Shakespeare, William | The Third Folio, bound by Francis Bedford, with distinguished provenance

Shakespeare, William

Mr. William Shakespear's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. Published according to the true Original Copies. The third Impression. And unto this Impression is added seven Playes, never before Printed in Folio. London: Printed [by Roger Daniel, Alice Warren, and another (John Hayes or Thomas Ratcliffe)] for P[hilip].C[hetwind], 1664 

Folio on crown paper (323 x 210 mm). Frontispiece engraved portrait of Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout with Ben Jonson's verses below supplied from the 1685 fourth folio (trimmed close, remargined, bit of background in upper left supplied in facsimile), woodcut head- and tailpieces, initials, and ornaments, nineteenth-century manuscript bookseller's description of the third folio laid in; title-page and dedication leaf (A3, signed A2) supplied from another, smaller copy of the third folio, title-page browned, soiled, remargined at foot, and with a few marginal chips and tears, dedication leaf browned, inlaid with marginal chips and repairs and a few letters supplied in facsimile, final leaf (¶G6) repaired, a few scattered fore-edge corners restored throughout, occasionally touching a printed rule or a few letters, a very few scattered stains, washed. Red morocco by Francis Bedford (stamp-signed on verso of front free endpaper), covers with a gilt border of French fillet and toothed-roll, spine gilt in six compartments, lettered in the second and third, others densely tooled, marbled endpapers, gilt edges; joints neatly repaired, extremities rubbed. Half red morocco folding-case gilt.

The third folio edition (second, enlarged issue) of Shakespeare's plays, a page-for-page reprint of the second edition (1632). "[T]he rarest of the Folios, by far, is the Third, with only 182 copies surviving today [the Shakespeare Cenus records 228 copies of the First, 373 of the Second, and 339 of the Fourth]. … This edition was published in 1663, then quickly revised in 1664 when a new title page was printed that highlighted seven additional plays—the so-called Shakespeare Apocrypha—that were assed on at the end. Two years later, the Great Fire destroyed most of the buildings in London, including the old wooden St. Paul’s Cathedral, where many booksellers’ shops were located. It seems likely that many unsold sheets of the Third Folio went up in flames, creating a relative scarcity that persists today" (Lesser, “Surviving Shakespeare,” in The Four Shakespeare Folios, pp. 97–98).

The seven plays, "never before Printed in Folio," were added on eleven supplementary gatherings. Apart from the first of these, Pericles Prince of Tyre, none of the added works is currently thought to be even the partial product of Shakespere's pen. Chetwind took the other texts—given on the revised title-page as The London Prodigall, The History of Thomas Ld. Cromwell, Sir John Oldcastle Lord Cobham, The Puritan Widow, A York-shire Tragedy, and The Tragedy of Locrine—from earlier quartos, including Jaggard's of 1619, that were attribted to Shakespeare of "W.S."

Mary Allot, the widow of the publisher of the second folio, Robert Allot, had originally been forced to relinquish her husband's copyrights before she married out of the company. But her new husband, the clothworker Philip Chetwind (who was not a member of the Stationers' Company) later contested the assignment, alleging mispresentation on the part of Legatt and Crooke. He subsequently recovered the copyrights on her behalf. His name alone (or his initials) appears on the title pages of the two issues, but in fact other proprietors included Eleanor Cotes, Miles Flesher, William Leake, John Martin, Gabriel Bedell, Thomas Collins and Alice Warren. The text was the work of three different printers, identified from the ornaments as probably Roger Daniel, Alice Warren, and John Hayes or Thomas Ratcliffe. Daniel most likely printed the seven additional plays in this issue.

REFERENCES:

ESTC R30560; Bartlett 122; Greg III:1118–1119; Pforzheimer 909; Wing S2914; cf. Samuel V. Lemley, ed., The Four Shakespeare Folios: Copy, Print, Paper, Type (Pennsylvania State University Press for Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, 2024)

PROVENANCE:

Hamilton Fish (armorial bookplates). Fish (1808–1893) was one of the most significant American statesmen of the nineteenth-century, serving, successively, as U.S. congressman from New York, governor of New York, U.S. senator from New York, and secretary of state in the Grant administration.