400-year-old edition of playwright’s first collected book of plays including Macbeth and Twelfth Night auctioned at Sotheby’s
An original copy of William Shakespeare’s first collected book of plays has been sold for more than £2m at Sotheby’s auction house in New York.
The First Folio, often referred to as one of the most important books in English literature, was auctioned on Thursday night and bought by a private collector.
The edition is more than 400 years old and contains a collection of 36 plays. Only 750 copies of the manuscript were printed, of which only about 220 are known to survive.
Without the First Folio, it is possible that 18 of Shakespeare’s best-known works, including Macbeth, The Tempest, Julius Caesar and Twelfth Night, would have been lost as no contemporary manuscripts of Shakespeare’s plays survive.
