Thomas Pennant Barton Collection

This, the first edition of the collected plays of William Shakespeare, is commonly known as the First Folio. Printed in London and issued in 1623 by Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, the First Folio contains 36 plays, 18 of which had never before appeared in print, including Macbeth, The Tempest, and Julius Caesar. Before the First Folio, a number of Shakespeare's plays had been published in various smaller formats that frequently contained significant textual divergences between editions.

"In this edition eight of the sonnets included in Thorpe's 1609 edition are omitted; all are regrouped in a new and apparently arbitrary order under fanciful headings with the pronouns altered to suggest that the sonnets, written to a man, were addressed to a woman."--Pforzheimer.

Artist's name and date of creation (1835) from autograph on painting.