure

William Shakespeare is still a relevant literary voice.
Queen Marks Magna Carta Anniversary
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Press Pass for the Spanish Civil War Found 
Superheroes Of The Ancient World 

Palace Found At Tintagel, Fabled Birthplace Of King Arthur 
Ancient Egyptian Works To Be Published Together In English For The First Time
Who Was Cleopatra? 
The Untold Truth About The Holy Grail
 

 

Shakespeare First Folio found on Scottish Isle of Bute

                                                                 

When a leading Shakespeare scholar was contacted by a country house on the Isle of Bute with a claim to have an unrecorded copy of the playwright’s First Folio, her response was blunt: “Like hell they have.”

The collection of William Shakespeare’s plays from 1623 is not only among the most valuable books in the world - one copy fetched £3.5 million in 2003 - but also the most extensively researched.

So Emma Smith, professor of Shakespeare studies at Oxford University, steeled herself for a disappointing journey to meet the trustees of Mount Stuart House. “I thought, oh, they’re having a laugh. Or rather, it’s not a laugh. It’s going to be really sad because they think they’ve got one and they won’t.”

To her astonishment, she was wrong. Thorough checks on the watermarks and printing errors in the book showed it to be authentic.

The discovery, in the library of the stately home owned and run by a charitable trust, is remarkable even though the book is relatively common compared with other works to have survived from the 17th century. The Reed-Bute copy, named after the island and Isaac Reed, a literary editor who bought it in 1786, is the 234th known to have survived from an estimated print run of 750. The 233rd came to light in 2014, in a Jesuit college in Saint-Omer northern France, but such finds are unusual.

Professor Smith said that it was a valuable discovery because no copy of the book was printed in exactly the same way, which may yield clues as to how the text was put together. It will also shed light on how Shakespeare’s work was regarded in the centuries after his death.

“With each copy, we know some more about the reception of Shakespeare’s first book. This is like seeing a tiger in the wild.”

The trust intends to keep the book as an attraction for visitors to the house, which is open to the public, but the market value for such a good copy would be at least £2 million.

Professor Smith said that the house had already increased its security. “On the one hand it’s a brilliant draw for visitors, but there is also the pain of having to make it secure.”
The book’s value has increased exponentially as Shakespeare’s influence continues to spread. The First Folio, which collected 36 of Shakespeare’s plays, was sold for around £1 in 1623, which is about £100 in today’s money.

The Reed-Bute copy, which has been divided into three goatskin-bound volumes of comedies, tragedies and histories, was sold for £38 in 1807.

Stanley Wells, honorary president of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, said that the discovery was important because every scholarly library in the world wanted to have a copy. “It’s possible that the new copy will have new things to tell us, but we will have to wait until an expert has gone through it.”

The trustees at Bute knew for several years that they had a book purporting to be a First Folio but only decided to seek authentication in September. The record of ownership is patchy. Reed sold it to someone known only as “JW” and after that the trail goes cold.

It was not included in a celebrated census of First Folios created in 1906 by Sidney Lee, whose work was seen as comprehensive. Professor Smith said: ” The real importance of the First Folio is that, without it, we would not have half of Shakespeare’s plays, including Macbeth, The Tempest and As You Like It. Shakespeare would have looked very different, and his legacy would have been very different, had the Folio not been published.”

Professor Smith said that experts had assumed that all surviving copies had been found. “In 2012 there was a catalogue published that we thought was an exhaustive list, but evidently not.”

                                                                       

By Jack Malvern

With many thanks to The Australian 

Map from Google maps.
'The Great Gatsby': Seven Life Lessons
William Shakespeare Folios Net $3.6 Million At Christie’s

William Shakespeare: The World As He Made It

William Shakespeare is still a relevant literary voice.

