If you have a spare 3.5 million lying around (pounds, that is; in U.S. dollars you’ll need $6.1 million), you may want to consider investing it in an original Shakespeare First Folio that will be auctioned off by Sotheby’s in July:
"Hailed by auctioneer Sotheby’s as the most important book in English literature, the First Folio is credited with saving for posterity many of the bard’s plays including ‘Macbeth,’ ‘Twelfth Night’ and ‘Julius Caesar’ which had never before been printed.
"’The First Folio preserves 18 of his plays, including some of the most major, which otherwise would have been lost for all time,’ English literature specialist Peter Selley said as the volume was put on show on Thursday.
"’Relatively complete copies of the Folio in contemporary or near contemporary bindings very rarely come to market. There is only one copy recorded as remaining in private hands,’ he added."
Not that I could afford it anyway, but I’m surprised it’s so cheap.
Did you all know the Jesuits used to write plays, all of which have been lost?
There’s an increasing body of evidence which indicates Shakespeare was a crypto-Catholic; his father’s recusancy is well-documented, and he was schooled by an associate of St. Edmund Campion.
I suspect that if this interpretation of the evidence becomes mainstream we will then see a rash of English department revisions of their canon to diminish the importance of Elizabethan era drama in favour of more multicultural studies.
PVO
Dear St. Nicholas,
My name is Jean-Luc Picard. I have been a very good boy this year. I really really like Shakespeare, so there is only one thing I want for Noel. Please note the enclosed auction catalog….
Real scholars now recognize that the “Shakespeare” plays were really written by Bacon, because Shakespeare himself was too busy writing Don Quixote before having it translated into Spanish by his buddy Cervantes, who couldn’t make up anything on his own, being too scarred from his horrific experiences at and after Lepanto.
N.B. This is a joke.
What’s the point of buying this? So it can sit around and you can say, “Hey, I own this 6 million dollar book that I could have read for free at the library”?
The purpose of buying it would be to keep it out of the hands of the evil Priory of Sion in their diabolical plot to take over the world by arbitrarily changing the meanings of the symbols Shakespeare was fond of and constructing an anti-Catholic tale based on 100 year-old unsubstantiated claims made against the Church by Fundamentalist “scholars.”
(I am crazy. I have been reading DaVinci Code all day and it soooo painful how pathetically dumb that man (Brown) is. Pray for me!)