A complete set of the four Shakespeare Folios will be sold by auction in London this May with a top estimate of £4.5 million.
Sotheby’s are selling the four volumes, assembled from the collection of Sir George Augustus William Shuckburgh-Evelyn.
He bought together a First, Third and Fourth Folio around 1800.
George Shuckburgh-Evelyn was a polymath and collector with some notable scientific achievements to his name.
The fourth volume, a Second Folio, was added in 2016.
Sotheby’s say: “Owning a set of all four Folios has been a goal for generations of bibliophiles although it is a task that has been harder to accomplish with each passing decade. The last time all four were offered as a single lot was at Sotheby’s in New York in 1989. The vast majority are to be found in institutions worldwide.”
The Folio editions of Shakespeare’s work are considered among the most important and influential works of literature in world history.
The title page of the Second Folio, with a verse by Ben Johnson. Image courtesy of Sotheby’s.
Without the First Folio, published in 1623, it’s likely that much of Shakespeare’s work would have been lost.
It’s thought around 750 copies were printed.
In 1632 a Second Folio was produced to meet demand.
In 1664 the Third Folio followed before the Fourth Folio was published in 1685.
Not long after the Second Folio was published the disputes that would lead to the Civil War started to reach their height. Theatres were closed for much of the period before the return of the monarchy.
Then, as many copies of the Third Folio still sat in London warehouses, the Great Fire of London destroyed much of the capital and many copies of what is now the rarest of these volumes.
The Great Fire of London in 1666 destroyed much of medieval London and storehouses full of Shakespeare’s Third Folio.
The Folios were collected as copies of the plays, as monuments to their preservation, and studies of their textual evolution.
There are very small numbers of Folios and many are now in institutional collections, particularly full sets of four.
John Hemminges and Henry Condell drove the process of producing the First Folio, with 36 plays, 18 of them printed for the first time.
The first recorded sale was on December 5, 1623, when Edward Dering took a pair of the books for £2 (certainly the equivalent of getting on for £1,000 in today’s money).
Today, First Folios are the most prized. In 2020 a copy was auctioned in New York for $8.4 million to set a record for the volume. In 2022 a copy sold for £2 million.
This set will be sold in a single-lot auction on May 23 with an estimate of £3.5 to £4.5 million.
