Bardwatching: Spring Term 2 2019-20

For the first time in nearly 20 years, a complete First Folio of Shakespeare's plays is to be auctioned on 24 April, and is expected to fetch between $4m and $6m. First Folios – the first collected editions of 36 of Shakespeare's plays, are relatively few in number, with the majority held by public institutions (the British Library owns 5) and only 6 thought to be in private hands. Unusually, this edition is being sold by a cash-strapped Californian college along with an original manuscript by Mozart, in response to what they referred to as a ‘financial emergency’.

The First Folios were published at the instigation of two of the bard's actor contemporaries seven years after his death, in 1623. It has been posited as a suggestion that discrepancies between these texts and later editions come of the fact that the actors in question reported chunks of the plays from memory – and it would also have added to the complication that full copies of the plays would not usually have been written, with each actor receiving instead only their own part: a practice which is lampooned in A Midsummer Night's Dream when the Mechanicals rehearse their play. Several plays which would otherwise have been lost to history were put in print for the fi rst time in the First Folio. If you've some spare funds in your drama department budget, why not consider a special acquisition for the library?!