#SHAKESPEARE FIRST FOLIO IN ARIZONA SERIES#

Maybe our databases will get even better and we will discover that they are by Shakespeare, but we’re not at that point yet.” Today we’re using pretty sophisticated databases…and computational stylistics to determine authorship. “It turns out only one of them is attributed to Shakespeare, and that’s ‘Pericles.’ And the rest are not. So they just added on seven new plays to the second folio.”īut according to Levine, six of those new plays almost certainly weren’t really Shakespeare’s, though scholars are still scrutinizing them. Then the third folio comes along and it’s the ‘new and expanded’ edition. They cleaned up spelling mistakes and things like that. Then the second folio, which you can think of as the second edition, really was a corrected version of the first folio. “Shakespeare’s plays weren’t really written down anywhere, so the publication of the first folio was a way to capture what he’d written,” he said.

USC Dean of Libraries Tom McNally said the folios were essentially consecutive editions of the plays. (which has 19 copies of the third folio) and a library in Japan, with others scattered among collectors and universities worldwide. Many are in the possession of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. For the record, there are 228 copies of the first folio, 364 of the second and 329 of the fourth. Only 150 remain in existence, Levine said. What makes the third folio so rare is that two years after it was published in 1664, the Great London Fire occurred, presumably destroying many copies that may have been in bookshops and publishing houses. So that’s significant in itself, just in terms of holdings, but it’s also significant for… it’s a material record of the reception of Shakespeare, and we get a sense of Shakespeare’s popularity in his own time.” “Maybe someday a donor will come along and donate a first folio, but now we have the second, third and fourth. So that in itself gives us almost a complete set,” she said. “Now our library has three of the four folios published in the 17 th century. Highly sought after by collectors, a donor has given the USC library a copy of the rarest collection, the third folio in the series.Įnglish Professor Nina Levine explained what makes this gift so important.

#SHAKESPEARE FIRST FOLIO IN ARIZONA SERIES#

William Shakespeare’s classics “Hamlet,” “Romeo and Juliet,” and “King Lear” are among the immortal plays contained in a recent valuable donation to the special collections of the University of South Carolina’s Cooper Library.īeginning in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, his plays were collected in a series of four large books, called folios.

Shakespeare first folio in arizona