❧ WRITTEN BY FRANK RINDER ❧

ON November 8, 1623, Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard obtained the licence of the Stationers’ company for the publication, in the first folio edition of Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies, of sixteen plays, not before printed. Some 265 years later the late Mr. Bernard Quaritch, in cataloguing a good copy of the completed work, directed attention to the fact that, based on the then value of the quartos, the twenty Shakespearian plays actually printed for the first time in the folio of 1623—for as many were included—would, as first editions, have a money-worth of from £3,500 to £4,000. All question of the quartos apart, however, a fine copy of the book, originally procurable for £1, might now realize from £2,000 to £3,000; indeed, the mean between these two sums is said to have been privately offered for a particularly well-known example. No printed book, apart from about a dozen monuments of typography from fifteenth-century presses, has fetched so much at auction as the £1,720 realized at Christie’s in 1901 for the Dormer-Hunter first folio, now in the possession of Mr. Charles Scribner of New York, albeit a few weeks previously £1,475 was the amount paid on behalf of a transatlantic collector for the scarcer Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ in first edition, said to have been issued at 1s. 6d. ¶ That there was ample warrant for the publication of a new facsimile is acknowledged on all hands; and the folio recently produced by the Clarendon press has failed in few respects only to satisfy the most exigent of connoisseurs. The hypercritical observe that the plate-mark measures no more than 1211⁄16 in. by 7½ in., as against 13⅛, in. by 8⅛ in., the actual size of the pages of the duke of Devonshire’s copy at Chatsworth, on which the facsimile is based. On the whole, however, the volume has been cordially welcomed, and that welcome is merited. ¶ Interest and value are enhanced, of course, by the scholarly introduction and the census of known extant copies from the pen of Mr. Sidney Lee. Under his guidance we are enabled to take a bird’s-eye view of all relevant facts pertaining to the volume ‘which constitutes the greatest contribution yet made to English literature.’ Oversights and inaccuracies must of necessity have crept into the census, for Mr. Lee has been compelled to rely to a considerable extent, of course, on information supplied to him by owners and others. But who would have been prepared to undertake a like task, who would have been able to carry it to a more successful issue? ¶ Mr. Lee conjectures that the edition of the first folio consisted of 600 copies, of which not far short of one-third, in varying states, probably still exist. In 1616 and 1647 respectively there appeared the collected works of Ben Jonson and of Beaumont and Fletcher, each issued, he thinks, in about the same number of copies and at the same price of £1. At the sale of Sir Kenelm Digby’s library in April 1680 the Beaumont and Fletcher volume fetched 13s. 6d.; the Ben Jonson, with the folio of 1640 added, 17s. 6d. As most collectors are aware, the earliest record of the sale by auction of a first folio Shakespeare is of that in the library of Sir William and the Hon. Henry Coventry, dispersed in the Haymarket by W. Cooper on May 19, 1687; but, unfortunately, there is no mention of the sum realized. Mr. Lee states that the first priced record belongs to 1756, when the Martin Folkes example, now in the Rylands library, was sold to George Steevens for 3 guineas. On the other hand, it has been affirmed that in an anonymous collection of books dispersed in 1687–8 a first folio fetched no more than 14s. ¶ It is felt that in one direction Mr. Sidney Lee might with advantage have taken a further step. He has gathered together the material necessary for making, not only a geographical analysis of the copies traced, but an analysis which shall show, too, the approximate condition of those to be found here or there. Of the 600 copies conjectured to have been printed in 1623, Mr. Lee mentions the present owners of 144, leaving the possessors of 14., whose particulars do not agree with those of any others, untraced. The total of 160, including the two copies named in the postscript, is made up by mention of an example stated to have been lost in the S.S. Arctic, 1854, and of that said to have been destroyed in the Chicago fire of 1871. In order to understand the table that follows, it is necessary in the first place to transcribe details of the four main classifications into which Mr. Lee divides the copies he has traced:—

The accompanying table is an attempt to show at a glance the geographical distribution of the copies named by Mr. Lee. His estimate of condition has been scrupulously followed, even with regard to the first folio in the royal library at Berlin. In the Vossische Zeitung of February 10, and in The Times of the following day, there appeared a statement to the effect that a careless or malicious reader had mutilated this Berlin copy, which was bought of Joseph Lilly in 1858 and presented by the then prince-regent, afterwards Emperor William I., to the royal library, and that the whole of the ‘Comedy of Errors’ had been cut out. I communicated with the director of the library on this subject, and he courteously informs me that the statement, happily, is based on a misapprehension. The folio of 1623 is in the same condition as when presented forty-five years ago; on the other hand, the facsimile of 1806 has been robbed of eight leaves, including those on which the ‘Comedy of Errors’ is printed. As to distribution, I have assumed that the five copies sold in the United States during the past few years have there remained; of the three examples which occurred at Sotheby’s in 1902 I chance to know that one has gone to America, another is still in London; while since January copies LXXVIIIa, LXXX, and LXXXVI have been sold at auction and are entered under ‘London, private owners.’ It is worthy of remark that the three first folios in British colonies are presentations from public-spirited men: those at Capetown and Auckland are the gift of Sir George Grey; that at Sydney of Sir Richard Tangye.