Shakespeare’s book of plays sold for over £2million at auction

The Folio, a copy of which sits in the British Library, contains all but one of the playwright’s 37 plays.

Just 17 of these were printed during his lifetime, with 18 being published for the first time in this text including Macbeth, The Tempest and Twelfth Night.

It was collected by two of Shakespeare’s friends and fellow actors, John Heminge and Henry Condell, who edited the copy and supervised its printing.

The plays were compiled from now lost manuscripts, prompt books for the actors and his own working drafts.

The texts worked to correct “bad quartos” which were being circulated by dodgy dealers – corrupt pirate editions thought to be based on reconstructions from the authors’ memories of the play.

The plays were performed at the Globe, an open air playhouse built in 1599 on the south bank of the River Thames.

After the Gordons owned the text, there is record of a John Fraser also in the seventeenth century.

William Stuart Crawfurd also has his name on the bookplate, with the next inclusion being W.L. Watson in 1902.

It was later owned by Professor R.W. Seton-Watson of Oxford, J.G. Hooper, Abel E. Berland of Chicago and the Seven Gables Bookshop in New York 1972.

It was bought in the same year by Victor Jacobs of Dayton, Ohio, before being sold most recently by Sotheby’s in 1996.