SHAKESPEARE EXHIBIT IN WIDENER BELIEVED WORTH OVER $100,000

Including one of the sixteen perfect first editions of the folio of Shakespeare's Plays, the second most valuable English edition of Montaigne's Essays in the world, and rare quarto editions of Shakespeare's Plays, genuine and spurious, the fifteen-volume Shakespeare exhibit now displayed in the Widener Memorial Room is estimated to be worth over $100,000.

Exhibit A and largest item of the total value is the first edition of the folio, printed by Jaggard and Blount in London, 1623. This volume, part of Harry Widener's private collection, is the most costly book in the Harvard University Library. Only recently Abraham S. W. Rosenbach paid in the neighborhood of $70,000 for one like it, remarking at the time that he was getting the bargain of his book buying experience.

Second in interest are the quarto volumes of the plays, especially the first quarto of Midsummer Night's Dream (1600), the Whole Contention (spurious), and the so-called quarto of King Lear (1608). These are opened to display the carnation emblem and the typography upon which Professor Pollard of the University of London bases his thesis that the Lear and the Whole Contention together with six other plays similarly marked and printed, and variously dated 1600, 1608, and 1619, were in reality all printed and bound together by Jaggard in 1619.

Other Notable Exhibits

Exhibited among the sources of Shakespeare's plays is a first English edition (1603) of Montaigne's Essays, second in value only to the British Museum copy which has Shakespeare's autograph on its fly-leaf.

Other notable items on display are: copies of the second, third and fourth editions of the folio, with the fourth edition in its original binding; a folio edition, 1647, of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, a volume belonging originally to the Earl of Bridgewater, elder brother to Milton's Comus; a copy of a 1640 edition of Shakespeare's Poems in the original calf binding; a 1577 edition of Hollinshed's Chronicles, opened to a woodcut of the meeting between Macbeth and Banquo and the three witches; and the first collected edition of Jonson's Discoveries with attention drawn to Johnson's famous remark that:

"I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that his writing (whatsoever he penn'd hee never blotted out line. My answer beene, woulde that he had blotted a thousand".