All Four Shakespeare Folios to Auction with £4.5m Estimate

Sotheby's' auction dedicated solely to all four Shakespeare Folios will mark the first time they have been offered as a single lot since 1989.

The set, which will be offered in London on May 23 with an estimate of £3.5 – £4.5 million, was brought together in 2016, but the First, Third, and Fourth Folios have been together since around 1800 when they were purchased separately by Sir George Augustus William Shuckburgh-Evelyn. He was a bibliophilic polymath whose scientific endeavours included pioneering the barometric measurements of altitude and inventing a new way of calculating the standard length of a yard.

In the 20th century it was not unknown for all four folios to be offered as a set – at least six sets were sold by Sotheby’s between the 1930s and the 1980s – but as the number of copies in private hands has dwindled, this has become increasingly rare.  

The earliest recorded purchase of the First Folio was on December 5, 1623, when Edward Dering bought two copies (for £2). By the early 1630s there was an appetite for a new edition of Shakespeare’s plays. This meant that the First Folio had sold out within a decade, which was a short period for an expensive work of literature by an author who had been dead for nearly 20 years.

The text of the Second Folio was taken from the First Folio with some obvious errors corrected, but others inadvertently introduced. It was not recognised at the time that the quality of the text of the Folios tended to decline with each reprint, so it was common for earlier Folios to be discarded when a new edition was published. Samuel Pepys bought a Folio in 1664 but he ridded himself of this copy when he bought a new Fourth Folio in 1685.