A new Shakespeare First Folio has been discovered at Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute.

Emma Smith,Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Oxford University, has authenticated the First Folio as genuine, bringing the total of First Folios known to survive to 234.

Professor Smith has identified the Folio as the working copy that formerly belonged to Isaac Reed, a well-connected literary editor working in London in the 18th century.

The First Folio is the name given to the collection of William Shakespeare’s 36 plays published in 1623. Only 233 are known to survive and it is one of the most valuable books in the world.

‘When the team at Mount Stuart first told me they thought they had a First Folio, I must admit I thought “yeah, sure, and so do I!”,’ said Professor Smith.

‘But when I went up to investigate, I could see from the watermarks and the idiosyncracies of the text that it was genuine. It was a really exciting moment, I find First Folios to be such charismatic books.’

She added: ‘This is an exciting discovery because we didn’t know it existed and it was owned by someone who edited Shakespeare in the 18th Century.’

‘It is an unusual Folio because it is bound in three volumes and has lots of spare blank pages which would have been used for illustrations.

‘This First Folio belonged to Isaac Reed, a serious and well-connected literary editor who had an extensive library.

‘A letter from Reed shows that he acquired the Folio in 1786, and records show that it was sold shortly after Reed’s death in 1807 to a ‘JW’ for £38.

‘After that the trail of the Folio goes cold as there are no further public records of its existence and it was omitted from Sidney Lee’s 1906 census of First Folios.

‘But we know that Mount Stuart acquired the Folio at some point in this period because it is mentioned in a catalogue of the Bute library in 1896. In fact, a note in the house’s archives show that the 3rd Marquess of Bute thought the sum for which it sold in 1807 was ‘too dear’ so perhaps the family found the price more reasonable when the book came onto the market later in the 19th century.’

The Reed-Bute Folio is in three volumes – comedies, histories and tragedies – and was rebound in goatskin in 1932 to match the other three Bute Folios.

This month, Professor Smith has also published Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book with Oxford University Press.

In her book, she investigates the events leading up to the publication of the First Folio, seven years after Shakespeare’s death.

‘The real importance of the First Folio is that, without it, we would not have half of Shakespeare’s plays, including Macbeth, The Tempest and As You Like It,’ said Professor Smith.

‘Shakespeare would have looked very different, and his legacy would have been very different, had the Folio not been published.

‘My book aims to apportion credit for Shakespeare’s legacy more widely and to note that without the people who edited, printed, and read the book in 1623, we would not be celebrating the 400th anniversary of his death this year.

‘When we think about Shakespeare, we usually think about his plays being performed on stage. But the written word and the First Folio is central to our understanding of Shakespeare. I hope this anniversary year encourages people to reread the texts of his work.’

The Folio is believed to be only the first of many significant discoveries in the Bute Collection at Mount Stuart. The collection was put together over 600 years and includes landmark works of British portraiture from the 18th and 19th centuries, Italian masterpieces from the 16th century, and Dutch and Flemish Old Masters.

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