The Leicester Codex sale price.
World’s Most Expensive Printed Book - “The Bay Psalm Book” - Sells For $14.2 mn 
 Rorke's Drift: Rare Account Of Zulu Battle Written The Day After Sells For £15k
 Rare Copy of Old Testament Reunited With 'Twin' in Israel
Shakespeare First Folio discovered In French Library
Original Magna Carta Copy Found In Sandwich Archive
Scribbled Draft Lyrics of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” Sells for Record $2 Million 
 Alan Turing and The Imitation Game   
'American Pie' Lyrics Sell For $1.2 million In New York
 Beatles’ First Recording Contract to Be Auctioned For An Estimated $150,000 
Queen Marks Magna Carta Anniversary

Alan Turing Manuscript Sells For $1 million 

Shakespeare’s World Revealed In 400-year-old Handwriting
The Book Of Kells: A Medieval Treasure

Mysterious 'Man in the Iron Mask' Revealed
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Press Pass for the Spanish Civil War Found 
Letter From Paul McCartney To Prince Sells For $15K
Superheroes Of The Ancient World 

Palace Found At Tintagel, Fabled Birthplace Of King Arthur 
Ancient Egyptian Works To Be Published Together In English For The First Time
The Voynich Manuscript: World's Most Mysterious Manuscript To Be Released
500-Year-Old Hidden Images Revealed In Mexican 'Manuscript'
John Lennon MBE Return Letter Valued At £60k
Who Was Cleopatra? 
The Untold Truth About The Holy Grail
 

 

 

Shakespeare’s World Revealed In 400-year-old Handwriting

                                                                      

Heather Wolfe isn’t a Shakespeare expert, but she can do something many Shakespeare scholars can’t: she can read his handwriting.

In 16th and 17th-century Eng­land, most documents were written in a style of cursive writing called secretary hand. To the untrained eye, it is nearly impenetrable. The h looks like a butcher’s hook; m, n, i and u often are indistinguishable. An s might look like the numeral 6 — or a carrot

Wolfe, curator of manuscripts and archivist at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, specialises in reading these documents. Now she is leading a project to digitise, transcribe and post online every known reference to Shakespeare and his family written in and around his lifetime. She is discovering details that have been overlooked for centuries, from mistranscriptions and mysterious seals to an unpublished document tucked away in the Venice state archives that describes Italian and French diplomats attending Pericles in London.

No handwritten drafts of Shakespeare’s plays survive — only published editions. But there do exist three pages that scholars believe Shakespeare wrote by hand to revise a play called Sir Thomas More by Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle. Those pages are in secretary hand.

Wolfe’s project began when she was conducting research for an exhibition of 50 Shakespeare-related documents currently on view at the Folger for the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death. To prepare for the exhibition, she travelled to museums and libraries across Britain, examining and transcribing ­documents before they arrived at the Folger on loan.

At the Bodleian Library in Oxford, typing on her laptop, she made a transcription of an account by the astrologer Simon Forman, who in 1611 recorded his impressions — and the moral lessons — of four plays he had seen at the Globe Theatre. It is the most detailed surviving ­account of an audience member in Shakespeare’s time, and is frequently cited by Shakespeare experts.

Describing Autolycus, a peddler who tricks people out of money in The Winter’s Tale, Forman concludes: “Beware of trusting feigned beggars or fawning felons.”

For more than 80 years, scholars had been mistakenly citing the phrase as “fawning ­fellows”, repeating a mistranscription that ­appeared in EK Chambers’s William Shakespeare in 1930. (The author had confused an n for a u.)

Wolfe checked with Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, editors of the Folger Shakespeare Library editions. They agreed with her reading, which depicts Autolycus as a more malicious character — a felon rather than a fellow.

“Because I’m not a Shakespearean, I’m very nervous to say anything new about Shakespeare,” Wolfe says. “It’s riding on top of hundreds of years of scholarship. To put yourself out there … feels a bit audacious.”

Wolfe, 44, was born in Atlanta and attended high school in Pennsylvania. After graduating, she felt she hadn’t studied enough Shakespeare, so she decided to pursue a masters in medieval and Renaissance literature at the University of Cambridge.

She thought she would be reading Shakespeare plays. Instead, she was immersed in the archives, learning how to read 400-year-old handwriting. “I had never heard of palaeography”, the study of historical handwriting, she says. “There is an addictive quality to it once you learn how to read it.”

She was hooked. She stayed at Cambridge to complete a PhD, then earned a masters of ­library science at the University of California. While she was in California, she called the ­director of the Folger and asked: “Do you ­believe in the concept of a scholar-librarian?” She joined the Folger’s staff in 2000.

The transcription project, called Shakespeare Documented, was launched online in late January at shakespearedocumented.org. So far, it includes 500 references in 400 documents from more than 30 institutions. Images of most of the documents have been posted online.

