A FIRST FOLIO edition of Shakespeare’s plays attracted feverish bidding at auction in London yesterday before selling for £2.8 million.

Moments after the auctioneer opened bids at £1.6 million, two competing buyers, standing at the back of the crush of onlookers, were pushing the figure higher and higher.

The 1623 volume they were bidding for — originally priced 20 shillings — is considered to be the most important book in English. It transformed artistic imagination, language, literature and the performing arts.

It was published seven years after Shakespeare’s death and contains 36 plays, of which 18 had never been printed. If not for their appearance in the edition, they might have been lost.

The volume, still in its 17th-century calf binding, eventually went to a young man acting for the antiquarian dealer Simon Finch, who was thought to be buying on behalf of a client.

The auction at Sotheby’s provided a rare opportunity to purchase one of only two known copies left in private hands. The other was sold privately to the late Sir Paul Getty in 2002.

Although 750 copies were printed, only a third have survived and most are incomplete. The volume sold yesterday had not been on the market for three centuries.

The plays were performed in London playhouses, including the Rose and the Globe, and in the provinces. But without the First Folio, which was assembled by Shakespeare’s friends and fellow actors, plays such as Macbeth and Twelfth Night would not have survived.

Shakespeare, who died in 1616, does not appear to have made any effort to get an edition of his plays published.

Stanley Wells, a Shakespeare scholar, said: “There is no guarantee that these unpublished plays would ever have been put into print if the Folio had not appeared. Hundreds of plays of the period are lost, known by their titles alone. The 18 plays by Shakespeare first published in the Folio might easily have suffered a similar fate.

“If Shakespeare had been known only by the plays that had reached print before the Folio appeared, the world would have been a different place. The English language would have been far less rich.”

The copy sold yesterday is covered with markings and annotations in a mid-17th century hand, offering an extraordinary insight into its early readership. Someone jotted down a series of distinct markings and the occasional word such as “wit” and “love”, illuminating a contemporary, or near-contemporary, reader’s taste and interpretation of Shakespeare’s works.

The 17th-century reader marked a number of lines now among the most famous passages, such as Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech.

The historic volume was sold by the trustees of a library in Gordon Square, London, established in the early 18th century under the will of Dr Daniel Williams, the leading dissenting minister of his generation.

The library, maintained by Dr Williams’s Trust, is one of the oldest open to the public still conducted on its original benefaction. The trustees decided to sell to secure its finances and safeguard its historic collections for future generations.

SAVED PLAYS

Without the First Folio, 18 of the Bard’s plays would not have survived:

Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, A Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, All’s Well That Ends Well, As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, Henry VIII, King John, Measure for Measure, The Taming of the Shrew, Timon of Athens, Two Gentleman of Verona and Henry VI Part I

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