Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (the Bodleian copy)

The Bodleian Library's own copy of the 1623 First Folio, shelfmarked Arch. G c.7, is the only First Folio known to have been owned, lost and recovered by the same institution. It reached the library under Thomas Bodley's 1610 agreement with the Stationers' Company, the founding document of legal deposit in Britain, within months of publication. In the 1660s the library judged the newly issued Third Folio the more useful text and sold the First as surplus stock, along with a batch of other superseded books, to the Oxford bookseller Richard Davis.

The copy then disappeared from the documentary record for roughly two and a half centuries. It resurfaced in January 1905 when Gladwyn Maurice Revell Turbutt, an undergraduate of Magdalen College whose family had owned the book since about 1750, brought it to the Bodleian's sub-librarian, Falconer Madan, apparently to have storm damage to the binding assessed. Comparing the binding tooling and the marks left by a chaining staple with other books bound for the library in the 1620s, the Bodleian's bindings expert Strickland Gibson concluded that this was the library's own lost copy, still in its original Oxford binding.

A public subscription raised the 3,000 pounds needed to buy it back from the Turbutt family in 1906, in competition with the American collector Henry Clay Folger, who eventually amassed 82 First Folios and would very likely have added this one to a private collection abroad. It has remained in the Bodleian since, and since 2013 a conserved, high-resolution facsimile has been freely available online.

What the book physically is

The First Folio is a single large volume of 908 pages collecting 36 of Shakespeare's plays, printed in the folio format: full printer's sheets folded once, giving large pages bound into thick gatherings. It was set in a mixture of roman and black-letter type by five compositors working in the London shop of William Jaggard and, after his death partway through the job, his son Isaac Jaggard, with three other stationers, Edward Blount, William Aspley and John Smethwick, sharing the financial risk and the rights. The whole job took roughly two years, with numerous interruptions, and the book was entered for registration at Stationers' Hall on 8 November 1623.

The Bodleian's copy, Arch. G c.7, is a working copy from the library's early decades before it left the collection, and its paper shows it: the Sprint for Shakespeare conservation project that prepared it for digitisation in 2012 found the paper in places extremely thin, of second-grade quality, with creases, pleats and papermaker's flaws throughout, and the lower corners of many leaves torn or broken away from heavy use. This is a book that was read, not merely kept.

Why a printed playbook physically looked like scripture

The choice of format was itself a claim. In early Stuart England the folio, the largest and most expensive standard book size, was conventionally reserved for history, theology, law and the classics - texts assumed to be permanent and consulted rather than read once and discarded. Stage plays were commercial entertainment, printed cheaply in quarto pamphlets that were not expected to outlast their run.

Ben Jonson had tested that convention in 1616 by publishing his own collected Workes in folio, and was mocked for the presumption of treating his stage plays as if they belonged on the same shelf as Camden's history or a Bible. Heminges and Condell's decision to give Shakespeare's plays the same treatment seven years later was therefore not a neutral publishing choice: it was an argument, made in the physical form of the book itself, that these plays deserved to be read as literature and kept rather than performed once and forgotten. Jonson underwrote the argument directly, contributing two commendatory poems to the front matter, including the line that Shakespeare was 'not of an age, but for all time.'

Why the book exists at all

Shakespeare died in April 1616 without arranging for his plays to be collected. About half of the 36 plays in the Folio had never been printed in any form before 1623; without this volume, Macbeth, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, The Winter's Tale, Coriolanus, Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, King John, All's Well That Ends Well, Henry VIII, Timon of Athens, Cymbeline and two others would have no early text at all and might not have survived in any recognisable form.

Heminges and Condell were King's Men actors who had worked alongside Shakespeare for two decades; both are named as beneficiaries in his will. Their dedicatory epistle states their purpose as keeping 'the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow' alive, 'only to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend, and Fellow aliue, as was our SHAKESPEARE'. Whatever commercial motive the four sharing stationers also had, the editorial project itself is framed by its editors as an act of memorial for a dead colleague, not a normal print-trade commission.

How this specific copy reached the Bodleian

The Bodleian received its copy automatically, not by purchase in the ordinary sense. On 12 December 1610 Sir Thomas Bodley, who had refounded and endowed the University's library nine years earlier, obtained an agreement from Thomas Man, Master of the Stationers' Company, that the Bodleian would receive a free copy of every book entered at Stationers' Hall. The arrangement is generally treated as the founding instrument of legal deposit in the British Isles: it was extended to the Royal Library and to Cambridge University Library by 1662, and eventually given statutory footing by the Copyright Act of 1709/1710. Bodley died in 1613, a decade before the First Folio was printed, so the volume arrived at the library under a standing arrangement he had negotiated rather than through any transaction involving the book itself. It was bound for the library in Oxford shortly after arrival.

Why the library got rid of it

The Third Folio, published in 1663 with a reissue in 1664 that added a title-page attribution to a set of new plays, presented itself as the fuller and more current edition: it carried seven additional plays beyond the 36 of the First and Second Folios (six of the seven are now regarded by scholars as apocryphal or, at most, only partly Shakespeare's, but that judgement postdates the 1660s by a long way). To a library managing shelf space for a working text rather than curating a literary monument, replacing an older, worn edition with a newer one that had more content in it was a reasonable decision by the standards of the time.

