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The Guardian Shakespeare folio 'A piece of world literature' ... The rare first folio edition of William Shakespeare's plays, published in 1623, for sale at Sotheby's. Photograph: Martin Argles Without it actors wouldn't be asking if that was a dagger they saw before them, or if it was a dagger of the mind. They wouldn't be asking the music to play on, if it's the food of love, that is. And they wouldn't be turning to someone they thought was a friend asking - you too? There would have been no Macbeth, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, Antony and Cleopatra, Measure for Measure, Julius Caesar, The Taming of the Shrew, The Winter's Tale, All's Well That Ends Well, The Comedy of Errors, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, Henry VIII, King John, Timon of Athens, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Henry VI Part I or As You Like It.
Advertisement Yesterday it was announced that the most important book in English literature, the first folio edition of William Shakespeare's plays first printed in 1623, is to be sold in July. Such is the importance of the book that the hyperbole flying around a sombre side room at Sotheby's New Bond Street headquarters in London yesterday was more like a football manager's press conference. It was "the legendary first folio", it "changed the world", the sale is "exceptional", a "phenomenal event". Even the complete ones have bits missing or are in replacement binding. The only comparable edition to appear at auction is an edition known as the Houghton copy sold in 1980 and now in Tokyo. Sotheby's experts believe this edition, still in its mid-17th century calf binding, is even better. "This sale will be a truly exceptional event," said Peter Selley, the auction house's English literature specialist. "With the exception of the great spiritual leaders, his influence on Western culture is more profound than any individual who has lived." The edition is being sold by the trustees of Dr Williams' Library, a theological institution near Euston station in London, where the edition has lived since 1716. David Wykes, director of the library, said the sale had been forced on it to "safeguard the financial future of the library." He said the book was not central to the collection and represented a third of its total insurance premium. The owners and the auction house are both aware that the folio could be lost to the country when it is sold in July. But Stephen Roe, head of Sotheby's books and manuscripts division, insisted: "It is a piece of world literature, not just for the UK." Librarians are normally horrified by scrawlings and annotations made in their books. Manuscripts expert Peter Beal yesterday gleefully admitted: "We not only have a remarkable copy of the greatest book in the English language, we have some icing on the cake." There are squiggles and circles and lines and words to test a Bletchley Park codebreaker. Dr Beal's hunch is that it is the work of a clever student who, obsessed by the plays, wrote arbitrarily in the margins with no particular system. He would mark certain phrases - to be or not to be - and then whole passages. Words like love, wit, honour, glory appear, and the word simile appears over and again. "He starts marking off a page and then seems to get bored and marks the whole page," added a delighted Dr Beal. Quite why Henry VIII is scribbled on and The Merry Wives of Windsor is not is probably down to the fact that he loved one and hated the other. Shakespeare, who made no attempt to have his plays published while he was alive, would probably have approved. He may not have been so enamoured with one particular phrase in the margin: "Best I desire the readers moughth to kis the writeres arse." Dr Beal believes it to be the work of a rude child rather than the obsessive annotator. And it is presumably not the handiwork of the the book's first known owner, the nonconformist preacher William Bates, a leading Puritan of his time much admired by Queen Mary. Bates sold the edition to Daniel Williams, a fellow dissenter, for more than -L-500. Williams then set up the library, now used by academics and researchers into English Protestant dissent, in his will and the folio has remained there ever since. That the collection exists at all is down to the work of two actors and friends of Shakespeare, John Heminges and Henry Condell, who published it seven years after his death. Although half the plays had appeared in quarto editions, others would have been lost without this book. "The first folio preserves 18 of his plays, including some of the most major, which otherwise would have been lost for all time," said Dr Selley. Before the sale, Sotheby's will take the book on a world tour exhibiting in Los Angeles, Chicago, Beijing and Hong Kong.
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