Even 400 years ago, intellectual property law was giving publishers headaches. Back then the compilers of William Shakespeare’s First Folio were unable to secure the rights for all the plays, leaving their work incomplete while rival publications emerged.
Now, in this quatercentenary year, one of those rivals is set to make a healthy sum as a 1634 copy of The Two Noble Kinsmen goes on sale for £150,000. Should the sale be completed it will cap a huge year for Shakespeare sales in the antique books market, during which folios of all sorts have been snapped up for large sums.
Peter Harrington, the rare books company, has the copy of The Two Noble Kinsmen, which is one of only five first editions to be in private hands.
While it is not known exactly why The Two Noble Kinsmen was not included in the First Folio in 1623, one theory is that the compilers, John Heminges and Henry Condell, hit a rights issue: the individual plays were owned by different people, and not all of them could be secured.
In the case of The Two Noble Kinsmen, the last of Shakespeare’s plays, it may simply have been too fresh a property and that people would have still been putting on productions.
“There’s a certain amount of guesswork about it,” said Adam Douglas, senior specialist at Peter Harrington. “One theory is that they tried to put into book form the plays they no longer had commercial use for. If something was new enough. you probably wouldn’t want to put it in the First Folio because that would kill it in a sense. It would lose its novelty.”
There was also a question of authorship. A number of later plays in the Shakespeare canon are known to be collaborations, particularly with John Fletcher, who co-wrote The Two Noble Kinsmen. It is possible that it may not have been considered a Shakespeare play at the time. At the end of 17th century the play even appeared in a compilation of Fletcher’s works.
This edition of The Two Noble Kinsmen emerged in 1634, two years after the Second Folio was published. By that point Shakespeare had been dead for 18 years, but there must have been sufficient interest for it to be considered worthwhile, especially as Shakespeare’s fame was more limited than might be imagined.
“Shakespeare didn’t have unrivalled primacy. Ben Jonson probably led the way for quite a long time,” Douglas said. “It’s interesting that people thought it worth publishing,”
The book feels like the 17th-century equivalent of a bootleg recording, a work that was not part of the official canon. “It’s possible somebody else had the rights,” Douglas said. “There was a bootleg of the First Folio: the ‘False Folio’, so people were competing to publish these things.”
• Shakespeare’s First Folio and four more on sale for £8m
This sale would be the cherry on the cake for Peter Harrington, which has made hay this year. It has sold copies of the first, second and fourth folios, as well as a 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s poems and a 1655 quarto of Othello. Douglas called it a “bumper year”.
Meanwhile, another Shakespearean rare book is hitting the market. The Folio Society has released 1,000 copies of a new edition of The Complete Works, with introductions by Dame Judi Dench and Gregory Doran, the former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. The limited editions went on sale on Tuesday.
