New copy of William Shakespeare's First Folio emerges on Scotland's Isle of Bute

This article originally appeared on Culture24.

A prized Shakespeare First Folio, once owned by an 18th century editor, bears the fingerprints of its former owners

A new copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio – the collection of 36 plays written by Shakespeare in 1623, including Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra – has surfaced at a 19th century Scottish mansion in a discovery which has surprised literary experts.

Rebound in goatskin in 1932 to match three other Folios on the Isle of Bute, the Reed-Bute Folio at Stuart House belonged to Isaac Reed, a “well-connected” editor who worked in London during the 18th century.

Emma Smith, a Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Oxford University, was initially cynical when curators at the house suggested they owned a First Folio. “I’m afraid I thought, ‘yeah right, sure you have, just like I have, just like that fantasy that we all have one in our attic somewhere that we’ve lost,’” she says.

“But when I went up to investigate, I could see from the watermarks and the idiosyncracies of the text that it was genuine. It was a really exciting moment. I find First Folios to be such charismatic books.

“Checking the print variations very closely, doing a collation, we were able to see which sheets were in the correct form and which weren’t. That’s a very close, precise piece of work which I think makes it pretty clear that the vast majority of the leaves in the Bute first folio are indeed first folio leaves.

“We didn’t know it existed and it was owned by someone who edited Shakespeare in the 18th Century. It is an unusual Folio because it is bound in three volumes and has lots of spare blank pages which would have been used for illustrations.

“The Bute copy has a really clear set of owners who’ve left their fingerprints, if you like, on that copy. It’s a copy which has got its own history kind of bound up in it, and that’s a history of that book but it’s also a history of Shakespeare and what Shakespeare has meant.”

A letter from Reed shows that he acquired the Folio in 1786, and records show that it was sold shortly after his death in 1807 to a ‘JW’ for £38.

“After that the trail of the Folio goes cold,” says Professor Smith. “There are no further public records of its existence and it was omitted from Sidney Lee's 1906 census of First Folios.

“But we know that Mount Stuart acquired the Folio at some point in this period because it is mentioned in a catalogue of the Bute library in 1896. In fact, a note in the house’s archives show that the 3rd Marquess of Bute thought the sum for which it sold in 1807 was ‘too dear’, so perhaps the family found the price more reasonable when the book came onto the market later in the 19th century.”

Only 233 other copies of the First Folio are known to have survived.

• The Folio can be viewed by the public at Mount Stuart in a special display at Mount Stuart until October 30 2016. The Bodleian Libraries' two copies of the First Folio will be on display in Oxford's Weston Library later this month in an exhibition curated by Professor Smith called Shakespeare’s Dead.

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Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk/history-and-heritage/literary-history/art551046-william-shakespeare-first-folio-isle-bute