This Complete Set of Shakespeare’s Four Folios Could Sell for $6 Million
In the 17th century, the Bard’s plays were preserved for posterity in the First, Second, Third and Fourth Folios. Now, all four volumes are being sold as a set
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In 1623, seven years after William Shakespeare’s death, two of the playwright’s friends published a compilation of his works. Titled Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies, the volume is best known as the First Folio.
Several more editions were published in the years that followed. The Second Folio debuted in 1632, followed by the Third Folio in 1663 and the Fourth Folio in 1685. Now, for the first time since 1989, a rare set of all four Folios is hitting the auction block. Sotheby’s will sell the volumes next month at an auction in London, where they’re expected to fetch up to $6 million.
Copies of the Folios often fetch impressive sums. In 2020, Christie’s sold a copy of the First Folio for nearly $10 million, making it the priciest piece of literature ever auctioned. Another copy sold for $2.4 million in 2022.
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The First Folio is widely considered one of the English language’s most influential texts, and it proved essential in preserving and propelling Shakespeare’s work through the ages.
When actors Henry Condell and John Heminge, members of Shakespeare’s troupe the King’s Men, printed the First Folio in 1623, they included 18 plays—including Macbeth, As You Like It and The Tempest—that had never been published and may have otherwise been lost to history. Many of the other plays had been printed only in small, folded books called quartos.
Without the First Folio, “we wouldn’t even be talking about Shakespeare,” Emma Smith, a Shakespearean scholar at the University of Oxford, told Smithsonian magazine’s Ellen Wexler in 2023, when the volume turned 400.
While the First Folio is still considered the most valuable of the four 17th-century printings, the Third Folio is the rarest. About 750 copies of the First Folio were printed in 1623, and at least 235 copies still exist today. But only 182 copies of the Third Folio survive, as most of them probably burned in the 1666 Great Fire of London, per the Associated Press.
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“Owning a set of all four Folios has been a goal for generations of bibliophiles,” says Sotheby’s in a statement. The volumes heading to auction were assembled over several centuries: Around 1800, the collector George Augustus William Shuckburgh-Evelyn purchased copies of the First, Third and Fourth Folios. The Second Folio was added to the collection in 2016.
All four editions contain unique errors. According to Fine Books & Collections, “the quality of the text of the Folios tended to decline with each reprint.” The Second Folio included an ode to Shakespeare by poet John Milton. Meanwhile, the Third Folio included seven additional plays, and only one of them is thought to be by Shakespeare.
Today, most copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio are owned by institutions like the Folger Shakespeare Library, the British Library and the New York Public Library. Per Sotheby’s, complete sets of the Folios have become increasingly rare.
The upcoming auction will undoubtedly prove much more profitable than the first known purchase of a Shakespeare Folio, which occurred on December 5, 1623, when a politician named Edward Dering bought two copies of the first edition for £2—about $550 today.
