The Visitors Books of Shakespeare’s Birthplace only survive from 1812, too late for Sir George, but they do reveal that Shuckburghs visited in 1817. He was a great collector of books, and perhaps he took an interest in William Shakespeare as a fellow Warwickshire man. He was a member of both the Royal Society and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and lived most of his life at Shuckburgh, dying there in 1804. It’s not known why the 6 th Baronet originally bought his copy of the First Folio, though he was a learned man: having succeeded to the title in 1773 he was returned to Parliament for the county of Warwick in 1780, his main interests being mathematics and astronomy. Sir James Shuckburgh, the 14 th Baronet, only recently inherited the title and the house after the premature death of his father Sir Rupert in 2012. The estate has been in the same family since the 12 th century, that’s 900 years, though the house “only” dates back to the 15th century, with a nineteenth-century facade. The other interesting feature of the story is that Shuckburgh is in Warwickshire, in the north of the county close to Northamptonshire. The library in France didn’t realise that the book was an original 1623 edition, but the Shuckburgh family had always known, but just didn’t tell anybody. It may contain annotations, or the pages may exist in different states, shedding light on printing-house practices or on the manuscripts from which the books were printed.Įven since 2011 there have been two discoveries: the St Omer copy found in France that brought the total up to 233, and this one, presumably number 234. Academics will be hoping to get a look at this newly-discovered copy because unlike modern books, each copy of a book of this period is unique. Several censuses have been compiled detailing all the copies of this book, starting with Sir Sidney Lee in 1902, followed by Anthony West’s in 2001 and Eric Rasmussen’s that I wrote about in 2011. Shakespeare’s First Folios are extremely well-documented. The First Folio is known to have been purchased by Sir George Augustus Shuckburgh-Evelyn in around 1800 and has remained quietly on the shelf ever since. Several hundred copies of the First Folio still exist in varying states of completeness.īut this copy is unknown, and three of the four copies for sale come from the collection held at Shuckburgh Hall. Why the excitement? None of the folios is exactly rare, though they are valuable. Anyone who hopes that there are Shakespeare treasures still to be found must have felt their hearts flutter when it was announced that the major auction house Christies is to sell copies of all four Shakespeare folios in May.
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