Four Shakespeare Folios are collectively expected to fetch up to $6 million (£4.5 million) at auction next month at Sotheby’s London. The auction house announced the upcoming May 23 sale during the week commemorating the iconic playwright, who was born on April 23 and died on the same date.
Next month’s sale will be the first time all four Shakespeare Folios are offered in a single lot since Sotheby’s 1989 New York sale, where they sold for $2 million.
First Shakespeare Folio Is “Most Significant Publication in the History of English Literature”
The set of four Shakespeare Folios begins with the First Folio, officially titled Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies. Seven years after the playwright’s death in 1616, John Heminges and Henry Condell—actors and shareholders in William Shakespeare‘s troupe—compiled and published the First Folio, which contained 36 plays in a single volume. Half of these were published there for the first time.
The First Folio had an initial print-run of around 750 copies in 1623. According to scholars, without its publication, iconic plays like Macbeth, The Tempest, and Twelfth Night might have been lost for good. Sotheby’s called the volume “without question the most significant publication in the history of English literature.”
First Folio Is Priciest, While Third Is Rarest
The first of the Shakespeare Folios was popular enough that an updated edition, the Second Folio, was published in 1632. A third followed in 1663 and a fourth in 1685. The four-volume set heading to auction at Sotheby’s has been together since 1800, when British politician and mathematician George Augustus William Shuckburgh-Evelyn acquired each volume individually.
The First Folio is considered to be the most valuable of the four. Past sales have achieved particularly high prices. In 2020, a copy of the First Folio sold at Christie’s London for $9.98 million (£7.65 million), including fees. Other copies fetched $2.4 million at Sotheby’s New York in 2022 and $5 million at Sotheby’s London in 2006. While the First Folio is the priciest, the Third Folio is the rarest. A trove of booksellers’ copies was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. This left only 182 surviving copies of the Third Folio.
Today, very few copies of the Shakespeare Folios remain in private hands. Most surviving volumes are part of institutional collections across the United Kingdom and the United States. The UK’s Royal Collection notably contains a copy of Shakespeare’s Second Folio that was owned and annotated by King Charles I.