There is much that scholars still don’t know about Shakespeare. Generations have scoured texts from the period for even a passing reference to him. One of Wolfe’s biggest discoveries is a document that had been known to Shakespeare scholars only from a summary printed by His Majesty’s Stationery Office in London in 1908.

In 1616, a former Venetian ambassador to England, Antonio Foscarini, was put on trial in Venice, accused of being a convert to Protestantism, a drunkard, a womaniser and a theatregoer. (He was later acquitted on all charges.) The court proceedings included the 1617 deposition in London of his former interpreter, Odoardo Guazzo.

For more than 100 years, Shakespeare scholars have referred to the summary of this deposition, which briefly mentions a performance of Pericles attended by Foscarini’s predecessor.

Wolfe enlisted Carlo Bajetta, a Cambridge classmate who is now an English professor in Aosta, Italy, to track down and translate the original deposition in the Venice state archives. Written in Italian, the deposition offers a much more colourful account of the playgoing habits of London’s diplomatic class.

Speaking of Foscarini, the interpreter says, “I believe he went twice, or three times, but I never went with him, because he would go in private, thinking no one would recognise him.”
Foscarini’s predecessor as ambassador, by contrast, had invited counterparts from France and Florence to Pericles, and paid “more than 20 scudi” for the performance — equivalent to more than $1500 today, by one estimate.

“Wow,” says Harvard University professor Stephen Greenblatt, when told by The Wall Street Journal that Wolfe’s colleague had found the document. Greenblatt has written about the episode but did not know a more detailed account existed. “So many things are lost and have disappeared,” he says.

Wolfe is also examining physical aspects of the manuscripts to see what clues they might reveal. She hopes to inspect the watermarks on the playwright’s will at the National Archives in Britain to investigate whether he may have added another page after the marriage of his daughter.

She is also studying the oft-ignored back of documents to see how they were folded. (A letter folded into a tiny packet might be a personal one; another folded broadly might be professional.)

And she discovered that Shakespeare borrowed a seal from Henry Lawrence, the scribe’s servant, for his signature on the deed for his purchase of the Blackfriars Gatehouse in London on March 10, 1613, for £140. He paid £80 in cash. In a document dated the following day, Shakespeare secured a £60 mortgage on the same property from the seller, Henry Walker. He used the same seal.

There’s a possibility, Wolfe thinks, that both transactions may have happened on the same day, in the same room. This could lead to new insight on the nature of the exchange. “It gives us some answers but it also raises more questions,” says Folger director Michael Witmore.

By Jennifer Maloney

                                                                

With thanks to The Australian

More on documents and literature
'The Great Gatsby': Seven Life Lessons
Shakespeare First Folio found on Scottish Isle of Bute

Sir John Monash: Grantlee Kieza’s Biography
Julia Child’s French Cooking Book Was A Trail Blazer 

Shakespeare First Folio discovered In French Library 

 William Shakespeare: The World As He Made It
Cleopatra: Was She Killed By A Snake?
William Shakespeare is still a relevant literary voice.
Charles Dickens: Literary Legend 
Spain Finds Don Quixote Writer Cervantes' Tomb In Madrid 
Where Do Fairy Tales Come From? 
Winnie The Pooh Named Kids' Favourite Book 
The Best and Worst of Hollywood's Book Adaptations? 
Is This Pasted Note Jane Austen's Final Missive? 
Sherlock Holmes: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hero Still Going Strong 
Alice in Wonderland at 150 
Fairy Tales Are Grim! 
Diggers discover Thomas Hardy’s ‘Tess’, Martha Brown
Ben-Hur: A Remake On The Way

The Battle Over Troy
Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book" Remade Again
Maggie Smith: Michael Coveney’s Biography 
The Book Of Kells: A Medieval Treasure

Mysterious 'Man in the Iron Mask' Revealed
William Shakespeare Folios Net $3.6 Million At Christie’s
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Press Pass for the Spanish Civil War Found 
Letter From Paul McCartney To Prince Sells For $15K
Superheroes Of The Ancient World 

Palace Found At Tintagel, Fabled Birthplace Of King Arthur 
Ancient Egyptian Works To Be Published Together In English For The First Time
The Voynich Manuscript: World's Most Mysterious Manuscript To Be Released
500-Year-Old Hidden Images Revealed In Mexican 'Manuscript'
John Lennon MBE Return Letter Valued At £60k
Who Was Cleopatra? 
The Untold Truth About The Holy Grail