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- Shakespeare folio discovered in France
First folios of Shakespeare’s plays are among the world’s rarest books, intensely scrutinized by scholars for what their sometimes-minute variations. Reports the New York Times.
Now a previously unknown folio has surfaced at a small library in northern France, bringing the world’s known total of surviving first folios to 233, the New York Times reported.
“This is huge,” said Eric Rasmussen, an American Shakespeare expert who traveled to France over the weekend to authenticate the volume. “First folios don’t turn up very often, and when they do, it’s usually a really chewed up, uninteresting copy. But this one is magnificent.”
The book was discovered this fall by librarians at a public library in St-Omer, near Calais, who were sifting through its collections for an exhibition on English-language literature. The title page and other introductory material were torn off, but Rémy Cordonnier, the director of the library’s medieval and early modern collection, suspected that the book — cataloged as an unexceptional old edition — might in fact be a first folio.
He called in Rasmussen, a professor at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of “The Shakespeare A Descriptive Catalogue,” who identified it within minutes.
“It was very emotional to realise we had a copy of one of the most famous books in the world,” Cordonnier said. “I was already imagining the reaction it would cause.”
Few scholars have yet seen the book. But its discovery among holdings inherited from a long-defunct Jesuit college is already being hailed as a potential source of fresh insight into everything from tiny textual variants to the question of Shakespeare’s connection to Catholic culture.
Jean-Christophe Mayer, a Shakespeare expert at the University of Montpelier, in France, cautioned against making too strong a connection, but noted that a library in the northern French town of Douai also owned some early transcripts of Shakespeare’s plays. “It’s interesting that the plays were on the syllabuses at these colleges,” he said. The new folio, he added, “could be part of the puzzle of Shakespeare’s place in Catholic culture.”
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