Rare Shakespeare Folio Goes To Auction

The complete first folio of the playwright's work had a print run of approximately 750 in 1623. However, only a third of these survive and most of them are incomplete. The book is being sold by Dr Williams's Theological Library in London, which hopes the proceeds - expected to be more than £3m - will secure its future. No collected edition of Shakespeare's plays was published during his lifetime.

In 1623, seven years after his death, some of his friends put together a folio comprising 36 plays. It was the first time that 18 of them - including Twelfth Night and Macbeth - had been printed. Many of the plays have extensive annotations by readers. It is likely that they survive only because they were included in the book and would otherwise have been lost. This edition is bound in brown leather and is full of annotations, marking interesting parts of the text. Its 17th Century readers did not make notes beside passages now considered to be Shakespeare's most famous - Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech, for instance.

Instead, they highlighted other sections such as those from Midsummer Night's Dream and Coriolanus. One reader even corrected an error in the text in the second part of Henry VI, changing by hand three times the name Elinor to Margaret.