Police have recovered a 400-year-old volume of Shakespeare stolen in England a decade ago and worth millions of dollars (pounds) after a man walked into a library in Washington, D.C., and asked to have it authenticated.

Police in Durham, northeast England, said Friday they had arrested a 51-year-old man over the theft of the First Folio edition of 1623, which scholars consider one of the most important printed books in the English language. It was among seven centuries-old books and manuscripts stolen in December 1998 from a display case at the Durham University library.

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he mystery began to unravel two weeks ago when a man brought the First Folio to Washington's Folger Shakespeare Library and asked to have it verified as genuine. The man claimed to be an international businessman who had bought the volume in Cuba. "We have people come to us from time to time with questions about books," said Garland Scott, head of external relations at the library, one of the world's leading centers of Shakespearean research. "It's not every day that someone walks in with a First Folio."

Scott said library staff members soon had their suspicions raised. The book was largely intact, but the end boards and some early pages -- which bore marks that would have identified them as the Durham copy -- had been removed.

The seller was Dr. Williams's Library in London, which said it needed money to survive and preserve its research collections. Five cameras stood on tripods at the back of Sotheby's book room for the sale of the volume, while at least two photographers took up posts nearer the front. For all the publicity, the auctioneer couldn't get the price higher. Sotheby's had valued the folio at as much as 3.5 million pounds, or about $6.1 million, above the record for such an edition.

"It's not a very nice copy," said Peter Grogan, a book dealer with R.A. Gekoski in London. "The title page is not in very good condition, and that's the face that the book shows to the world."

The collection of 36 plays, known as the First Folio, was published after Shakespeare's death in an edition of 750, and probably sold for 20 shillings, said Sotheby's. It includes 18 plays that might otherwise have been lost, experts said. The nearest comparable First Folio sold in New York in 2001 for a hammer price of $5.6 million, said Sotheby's.

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Only about 250 copies of the First Folio survive, and this one still has its mid-17th-century calf binding. There may be only one similar copy left in private hands, said Sotheby's, which holds sales of English literature twice a year.

The year-long Complete Works festival, which begins on the anniversary of the bard's death, will stage his sonnets, poems and all 37 Shakespeare plays. Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen are among the performers taking part. RSC artistic director Michael Boyd told the BBC that the event would be a "national knees-up". "Our ambition is to stage one of the most significant cultural festivals of the year in Stratford-upon-Avon," said Mr Boyd. Shakespeare is traditionally said to have been born on 23 April 1564, and to have died on the same day 52 years later, in 1616. Hailed as the biggest theatrical celebration in the company's history, the RSC claims the festival marks the first time all the plays have been staged in one continuous season.

Seventeen overseas theatre companies and 14 UK theatre companies will perform at the festival, as well as the 23 productions being staged by the RSC. Ten of the productions will be in languages other than English, at least in part. "It shows how fantastically universal the plays are, and seeing people's different approach," said Dame Judi, who will play Mistress Quickly in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

BBC arts correspondent Rebecca Jones called the project "a gamble", but said ticket sales were already up by a 25 per cent on the equivalent period last year. "If the festival is a success it could help revitalise a company which has been criticised by some for losing its way," said Jones. A new outdoor theatre - The Dell - will be built in the riverside gardens beside the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, and a temporary 100-seat studio will be erected inside the auditorium for a month. Actors will also perform in the 1,000-seat Courtyard Theatre, which is scheduled to open in July 2006, and Holy Trinity Church, the burial place of Shakespeare.

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.

As the National Portrait Gallery planned to reveal that only one of half a dozen claimed portraits of William Shakespeare can now be considered genuine, Prof Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel said she could prove that there were at least four surviving portraits of the playwright.

Startlingly, she said swellings close to Shakespeare's left eye, which she says are clear in several of the contested portraits, are evidence that he had lymph cancer. By dating the portraits, she said, it was likely that he had suffered for around 15 years in increasing pain and died from it. Little is certain in Shakespeare studies - nothing is known about his death in 1616 and much of his life is a mystery - but if Prof Hammerschmidt-Hummel's claims win backing they will throw the National Portrait Gallery's three-year research project into the authenticity of Shakespeare portraits into serious doubt.

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Prof Hammerschmidt-Hummel, who teaches English literature and culture at Marburg and Mainz University, took the unusual step of using forensic tests used by German detectives to study the morphology of paintings and sculptures that are claimed to be of Shakespeare. Measuring facial features - nose, eyes, lips, chin etc - and the relationships between them she claims that two paintings, a bust and a contested death mask of the playwright show identical characteristics. The features are so similar, she claims, that they must be the result of sittings with Shakespeare himself.

The four images with the morphological similarities are, she reveals in a book to be published in Britain in April, the Flower Shakespeare, named after the brewery family that gave the picture to the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1895, the Chandos Shakespeare, presented to the nation by Lord Ellesmere in 1856, the terracotta Davenant Bust, which stands in the Garrick Club in London, and the Darmstadt Death Mask.

So-called because it resides in Darmstadt Castle in Germany, the mask is dismissed by many as a 19th century fake but Prof Hammerschmidt-Hummel says that the features, and most notably the impression of a swelling above the left-eye make it certain that it was taken within days of Shakespeare's death. She said: "The cancerous growths grow bigger as the dates progress. "Everybody else has missed them but how else would an artist know they were there unless they had seen Shakespeare." Research for the book has taken 10 years and she says pathologists, doctors, ophthalmologists, dermatologists and imaging engineers have helped her build 3D images to demonstrate the similarities.

Academics Brenda James and Professor William Rubinstein have recorded their findings in a new book in which they make the case for Neville, a Tudor politician, diplomat and landowner whose life span matched that of Shakespeare almost exactly. The authenticity of Shakespeare, author of dozens of sonnets and plays still performed today, has been argued over since the 19th century, with Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe and even Queen Elizabeth I among proposed alternatives. James, a Briton, says she stumbled upon the new contender Neville while decoding the Dedication to Shakespeare's Sonnets, which led her to identify Neville as the author of the plays.

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James said a notebook written by Neville while locked in the Tower of London around 1602 contained detailed notes which ended up in Henry VIII first performed several years later. His experience in the tower, where he faced execution for his part in a plot to overthrow the queen, would also explain the shift in 1601 from histories and comedies to the great "Shakespearian" tragedies. He was learnt, travelled around Europe and was a close friend of the Earl of Southampton to whom the Shakespeare sonnets are believed to be dedicated.

Not all Shakespeare experts are so sure. "Given the amount of documentation showing William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the plays one can only suppose that the conspiracy theorists are in it for the money they can make out of peddling their bizarre wares," said Roger Pringle, director of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

Ann Thompson, professor of English at King's College London and an editor on the Arden Shakespeare series, has not read the new book The Truth Will Out: Unmasking the Real Shakespeare, but has her doubts. One of the chief reasons given by James and Rubinstein for doubting Shakespeare's authorship is his lack of formal education and familiarity with the ways of the court. "It is snobbery, basically," Thompson told Reuters. "People think you would have to have a university education at least to write as he does."