Searching for Shakespeare: Celebrating 400 years of Shakespeare’s First Folio

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 47 We likely wouldn’t have half of Shakespeare’s plays without the First Folio of 1623. Imagine a world without Macbeth, Twelfth Night, or Julius Caesar. Our guest on this episode of Shakespeare Unlimited is Emma Smith, a…

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 56  Today, the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s works, printed in 1623, can sell for millions of dollars. But the First Folio wasn’t always valued so highly. In this podcast episode, two experts in the First Folio…

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 17 In the fall of 2014, the world learned of a remarkable discovery: An old book in a French library, acquired in the 1790s, was identified as an unknown copy of the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare—the…

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 36 Henry Clay Folger paid a world record price for a book—not once, but twice—as he became the world’s leading collector of Shakespeare First Folios. The Folger Shakespeare Library celebrated its 90th birthday this past April. Did…

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 31 Just what exactly does it mean to edit the works of Shakespeare, particularly since we have no surviving manuscript copies? Why is it that new editions of the plays continue to be published? In this episode…

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 44 The Folger is the world’s largest Shakespeare collection, and the crown jewels of that collection are the 82 First Folios. To celebrate 400 years of Shakespeare, eighteen of these rare books are traveling the country throughout…

Casket, carved in an Elizabethan style 1866.Imagine buying a book and having the queen of England give you a special case in which to store it! That’s what happened after wealthy heiress Angela Burdett-Coutts purchased a Shakespeare First Folio in…

Let’s face it, every special collections library has at least a few mystery items in the vault that are quietly passed down over the decades from curator to curator (or cataloger to cataloger, or acquisitions librarian to acquisitions librarian). These…

A guest post by Dr. Nigel Smith I am writing a transnational history of early modern European literature. Our inherited history of the different early modern vernacular languages and their literatures was fashioned through the lens of the 19th-century and…

Henry V fragment. Photo by Elizabeth DeBold. There were several good guesses about this month’s Crocodile Mystery—a crease in the paper, or an off-center, pre-stamped envelope. But, Elisabeth Chaghafi was right on the money with her guess: this is a…