A Midsommer Nights Dreame [A Midsummer Night's Dream] - 1623

London, Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount,, 1623. The full text of A Midsummer Night's Dream from the First Folio, 9 leaves of text, numbered pp. 145-162, supplied with a handwritten title leaf. Marginal manuscript ink note or symbol to recto of N3 (p. 149); mispagination of recto of N5 (number 151 repeated) corrected to page 153 in an early hand; small stain to verso of N6; recto of O3 misnumbered 163 and corrected to 161 in manuscript. Bound in 1920s red crushed morocco by Sangorski and Sutcliffe, small scorch mark on upper cover, otherwise excellent, cloth slipcase. The play was first published in quarto in 1600 and 1619; a copy of the 1619 edition was annotated and used as a printer's copy for the publication of the 1623 folio, with some changes made to words of dialogue and stage directions, and with the substitution of Egeus for Philostrate in Act 5 scene 1. The quarto editions are rare: the first, of 1600, survives in only eight copies, all of which are in public institutions, while no more than thirty still exist of the second edition of 1619. Even these come up for sale very seldom: since the 1930s, we have traced one (imperfect) copy sold in 1963, another in 1974 (the Stockhausen copy, $11,000), with the latest being the Garden copy (1989, $110,000): so a copy from the First Folio probably represents the earliest printing of the play which can realistically ever be acquired.Approximately 750 copies of the first folio, the first collected edition of Shakespeare's works, are thought to have been printed. Some 233 complete or substantially complete examples are known to survive. In the 19th and early 20th centuries fragments from heavily defective copies were used to 'complete' other copies or sold as individual leaves ('leaf books', as they were called, were sometimes bound with accompanying text and issued as a highly limited edition, as in the case of ' A noble fragment: being a leaf of the original first folio of William Shakespeare's plays, printed in 1623, with a bibliographical essay by Seymour de Ricci', published in 1926). Substantial fragments such as ours were finely bound and sold as complete plays. Book