Unique copies.
Three copies are known which are distinguished by more interesting irregularities, in each case unique. The copy in the Lenox Library in New York includes a cancel duplicate of a leaf of ‘As You Like It’ (sheet R of the comedies), and the title-page bears the date 1622 instead of 1623; but it is suspected that the figures were tampered with outside the printing office. [308] Samuel Butler, successively
headmaster of Shrewsbury and Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, possessed a copy of the First Folio in which a proof leaf of ‘Hamlet’ was bound up with the corrected leaf. [309a]
The Sheldon copy.
The most interesting irregularity yet noticed appears in one of the two copies of the book belonging to the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. This copy is known as the Sheldon Folio, having formed in the seventeenth century part of the library of Ralph Sheldon of Weston Manor in the parish of Long Compton, Warwickshire. [309b] In the Sheldon Folio the opening page of ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ of which the recto or front is occupied by the prologue and the verso or back by the opening lines of the text of the play, is followed by a superfluous leaf. On the recto or front of the unnecessary leaf [309c] are printed the concluding lines of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in place of the prologue to ‘Troilus and Cressida.’ At the back or verso are the opening lines of ‘Troilus and Cressida’ repeated from the preceding page.
The presence of a different ornamental headpiece on each page proves that the two are not taken from the same setting of the type. At a later page in the Sheldon copy the concluding lines of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ are duly reprinted at the close of the play, and on the verso or back of the leaf, which supplies them in their right place, is the opening passage, as in other copies, of ‘Timon of Athens.’ These curious confusions attest that while the work was in course of composition the printers or editors of the volume at one time intended to place ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ with the prologue omitted, after ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ The last page of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is in all copies numbered 79, an obvious misprint for 77; the first leaf of ‘Troilus’ is paged 78; the second and third pages of ‘Troilus’ are numbered 79 and 80. It was doubtless suddenly determined while the volume was in the press to transfer ‘Troilus and Cressida’ to the head of the tragedies from a place near the end, but the numbers on the opening pages which indicated its first position were clumsily retained, and to avoid the extensive typographical corrections that were required by the play’s change of position, its remaining pages were allowed to go forth unnumbered. [310]
Estimated number of extant copies.
It is difficult to estimate how many copies survive of the First Folio, which is intrinsically the most valuable volume in the whole range of English literature, and extrinsically is only exceeded in value by
some half-dozen volumes of far earlier date and of exceptional typographical interest. It seems that about 140 copies have been traced within the past century. Of these fewer than twenty are in a perfect state, that is, with the portrait printed (not inlaid) on the title-page, and the flyleaf facing it, with all the pages succeeding it, intact and uninjured. (The flyleaf contains Ben Jonson’s verses attesting the truthfulness of the portrait.) Excellent copies in this enviable state are in the Grenville Library at the British Museum, and in the libraries of the Duke of Devonshire, the Earl of Crawford, the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, and Mr. A. H. Huth. Of these probably the finest and cleanest is the ‘Daniel’ copy belonging to the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. It measures 13 inches by 8¼, and was purchased by its present owner for £716 2s. at the sale of George Daniel’s library in 1864. Some twenty more copies are defective in the preliminary pages, but are unimpaired in other respects. There remain about a hundred copies which have sustained serious damage at various points.