The Bodleian's benefaction register records that in 1663 or 1664 the Oxford bookseller Richard Davis paid 24 pounds for a lot described as 'superfluous library books sold by order of the Curators'. The First Folio was one book among that lot; the register prices the batch as a whole, not the Folio individually, so there is no documented per-copy figure for what the library actually received for the book that would later cost it 3,000 pounds to get back. This is the moment cited in Bodleian's own published account of the volume's history, and in Emma Smith's scholarly study of the book, as the point the original copy left the collection.

Where it went, and how long it stayed lost

What happened to the volume between its sale in the 1660s and its appearance in the possession of the Turbutt family of Ogston Hall in Derbyshire is not documented in any source consulted for this record. The Turbutt family is recorded as having acquired the book around 1750, roughly ninety years into the gap; no source names the seller, the price, or the route by which it reached Derbyshire. The book therefore has two separate undocumented stretches in its history: an unknown number of years immediately after the 1660s sale, and the family's own unrecorded acquisition around the middle of the eighteenth century. It then sat in the library at Ogston Hall for roughly a century and a half.

How it was recognised as the Bodleian's own copy

In January 1905 Gladwyn Maurice Revell Turbutt, an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, brought the family's copy of the First Folio into the Bodleian. The most consistent account across the sources is that his father had noticed the binding deteriorating and sent his son to have it looked at, not that anyone in the family suspected a connection to the library's own lost copy.

The identification was made by Falconer Madan, then the Bodleian's sub-librarian and later Bodley's Librarian himself, working with Strickland Gibson, the library's specialist in bindings. Gibson's evidence was physical rather than textual: the tooling on the leather matched work he attributed to William Wildgoose, the binder used by the Bodleian in the 1620s, and the book carried the mark of having once been secured by a chaining staple of the kind used to fix valuable volumes to a library shelf. Taken together, an Oxford binding of the right date, in the hand of a binder the library is known to have used, on a book that had once been chained, was treated as sufficient physical proof that this was the library's own copy rather than simply another surviving First Folio that happened to have passed through Derbyshire. No source consulted for this record describes a manuscript price annotation as part of the identification; the case rests on the binding and the chaining evidence, and any claim that a price written in the book itself was used to trace it should be treated as unverified. See notes_for_editor.

The subscription and the Folger competition

Once the identification was accepted, the question was how to get the book back into the library's ownership rather than simply confirm which copy it was. E. W. B. Nicholson, Bodley's Librarian since 1882, led a public subscription to buy the volume from the Turbutt family, who had offered it for sale. More than 80 subscribers contributed to raise the 3,000 pounds needed.

The urgency behind the campaign is generally attributed to competition from Henry Clay Folger, the American oil executive who was assembling what would become the largest single collection of First Folios in the world - 82 copies, now held at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. Had Folger secured the Turbutt copy, the one demonstrable case of a library recovering its own lost First Folio would instead have become one more copy inside a private American collection, indistinguishable in provenance terms from any other Folger acquisition. The 1906 purchase is therefore not simply a nostalgic repatriation story; it is the reason the Bodleian, rather than a Washington vault, can point to a documented, continuous chain of ownership broken by exactly one identifiable transaction.

Conservation and the digital facsimile

By the early twenty-first century the copy's condition - thin, flawed paper, torn corners, heavy use marks from its years as a working library book before the 1660s - made it unsuitable for routine handling. In August 2012 the library launched Sprint for Shakespeare, a public fundraising campaign timed to the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, with a target of 20,000 pounds to conserve, photograph and publish a free online facsimile of Arch. G c.7. The actor Vanessa Redgrave helped launch the appeal, and figures including Stephen Fry, Sir Peter Hall, Gregory Doran and Tom Hiddleston lent it public support; the target was met before the end of 2012, and a second phase of support, including a lead gift from Dr Geoffrey Eibl-Kaye and support from the Dallas Shakespeare Club, funded further development. The resulting digital facsimile went online in 2013 and remains freely available, with its images released under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence.

This 2012-13 conservation and digitisation campaign is a distinct event from the 1906 repurchase and should not be conflated with it: the earlier campaign bought the book itself back into the library's ownership; the later one paid to conserve and photograph a book the library already owned.

What survives of the edition as a whole

Roughly 750 copies of the First Folio are estimated to have been printed in 1623. Census work, beginning with Sidney Lee's 1902 count of 152 known copies and substantially extended by Anthony James West's systematic worldwide census published in the 1990s and 2000s, puts the current figure at 235 copies known to survive, in varying states of completeness. Of these, about 149 are in the United States, around 50 in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and the remainder, roughly 36, spread across the rest of the world. A small number remain in private hands, including at least a few aristocratic family collections and the British royal collection; the great majority are institutionally held. The Folger Shakespeare Library alone holds 82, more than a third of every known surviving copy, a concentration built directly through the kind of competitive acquisition that the Bodleian's 1906 campaign was run to defeat.

What is unresolved

The book's own history contains two gaps that no source consulted for this record closes: the years immediately after its sale in the 1660s, and the circumstances of the Turbutt family's acquisition of it around 1750. Both are treated in this record as documented gaps, not filled with inference. The claim, repeated in some popular retellings, that a manuscript price or ownership note inside the book helped trace it back to the Bodleian could not be verified against the sources consulted, which describe the identification as resting on binding and chaining evidence alone; it is flagged here rather than repeated as fact.