“The appearance of a Shakespeare First Folio on the market is always a major event, with so few copies remaining in private hands,” said Richard Austin, Sotheby’s global head of books and manuscripts. The folio is missing its famous frontispiece page with Shakespeare’s image, which may have been removed or stolen over the years to be framed as a portrait. There are fragments of prayers, verse and mysterious lines from a “John Frasere” – a speech asking for herculean strength “to beatt him That let my love be stolen away when I was sliping”. The folio includes annotations, doodles, ink spills and markings from its owners over the centuries.
In the 1960s the folio crossed the Atlantic and was held in the collection of Abel E Berland, a real estate executive and bibliophile from Chicago. The book was subsequently owned by the political activist and historian R W Seton-Watson, who, during and after the first world war, championed the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire and fostered the emergence of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. It was then passed down through generations to the racehorse breeder William Stuart Stirling-Crawfurd, whose bookplate can be seen stuck into the folio’s pages. It is believed the edition is the only copy to have early Scottish provenance, having been first acquired by the Gordon family in the early 17th century. Heminges’ and Condell’s division of the plays into categories such as “comedies”, “tragedies” and “histories” still shape modern interpretations today. No contemporary manuscripts of Shakespeare’s texts survive and so without the First Folio it is possible that 18 works, including Macbeth, The Tempest and Twelfth Night, might have been lost to history. Edited by Shakespeare’s trusted colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell, the folio comprises 36 plays, half of which had never before been printed.
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